Feminism Psychoanalysis And Maternal Subjectivity

Download or read book Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity written by Alison Stone and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Alison Stone develops a feminist approach to maternal subjectivity. Stone argues that in the West the self has often been understood in opposition to the maternal body, so that one must separate oneself from the mother and maternal care-givers on whom one depended in childhood to become a self or, in modernity, an autonomous subject. These assumptions make it difficult to be a mother and a subject, an autonomous creator of meaning. Insofar as mothers nonetheless strive to regain their subjectivity when their motherhood seems to have compromised it, theirs cannot be the usual kind of subjectivity premised on separation from the maternal body. Mothers are subjects of a new kind, who generate meanings and acquire agency from their position of re-immersion in the realm of maternal body relations, of bodily intimacy and dependency. Thus Stone interprets maternal subjectivity as a specific form of subjectivity that is continuous with the maternal body. Stone analyzes this form of subjectivity in terms of how the mother typically reproduces with her child her history of bodily relations with her own mother, leading to a distinctive maternal and cyclical form of lived time.

Download or read book The Mother in Psychoanalysis and Beyond written by Rosalind Mayo and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 8 Motherhood and art practice: Expressing maternal experience in visual art -- 9 The paradox of the maternal -- 10 Not-so-great expectations: Motherhood and the clash of private and public worlds -- 11 Learning to be a mother -- 12 Music and the maternal -- 13 The maternal and the erotic: An exploration of the links between maternal and erotic subjectivity -- 14 How shall we tell each other of our mothers? -- Index

Download or read book The Impossibility of Motherhood written by Patrice DiQuinzio and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An adequate analysis of experiences and situations specific to women, especially mothering, requires consideration of women's difference. A focus on women's difference, however, jeopardizes feminism's claims of women's equal individualist subjectivity, and risks recuperating the inequality and oppression of women, especially the view that all women should be mothers, want to be mothers, and are most happy being mothers. This book considers how thinkers including de Beauvoir, Kristeva, Chodorow and Rich struggle to negotiate this dilemma of difference in analyzing mothering, encompassing the paradoxes concerning embodiment, gender and representation they encounter. Patrice DiQuinzio shows that mothering has been and will continue to be an intractable problem for feminist theory, and argues for a reconceptualization of feminist theory itself, and suggests the political usefulness of an explicitly paradoxical politics of mothering.

Download or read book Women, Mothers, Subjects written by Maura Sheehy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-14 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection, drawn from twelve years of the influential journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality, offers a groundbreaking advance in thinking and theorizing about what happens to women when they become mothers. It explores how women are changed and shaped by interaction with their children and the cultural constructs about motherhood in which they are embedded. Distinguished psychoanalysts, philosophers, feminists, gender and cultural theorists explore the meeting place of cultural representations of motherhood, maternal theory, and mothers interacting in the clinical setting and with their children, to illuminate how the process of becoming a mother creates and informs female subjectivity, identity, desire, expression, aggression, ambition, shame, envy, and relationships. Contributors find mothers to be complex subjects negotiating rich hybrid identities that explode received notions of maternal and even female subjectivity in their complexity. They create an exciting and very accessible new set of ideas and templates for thinking about mothers and women that will be of value to clinicians, academics, and mothers alike. This book was originally published as a special issue of Studies in Gender and Sexuality.

Download or read book The (M)other Tongue written by Shirley N. Garner and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-30 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This timely and provocative collection of sixteen essays combines feminist and psychoanalytic approaches to literary theory and to the reading of literary texts. It demonstrates not only the ways in which psychoanalytic theory can illuminate traditional literary texts, but also the ways in which feminist theory can modify, enlarge, and in some instances transform the body of psychoanalytic literature. Treating psychoanalysis as a form of narrative as well as a method of interpretation, the editors have divided their collection into three sections: 1) interpretations of the relation between contemporary feminism and Freud; 2) rereadings of classic patriarchal texts in the light of psychoanalytic feminism; and 3) readings of texts by women writers that have subverted patriarchal structures and given authoritative new voice to the maternal figure. Many of the essays make original contributions to the current debate about the conjunction of Freud and feminism; others offer innovative readings of specific texts that illustrate the significance of that relation. The Introduction provides an up-to-date survey of feminist psychoanalytic theory and enumerates the central issues. Because of the diversity of critical perspectives it offers and the range of texts it considers, this rich and important book will attract a broad spectrum of readers.

Download or read book The Mother Knot written by Jane Lazarre and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A feminist classic and a valuable testimonial to the experience of mothering. Originally published in 1976 but still relevant today, this is a fierce, often funny, often painful description of Lazarre's first few years of motherhood.

Download or read book On Matricide written by Amber Jacobs and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2007-09-04 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite advances in feminism, the "law of the father" remains the dominant model of Western psychological and cultural analysis, and the law of the mother continues to exist as an underdeveloped and marginal concept. In her radical rereading of the Greek myth, Oresteia, Amber Jacobs hopes to rectify the occlusion of the mother and reinforce her role as an active agent in the laws that determine and reinforce our cultural organization. According to Greek myth, Metis, Athena's mother, was Zeus's first wife. Zeus swallowed Metis to prevent her from bearing children who would overthrow him. Nevertheless, Metis bore Zeus a child-Athena-who sprang forth fully formed from his head. In Aeschylus's Oresteia, Athena's motherless status functions as a crucial justification for absolving Orestes of the crime of matricide. In his defense of Orestes, Zeus argues that the father is more important than the mother, using Athena's "motherless" birth as an example. Conducting a close reading of critical works on Aeschylus's text, Jacobs reveals that psychoanalytic theorists have unwittingly reproduced the denial of Metis in their own critiques. This repression, which can be found in the work of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein as well as in the work of more contemporary theorists such as André Green and Luce Irigaray, has resulted in both an incomplete analysis of Oresteia and an inability to account for the fantasies and unconscious processes that fall outside the oedipal/patricidal paradigm. By bringing the story of Athena's mother, Metis, to the forefront, Jacobs challenges the primacy of the Oedipus myth in Western culture and psychoanalysis and introduces a bold new theory of matricide and maternal law. She finds that the Metis myth exists in cryptic forms within Aeschylus's text, uncovering what she terms the "latent content of the Oresteian myth," and argues that the occlusion of the law of the mother is proof of the patriarchal structures underlying our contemporary social and psychic realities. Jacobs's work not only provides new insight into the Oresteian trilogy but also advances a postpatriarchal model of the symbolic order that has strong ramifications for psychoanalysis, feminism, and theories of representation, as well as for clinical practice and epistemology.