Building on existing scholarship, Spaces and Politics of Motherhood considers motherhood through themes at the cutting-edge of social and feminist theory including: materiality and material agency; place and memory in the formation of maternal identity; issues relating to parenting in public, and the politics of combining breastfeeding with wage-work. It argues that motherhood is an achievement realised through myriad engagements with a range of human and non-human others, as well as through everyday interactions in public space which can be both emotional and political.
Building on existing scholarship, Spaces and Politics of Motherhood considers motherhood through themes at the cutting-edge of social and feminist theory including: materiality and material agency; place and memory in the formation of maternal identity; issues relating to parenting in public, and the politics of combining breastfeeding with wage-work. It argues that motherhood is an achievement realised through myriad engagements with a range of human and non-human others, as well as through everyday interactions in public space which can be both emotional and political.
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Overview
Building on existing scholarship, Spaces and Politics of Motherhood considers motherhood through themes at the cutting-edge of social and feminist theory including: materiality and material agency; place and memory in the formation of maternal identity; issues relating to parenting in public, and the politics of combining breastfeeding with wage-work. It argues that motherhood is an achievement realised through myriad engagements with a range of human and non-human others, as well as through everyday interactions in public space which can be both emotional and political.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781786603098 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 04/18/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 156 |
| File size: | 638 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Maternal becomings: Space, time and subjectivity in early motherhood
This chapter focuses on new mothers' emergent sense of self. Questions of subjectivity came to the fore in geography in the 1990s as scholarly engagements with feminism, queer studies, critical race studies, postcolonialism and disability studies began to flourish (Bell and Valentine, 1995; Fincher and Jacobs, 1998; Keith and Pile, 2004). Through that decade there came to be an increasing awareness of and interest in concepts of difference and otherness within the discipline. Especially with the rise of feminist geography, there came to be a growing recognition of the importance of attending to the spaces and experiences of marginalised subjects. The 1990s also marked a time of growing recognition and interest in the ways peoples' understandings of themselves emerge through spatial practice.
This scholarship highlighted the way different aspects of identity (e.g., race, class, gender and sexuality) come to have meaning through everyday spatial practice, and how power asymmetries of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism and other forms of discrimination operate in and through space.
At the same time, this scholarship also highlighted the inherent instability and multiplicity of identity 'categories' by showing how identities are made (and remade) both through one another (intersectionality) and within particular cultural, historical, biological and technological contexts (Massey, 2006). These interventions have led to a rich body of scholarship on how different kinds of identities have come to be produced under different cultural and political milieus and to a lesser extent in different historical time periods (Bell and Valentine, 1995; Fincher and Jacobs, 1998; Keith and Pile, 2004). Yet while geography scholarship has done a good job of exploring how identity gets constructed differently in different places and cultural contexts, less work has attended to how identities themselves change over time.
This chapter considers early motherhood as a case of subject transformation. For many women, the experience of new motherhood can bring with it a sense of profound disorientation or deterritorialisation from one's former sense of self. In this chapter I explore trends in how new mothers in the UK understand their emergent subjectivities drawing on women's narrations of their experiences in the first year post-birth. Clearly, the relation to one's new baby is a key component to one's identity as a new mother (Baraitser, 2009), as is the formation of new relations to place and space, as I will discuss in chapter 2. In addition to the way these relations shape new mothers, in this chapter I argue that the transition to motherhood involves forming new relationships both to time itself and to one's former – and future – selves. Empirically this analysis is based on interviews with twenty mothers in London undertaken in 2011 and 2012 and an analysis of non-password-protected online discussion boards on the popular UK parenting website mumsnet between 2006 and 2014. Based on these data I argue that early motherhood can be understood as a kind of becoming.
I frame this argument through the conceptual work of Rosi Braidotti (2002) and that of Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 2004). In developing this argument I highlight the importance of time and temporality in understanding transformations to motherhood. I further argue that change over time is a highly productive (but underexplored) way of understanding subjectivity and suggest that approaching the process of subject formation as an ongoing process marks an important conceptual innovation within geography. This chapter is composed of three parts. After providing an overview of scholarship on maternal subjectivity within and beyond geography, I turn to outline my conceptual framework and empirical base. I then move on to my analysis, highlighting themes of time and the invocation of past, present and future selves undertaken by mothers in the first year post-birth as they seek to understand their new mothering selves.
EXPLORING MATERNAL SUBJECTIVITY
The question of what happens to women's identities and sense of self when they become mothers has been explored by writers, poets, artists and scholars across the arts, humanities, social sciences, healthcare sciences and medicine. Much of this scholarship has been informed by the foundational work of Adrienne Rich highlighting the fundamental tension between the power of procreation and the ways motherhood as a social practice is constrained under patriarchy (Rich, 1995) and Sara Ruddick's development of the concept of maternal practice or mothering as a verb or a kind of doing (1989). Over the years, scholarship in this field has flourished with the emergence of motherhood studies as a distinct field of scholarship. This field has produced myriad insights across both academic and popular titles, and it is beyond the scope of this chapter to provide an exhaustive discussion of this literature. One of the largest areas of attention has been the pressures of striving towards aspirational/impossible goals of simultaneously being a 'devoted mother' and a 'high-achieving worker' under neoliberalism (Asher, 2011; Boyer, 2014; Hays, 1998; Warner, 2006). This body of scholarship has also addressed the role of new technologies in the journey to and experiences of parenthood (Nahman, 2013); mothers' experiences raising transgender children (Pearlman, 2010); feelings of ambivalence about motherhood (Hollway and Featherstone, 1997; Parker and Bar, 1996); and different forms of mother-activism (O'Reilly, 2010).
As noted in the introduction, this scholarship has also examined the many ways in which experiences of motherhood and mothering subjectivities emerge through multiple intersecting relations of social identity. For example, in a North American context, Vasquez (2010) has examined Chicana mothers' efforts to counter cultural messages about discrimination as part of their parenting practice, while Murphy-Geiss (2010) has analysed Muslim mothers' struggles to honour traditional Islamic values in Western contexts marked by Islamophobia. Extending analysis beyond straight families, Gabb (2005) and Taylor (2009) have explored intersecting factors of sexual orientation and class among lesbian and other non-heterosexual parents in the UK context.
As an exhaustive review of this field is beyond the scope of this chapter, I will focus on how the work presented here builds on scholarship within the social sciences (and particularly geography) relating to motherhood and maternal subjectivity. Over the past twenty years a growing number of scholars in feminist geography have begun to attend to the spaces and practices of motherhood (see, e.g., England, 1996; Holloway, 1999; Katz and Monk, 1993; Longhurst, 2008; Luzia, 2010, 2013; Madge and O'Connor, 2005; McDowell et al., 2005; Mitchell et al., 2004; Pratt, 2012; Valentine, 1997). This scholarship has highlighted the fact that both experiences of motherhood and broader cultural understandings and expectations thereof vary significantly over place and time and are shaped by factors of race, class, sexual orientation and other attributes (Davidson, 2001; Holloway, 1999; Longhurst, 2000; Luzia, 2010, 2013; Madge and O'Connor, 2005; Valentine, 1997).
Scholars in feminist geography have noted how motherhood functions as a transformative experience for many women (Davidson, 2001; Madge and O'Connor, 2005) and that many new mothers and fathers find parenting overwhelming at times (Aitken, 2000). Concerning the question of identity in relation to the transition to motherhood, McDowell et al. (2005) and Holloway (1999) note the centrality of caring in most women's new identities as mothers and highlight the way normative understandings about what constitutes 'good' mothering are both shaped by the discourses of parenting 'experts' – which change over time with shifts in 'expert' opinion – and vary by class and locale. Following loosely from the work of Luce Irigary, Gregson and Rose (2000) suggest that maternal subjectivity can usefully be understood as indeterminate and ambiguous. Relatedly, Longhurst (2000) suggests that within any one mother there are multiple maternal identities, while Louise Holt (2013) has suggested the concept of interembodiment to highlight the way maternal subjectivity emerges relationally through (often) significant physical contact with one's baby. Exploring the question of maternal identity as a central concern, Luzia (2010, 2013) has explored the way maternal identities emerge in and through embodied spatial practice at different scales, exploring scales of home, neighbourhood and city through her study of lesbian mothers in suburban Australia.
In addition to terrestrial space, geographers have examined the role of online space in the formation of maternal identities. Through questionnaires and interviews with users of the UK website babyworld, for example, Madge and O'Connor (2005) note that online fora can provide an important source of companionship and support in the first year post-birth, providing mothers with an opportunity to express uncertainty and other feelings they might not disclose to friends offline. Arguing for an interpretation of early motherhood as a rite of passage, Madge and O'Connor suggest that online fora offer mothers an important outlet through which women can 'try on' different identities (see also Longhurst, 2000). Though highlighting that such fora cater largely to white, heterosexual, tech-savvy, middle-class mothers, these authors note the value of online interactions as a means for new mothers to move between maternal and other, more familiar identities.
In the interdisciplinary book Making Modern Mothers Thomson et al. make a number of observations about the emergence of maternal identity during pregnancy and early motherhood. Based on research from the UK they explore how differences between women can begin to emerge in light of discourses of the varying 'camps' of parenting practices (e.g., attachment parenting, 'free-range' parenting, 'teenage mother', 'working mother') (Thomson et al., 2011). They further note how women tend to describe their experiences of motherhood as a transition involving the curtailment of fun and the shift from pleasing one's self to pleasing another (206, 271) and identify 'selective remembering' as a strategy through which women forge coherent narratives about their mothering experiences (49). Sagely, they characterise birth as a 'temporal and emotional disruption that changes women's way of being in the world', going on to note that 'passing through the time zone from single woman to maternal subject has a seismic impact on all aspects of women's lives' (275).
In a similar vein, in Making Sense of Motherhood: A Narrative Approach, sociologist Tina Miller casts the transition to motherhood as – for most – a period of intermittent chaos or instability which gradually gives way to increasing levels of comfort with one's mothering self and (for some) the eventual inhabitation of the role of expert. Based on research from the UK, Miller also notes the societal pressure to be seen as a good mother and pressure to narrate one's experience of motherhood in terms of competence and the ability to cope (Miller, 2005: 62, 89). Yet amid such pressure to put on a strong face and demonstrate confidence, Miller also found evidence of women reporting a sense of not knowing who they were during early motherhood, noting further that narrations of self during this time sometimes include strategic reworkings of the past (e.g., in terms of 'readiness' for or expectations about motherhood) (Miller, 2005: 102). An overarching theme through this investigation is shock at the sheer magnitude of change motherhood brings. As one participant said of her transition to motherhood, 'The change to my life ... is complete and absolute' (Miller, 2005: 103), the arresting language conveying the magnitude of this transition for many women. This feeling was echoed in this research in the words of one participant who noted, 'Jesus Christ ... you can't prepare for it, can you, child birth' (Laura).
Approaching motherhood from the perspective of psychoanalysis, psychotherapist and feminist theoretician Lisa Baraitser takes a somewhat different view on the period of early motherhood in her book Maternal Encounters (Baraitser, 2009). Through engagements with Kristiva, Lacan, Irigary and others, Baraitser seeks to explore 'what motherhood is like' (rather than what it might mean) through autoethnography and reflections from her work with clients as a practitioner. Drawing loosely on Deleuze's theorisation of desire, Baraitser argues against representations of the maternal as lack (see also Shildrick, 2010). This work highlights the importance of writing in the processes by which women grapple with their experiences as new mothers (Baraister, 2009:14), together with the importance of experiences of time in maternal becomings (74–75). Through this work Baraitser eschews conceptualising motherhood as a transformation and hazards against the notion of a coherent, singular maternal identity, emphasising instead the inherently multiple and unstable nature of maternal identities.
In this chapter I build on this diverse field of scholarship by approaching the kinds of shifts in self-understanding that can occur for women in the first year post-birth through conceptual work on becoming as advanced by Braidotti, Deleuze and Guattari. As Hannah Stark (2017) has observed, there exist broad commonalities between Deleuzian philosophy and feminist philosophy in that both seek to move beyond traditional modes of Enlightenment thought, based in binary systems. Herein I seek to explore these commonalities through an analysis of the kinds of transformations that can occur in the course of becoming a mother.
CONCEPTUAL FRAMING: LARVAL IDENTITIES AND BECOMING
An engagement with the work of Deleuze and Guattari and those engaged with this body of theory (including Braidotti, Roberts, Buchanan, Colebrook and Stark, among others) provides a useful way to approach the concept of subjectivity as a dynamic process. Together these scholars outline a conceptualisation of subjectivity as a process of becoming, highlighting the ways understandings of self change over time. To understand how we might think about subjectivity in a Deleuzian way, let us first consider the idea of the larval subject (Deleuze, 1994: 118). Larvae provide a way of conceptualising selfhood as continual transition or passing-through of states in which understandings of self both extend and retain previous ways of being. This relates to the broader concept of becoming within Deleuzoguattarian thought as a 'being in the middle' rather than a destination or fixed state.
As beings whose bodies (and bodily capacities) are in a continual state of flux, larvae also relate nicely the broader corpus of Deleuzian work in which questions of 'what a body can do' (and indeed what constitutes a 'body') are posed, with myriad examples of ways in which the concept of bodies is not limited to human bodies, and indeed human bodies are not limited by the surface of the skin. Like the larval state, pregnancy and early motherhood mark a period of radical change to the body and bodily capacities. These may include gestation, birth and breastfeeding, as well as myriad forms of bodily practice such as changing nappies, clipping nails, becoming mobile with a baby, bathing, dressing, rocking a baby to sleep (in which, of course, fathers and others can also participate). These examples all fit nicely within Hannah Stark's conceptualisation of becoming as the production of 'new ways of relating to things and new embodied sensations' (Stark, 2017: 25).
Returning to Deleuze, the larva also suggests the way subjectivity relates to waves of successive temporal practice such that 'presents' always hold within them pasts, and 'the subject, at root, is the synthesis of time' (Deleuze, 1991: 93 in Roberts, 2007: 118). Put another way, becomings are always an (evolving) amalgamation of future and past (Stark, 2017: 34) (in contrast to current calls to 'live in the moment'). This formulation suggests a sense of connection, haunting or co-presence with past selves while also suggesting that the past can serve as resource in producing subjectivity.
As Deleuzian scholars note, becomings are marked in the first instance by instability (May, 2003: 147), with the becoming subject in a continual state of reinvention (Buchanan and Colebrook, 2000: 19). As Rosi Braidotti put it, within Deleuzian philosophy the subject is characterised by 'a flux of successive becomings' (Braidotti, 2002: 70), while Hannah Stark notes that 'becoming acknowledges that things exist in a state of perpetual movement and flux, it invites us to think about processes rather than static states' (Stark, 2017: 37). Within this approach selves are also figured as (internally) multiple, as suggested by Guattari's observation about the 'always mixed nature of the elements that make up our subjectivity' (Guattari, 1995: 7). Figuring the subject as multiple marks a departure from (or deterritorialisation of) both traditional Western philosophy and Cartesian humanism, as well as enabling a radically open approach to subjectivity (O'Sullivan, 2006; Stark, 2017).
(Continues…)
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