Thammasat University students who are interested in education, sociology, literature, cultural and social anthropology, the allied health sciences, and related subjects may find a newly available book useful.
Narratives of Motherhood and Mothering in Fiction and Life Writing is an Open Access book, available for free download at this link:
https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/62373
The TU Library collection includes other books about different aspects of motherhood in literature.
The publisher’s description of the book notes:
This open access volume offers original essays on how motherhood and mothering are represented in contemporary fiction and life writing across several national contexts. Providing a broad range of perspectives in terms of geopolitical places, thematic concerns, and theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches, it demonstrates the significance of literary narratives for understanding and critiquing motherhood and mothering as social phenomena and subjective experiences. The chapters contextualize motherhood and mothering in terms of their particular national and cultural location and analyze narratives about mothers who are firmly placed in one national context, as well as those who are in “in-between” positions due to migrant experiences. The contributions foreground and link together the themes central to the volume: embodied experience and maternal embodiment; notions of what is “normal” or natural (or not) about motherhood; maternal health and illness; mother-daughter relations; maternality and memory; and the (im)possibilities of giving voice to the mother. They raise questions about how motherhood and mothering are marked by absence and/or presence, as well as by profound ambivalences.
The introduction states:
To say that motherhood is a gendered concept is a severe understatement. Notions of motherhood are still largely based upon the connection between woman–biology–body in relation to social functions: women, by giving birth and nursing, have supposedly natural ties with the child. The notion of the good mother is still a hegemonic discourse inherent in daily life as well as in institutional practice. This discursive construct is both explicit and implicit, creating expectations and demands that distinctively separate the situation of women as mothers from that of men as fathers. Motherhood is a phenomenon that concerns women all around the world. This is not to say that all women mother, or are mothers, but it is to say that all women are affected in one way or another by motherhood, by its absence or presence. Furthermore, motherhood—which we take to mean the gendered situation of being a mother—and mothering—which we take to mean the gendered practice of parenting in terms of everyday care and sustenance—are ongoing day and night in all kinds of societies and environments. As a phenomenon, motherhood is diverse and multifaceted. Already in 1997, Elaine Tuttle Hansen observed: “What is said by and about mothers—full-time mothers, surrogate mothers, teenage mothers, adoptive mothers, mothers who live in poverty, mothers with briefcases—is increasingly complicated and divisive. Language is stretched to describe the bewildering fragmentation of a time in which one child may have a genetic mother, a gestational mother, and a custodial mother, each of whom is a different person”. “Mother,” then, as Hansen observes, may mean many things. Motherhood is often marked by ambivalences, fraught with mixed and at times conflicted feelings, which may also change over a lifetime. All these diversities are further compounded by different power dimensions beyond gender, including class, race, nationality, sexuality, age, and ability. In the twenty-first century, debates about transgender people, and about who counts as a woman, also impact on ideas about motherhood and who can be (understood as) a mother. But motherhood and mothering are not only defined by physical and material experiences. They also come to life through stories and recorded accounts. In narratives, in texts, motherhood gains meaning on existential and symbolic levels. On many occasions, it is these narratives, and the maternal experiences they express, whether the narratives are fictional(ized) or “documentary” that stir up debate, call attention to controversial issues and scrutinize conditions that clash with ideals and established perceptions. […]
What these examples have in common is that they give space to the voice of the (would-be) mother herself. The presence and absence of such perspectives in the public debate, in literary representation as such, and in what continuously takes shape as “popular culture” or the literary canon bears some scrutiny. For, while motherhood is a global phenomenon, it has yet to become an integrated part of the themes and tropes that are regularly studied in university courses in comparative literature and other relevant subjects. We therefore see the present volume as a contribution to international literary scholarship in general, as well as to “motherhood scholarship” in particular. It is one of our fundamental points of departure for this volume that disregarding meanings of motherhood and mothering is unhelpful for feminism, since it is a experience that affects all women, as well as all men. […] While it is true that motherhood and mothering take shape in narratives across many textual genres, from fictional literature to spoken narratives, from political statements to policy documents, we focus here on two main genres: first, literary fiction and second, life writing, that is, auto/biography and memoirs. The twenty-first century has seen the publication of a broad variety of fictional narratives, autobiographical writing, and essays that explore the fundamental impact of motherhood on individuals, families, and society, and taken all together, these texts do seem to constitute a “wave” of writing about maternal experience. With its focus on literary representations, the present volume offers insights into contemporary reflections on motherhood and mothering that sometimes are part of ongoing public debates, but at other times cannot be found in public discourses. Via its typically extended narratives, literature offers the possibility to dwell upon topics that are more hurriedly abandoned in public debate and media, or that are perhaps not commonly voiced in the “first person” because they are taboo. Literature therefore is a unique source of insight into human conditions and often envisions circumstances that are as yet concealed or marginalized in society at large. It has a unique ability to convey and combine emotional, linguistic, and artistic dimensions in “storying motherhood”. Furthermore, literary representations of mothers and mothering foreground the ways that parenthood and parenting for women are imbricated with dimensions like class, race, age, and nationality, as well as how motherhood is connected to living a heterosexual, lesbian, queer, or trans everyday life. Literature complicates questions about motherhood and non-motherhood, about norms, inclusivity, and diversity.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)