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Motherhood and Maternal Subjectivity

Transformations of Self and Other in the Maternal Experience

Edited by Maura Sheehy

Published February 4th 2013 by Routledge – 256 pages

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  • Hardback: 978-0-415-63483-0: $140.00
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Description

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.

Contents

1. Introduction Part I: Mothers in the Consulting Room 2. Giving Body to Thought 3. Mothers, Monsters, Mentors 4. Lost in a Fog, or "How Difficult Is This MOMMY Stuff, Anyway?" Part II: Maternal Subjectivity 5. Oi Mother, Keep Ye' Hair On! Impossible Transformations of Maternal Subjectivity 6. Mum's the Word: Intersubjectivity, Alterity, and the Maternal Subject 7. Maternal Silence. Discussions by Lisa Baraitser and Maura Sheehy, Reply by Rozmarin Part III: Maternality and Writing, Creativity 8. I'm in the Milk and the Milk Is in Me 9. Mother-Writing and the Narrative of Maternal Subjectivity Part IV: Maternal Representation in Culture 10. "’It Ain't Fittin': Cinematic and Fantasmatic Contours of Mammy in Gone with the Wind" 11. What About the Baby? The New Cult of Domesticity and Media Images of Pregnancy

　

Author Bio

Maura Sheehy is a psychotherapist in private practice in the USA and a contributor to Studies in Gender and Sexuality. A former staff and freelance writer for major national publications, she has an MA in Cultural Studies and has run a weekly support group for new mothers in Brooklyn, NY, USA.

Name: Motherhood and Maternal Subjectivity: Transformations of Self and Other in the Maternal Experience (Hardback) – Routledge 
Description: Edited by Maura Sheehy. 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...
Categories: Self Psychology/Intersubjectivity, Parenting, Feminism