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This article weaves together performance and critical writing to consider the heteronormative values that mainstream western family seems to put forward. Considering the compulsion towards reproductive futurity, it argues that women’s desires are multiple, flexible and ever-changing and do not necessarily include having children.
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 2019
's "Childless" breaks the cultural and psychoanalytic silence about the idiosyncratic meanings of maternality-challenging our pronatalist assumptions. Following suit, this discussion questions our understanding of what women want. Freud was famously confounded by that question, and still, the psychological processes leading to decisions about motherhood are largely absent from psychoanalytic theory. Because of this, the heteronormative, socially agreed-upon dictum that women must be, and want to be, mothers remains locked in place. The conflation of feminine, woman, and motherhood serve to negate female subjectivity, limiting the possibilities for other creative pursuits. Contemporary psychoanalysis eschews the primary importance of instinctual drives yet has not challenged the notion of a maternal instinct that drives women to desire motherhood. The cultural and psychoanalytic silence about the complexities of reproduction and child-rearing has rendered individual women silent and their desires toward and away from motherhood unarticulated.
Revista de saúde pública, 2010
Reflections on normative discourses on sexuality, family and reproduction are shown, promoted by medical and juridical knowledge in modern society. This study was based on the assumption that changes and maintenance of values and practices coexist in the current discourses on the desire to have children, expressed as claims in the dimension of sexual and reproductive rights, with new demands in the sphere of public and health policies. The current value attributed to family is founded on the model of modern conjugal family, which can be observed in the changes that have occurred in family relations and sexual identities. Based on a new configuration of values, the expectation of paternity and maternity has partly become a value of the homosexual relationship. However, despite changes in the sphere of family relations and social identities, the centrality of the heterosexual couple prevails in the medical and juridical discourse on the desire to have children.
Natal Signs: Cultural Representations of Pregnancy, Birth and Parenting, 2015
This paper offers an analysis of one account of one family. Using a narrative as its basis, it offers an opportunity to see into the lives, and home, of one family parented by a lesbian couple. This couple has been together for six years and has four children. The family has a mix of ‘foster to adopt’ and birth children between the ages of one and six. One of the women is an academic. The other is a stay at home mother. The family is located in one of Australia’s capital cities and lives in a suburban area, close to schools, parks and shopping centres. The analysis elaborates how this lesbian family challenges heteronormative modes of performing family in ways that outdo discourses of family on their own terms, with a particular focus on how the speaker in the data positions themselves and is positioned in terms of queering discourses of motherhood.
Anthropology & Medicine, 2018
Journal of Comparative Family Studies, 2000
Ever accelerating stmctura l, technological , econom ic and cu ltural changes in society provide a widely accepted explanation for the collapse of shared va lues and behavioural patterns within domes tic relations (Bauman, 1988). Single parenting, non-married cohabi tation, blended families, two-income families , serial cohabi tati on, gay and lesbian long-term cohabitation and parenting a ll constitute familiar patterns of domestic life (Noble. 1998). Though Western soc iety might sti ll consider the ' nuclear ' famil y to be the most ' natural' and idea l of domestic social organisations. it is no longer the practised nonn (Chea!, 1988). Indeed, even the continued use of the term 'fami ly' has been questioned by a number of soc ioiogists (Bemardes, 1993 ; Scanzoni , Polonko,.Teachman, and T hompson•. 1989). A distinctly modem discourse considers the family to be a ' natural ' social Organi sation, constituted, in its ideal fo nn , as 'nuclear' (father, mother and their bi ologica l offspri ng). This view of the family as the consummate setting within which to socialise ch ildren has recentiy precipitated a new notion of the fam il y 'in cris is '. Non-traditional fami ly fonn s are considered unable to provide the commi tment, obligation and responsibility necessa1y to ensure the proper sociali sation &nd raising of children. It is the bearing and raising o f children that is fundamental to the creation and endurance of fa milies. Nonetheless, an historica l tracing reveals that childhood, as a distinct psycho-social catego1y, is a recent invention. So too is the modem notion of ' motherhood' as a socia l role for women, rather than as a sex ual reproductive role. This paper considers one contributing factor to the supposed ' crisis ' in contempora1y families: voluntary childless women, and particularly voluntaril y childless women in long-tem1 heterosex ual relationships. The symbolic configuration of women as mothers ex tends beyond the familial boundary to support an ideology of gender that specifies women's ' nature ' as sexually reproducti ve. As women have chall enged their supposed physical , intellectual, spiritual, economic and social inferi ority, sex ual reproduction has become an increas ingly importcmt sign ifier by whi ch women are di fferentiated from men. Poststructural feminist analyses predominant in the l 980's may have effecti vely widened the definiti onal boundaries to embrace a broader spectrum of women's experiences. but the associatio• n between women and sexual reproduction remains central to feminist theory. Because within our current discursive field , to exist at all means being a woman or a man.
2012
The editors of Neo-Victorian Familes, Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben, have undertaken an extensive and worthy endeavour in editing a neo-Victorian book series for Rodopi. A burgeoning field within both Victorian and contemporary literary and cultural criticism, Neo-Victorian Studies examines intriguing re-appropriations of Victorian culture that began as soon as Victoria died and have continued to proliferate vigorously. Because the Victorian age brought great changes for children through the enactment of laws limiting child labour, raising the age of consent, and providing for compulsory education, negotiating this cultural shift regarding children preoccupied many Victorian writers. Neo-Victorian literature, films, and theatre have taken up the nineteenth-century 'cult of the child' to reexamine it, critique it, and to use it as a lens to consider current attitudes and policies toward children and families, as the essays in this volume show. We need sustained and serious analysis of what such reworking of the Victorian experience suggests, both about the nineteenth century itself and about the century-plus since, which have had such constitutive impact on our current understanding of kinship, guardianship, identity, and even on our definitions of what is a 'child' and what is a 'family'. This particular volume, Neo-Victorian Families: Gender, Sexual and Cultural Politics, focuses on the depiction of the family in the neo-Victorian
The expectation that all women will become mothers, and that they will mother in particular ways, has been a focus of feminist attention for many decades. What has been less considered is how pronatalist discourses are reproduced across generations within the same family. This article draws on interviews with five pairs of white middle class daughters currently planning to have children and their mothers living in South Australia, in order to examine the ways in which mother-daughter relationships are a key site for the reproduction of pronatalist discourses. Three recurring themes are examined: 1) expectations mothers have of their daughters to have children, 2) (grand)mothers as advice-givers, and 3) generational differences relating to paid work combined with the continued privileging of mothering. The article concludes with a discussion of the ways in which pronatalist discourses are mobilised in mother-daughter relationships, and how these position women in relation to motherhood.
Women: A Cultural Review, 2018
Voluntarily choosing not to have children is increasingly becoming a preferred life option in contemporary society. Yet there remains an inherent suspicion and pitying of women who do not follow what is still perceived, despite several waves of feminism, as their biological destiny. Such choices are considered 'unspeakable' by the dominant pronatalist discourse that currently presides in western advanced-capitalist society. This article attempts to challenge and reverse prescribed beliefs about motherhood and create a textual space for those who have been denigrated for choosing not to become mothers.
IJCRT, 2020
This paper critically analyses the construction and deconstruction of ‘mothering’ and ‘parenthood’ through the perspectives of dialectical discourses ranging from medical epistemology, media and social norms. Contemporary developments such as the decriminalization of LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer or Questioning) sexuality might not ensure an extended social confirmatory role of a ‘mother’ or a caregiver. Stretching to such concerns, homosexuality and transsexuality as a sexual behavior has been quite debatable through the historical authoritative notions of disciplinary boundaries, questioning the social validation of the ‘body’ and ‘identity’ in terms of pathological progression and popular representations of role internalization and generalization. The inner conflict within the systemic forces of legality and culture remains an ineradicable journey of contesting between spaces of struggle and assertion from varying movements of sexual and behavioral possibilities to a demarcation of limitations.
The Classical Review, 2022
Novelty, exemplary Originality and Idiosyncrasy, 2024
Якубова Л. Російсько-українські "історичні війни": введення в дискурс ненависті і знищення. Аналітична записка, 2023
Frontiers in environmental science, 2024
The School of Salamanca: A Case of Global Knowledge Production, 2021
Die Geburt des Zeitzeugen nach 1945, 2012
AISSCA Programma Cantieri , 2024
Applied and Environmental Microbiology, 2007
International Journal of Unani and Integrative Medicine
Croatian Medical Journal, 2016
RIED: Revista Iberoamericana de Educación a Distancia, 2022
Scandinavian Journal of Public Health, 2011
Plant Cell, Tissue and Organ Culture, 1991
Journal of Visualized Experiments