Description
Book SynopsisReassembling Motherhood brings together contributors from across the disciplines to consider the transformation of motherhood as both an identity and a role. It examines how bearing and rearing a child are being restructured as reproductive labor and care work change around the globe, emphasizing the limits imposed by race, class, and inequality.
Trade ReviewThis book is an important read for academics, as well as law and policy makers working in the fields of reproduction, families, and care work. * Canadian Journal of Sociology *
What does motherhood mean in the twenty-first century? If you want informed and fascinating answers, read
Reassembling Motherhood. A stellar interdisciplinary team of international scholars report on how technological advances, cultural changes, global migration, and variable state policies have transformed mothering. This landmark book will not only shape scholarly research but also instruct policymakers and engage a wide audience. -- Viviana A. Zelizer, Lloyd Cotsen ’50 Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, author of
Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the EconomyThis fabulous collection challenges our conventional understanding of motherhood and its connection to bodies, technologies, global migration, and policy, and pushes the debate to the next level. Ergas, Jenson, Michel and their contributing authors masterfully and convincingly trace the dismantling of the traditional notion of motherhood and the expansion of its choices, and show how these in turn create different forms of social inequalities, and physical, emotional, and global connections and disconnections. This volume is a must read for anyone interested in the issues of motherhood, care, social inequality, and public policy. -- Ito Peng, University of Toronto, coeditor of
Gender, Migration, and the Work of Care: A Multi-Scalar Approach to the Pacific RimErgas, Jenson, and Michel have edited an important collection that crystallizes the unequal and uneven transformations in the legal, social, economic, and biological relations of motherhood in the twenty-first century. Together,
Reassembling Motherhood explores what we know, pushes the boundaries of knowledge, and raises new questions for further research. The collection is provocative in the best sense. -- Eileen Boris, University of California, Santa Barbara, coauthor of
Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare StateTable of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Negotiating “Mother” in the Twenty-First Century: Between Choice and Constraint, by Yasmine Ergas, Jane Jenson, and Sonya Michel
1. Certain Mothers, Uncertain Fathers: Placing Assisted Reproductive Technologies in Historical Perspective, by Nara Milanich
2. Assisted Reproductive Technologies and the Biological Bottom Line, by Linda G. Kahn and Wendy Chavkin
3. Multiple “Mothers,” Many Requirements for Protection: Children’s Rights and the Status of Mothers in the Context of International Commercial Surrogacy, by Claire Achmad
4. The Borders of Legal Motherhood: Rethinking Access to Assisted Reproductive Technologies in Europe, by Letizia Palumbo
5. Pregnant Bodies and the Subjects of Rights: The Surrogacy–Abortion Nexus, by Yasmine Ergas
6. The Motherless Fetus: Ultrasound Pictures and Their Magic Disappearing Trick, by Anne Higonnet
7. Contracting for Motherhood: Postadoption Visitation Agreements, by Carol Sanger
8. Relinquishment and Adoption in Tamil Society: Mothers’ Experiences with De-kinning, by Pien Bos
9. Marginalized Mothers and Intersecting Systems of Surveillance: Prisons and Foster Care, by Dorothy Roberts
10. Care and Gender, by Martha Albertson Fineman
11. The Double Lives of Transnational Mothers, by Sonya Michel and Gabrielle Oliveira
12. Euro-Orphans and the Stigmatization of Migrant Motherhood, by Helma Lutz
13. The New Maternalism: Children First; Women Second, by Jane Jenson
Afterword: Crossing into the Future, by Alice Kessler-Harris
Contributors
Index
