Search results for ""Demeter Press""

Few words are as steeped in beliefs about gender, sexuality, and social desirability as “motherhood”. Drawing on queer, postcolonial, and feminist theory, historical sources, personal narratives, film studies, and original empirical research, the authors in this book offer queer re-tellings and reexaminations of reproduction, family, politics, and community. The list of contributors includes emerging writers as well as established scholars and activists such as Gary Kinsman, Damien Riggs, Christa Craven, Cary Costello, Elizabeth Peel, and Rachel Epstein.

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A large proportion—and in many jurisdictions the majority—of incarcerated women are mothers. Popular attention is often paid to challenges faced by children of incarcerated mothers while incarcerated women themselves often do not “count” as mothers in mainstream discourse. This is the first anthology on incarcerated mothers’ experiences that is primarily based on and reflects the Canadian context. It is also trans-national in scope as it covers related issues from other countries around the world. These essays examine connections between mothering and incarceration, from analysis of the justice system and policies, criminalization of motherhood, to understanding experiences of mothers in prisons as presented in their own voices. They highlight structures and processes which shape and ascribe incarcerated woman’s identity as a mother, juxtaposing it with scripted and imposed mainstream norms of a “good” or “real” mother. Moreover, these essays identify and track emergence of mothers’ resistance and agency within and in spite of the confines of their circumstances.

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Natal Signs: Cultural Representations of Pregnancy, Birth and Parenting explores some of the ways in which reproductive experiences are taken up in the rich arena of cultural production. The chapters in this collection pose questions, unsettle assumptions, and generate broad imaginative spaces for thinking about representation of pregnancy, birth, and parenting. They demonstrate the ways in which practices of consuming and using representations carry within them the productive forces of creation. Bringing together an eclectic and vibrant range of perspectives, this collection offers readers the possibility to rethink and reimagine the diverse meanings and practices of representations of these significant life events. Engaging theoretical reflection and creative image making, the contributors explore a broad range of cultural signs with a focus on challenging authoritative representations in a manner that seeks to reveal rather than conceal the insistently problematic and contestable nature of image culture. Natal Signs gathers an exciting set of critically engaged voices to reflect on some of life’s most meaningful moments in ways that affirm natality as the renewed promise of possibility.

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“Mothers Under Fire: Mothering in Conflict Areas” examines the experiences of women mothering in conflict areas. The aim of this collection is to engage with the nature and meaning of motherhood and mothering during times of war and/or in zones experiencing the threat of war. The essays in the collection reflect diverse disciplinary perspectives through which scholars and field practitioners reveal how conflict shapes mothering practices. One of the unique contributions of the collection is that it highlights not only the particular difficulties mothers face in various geographic locations where conflict has been prevalent, but also the ways in which mothers display agency to challenge and negotiate the circumstances that oppress them. The collection raises awareness of the needs of women and children in areas affected by military and/or political violence worldwide, and provides a basis for developing multiple policy frameworks aimed at improving existing systems of support in local contexts. —Kristen P. Williams, Clark University

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Visiting Africa: A Memoir is a personal journey as well as a physical one: it is about my ongoing and evolving attempt to approach Africa and its cultures with humility and modesty and about my struggles as a privileged white man to ethically encounter and live in a world marked by injustice and racialized inequality. It takes up the present challenge of resurrecting stories that challenge dominant narratives. It is an investigation of privilege and how the privileged must overcome their own defensiveness and feelings of guilt if they are to stand in solidarity with those people they meet and write about. Finally, this book is an investigation into the possibilities of empathy.

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Today, more and more grandmothers around the world are taking on varied responsibilities and many roles, sometimes concurrently. Consequently, grandmothers continue to play, as in the past, an influential role not only in the lives of their grandchildren, but also in our communities and in society more broadly. Grandmothers and Grandmothering: Creative and Critical Contemplations in Honour of our Women Elders, as the title suggests, seeks to pay homage to our grandmothers and their contributions to society. As well, it aims to explore the textured and complex phenomena of grandmothering from a range of disciplines and cultural perspectives. Our hope is that this collection challenges preconceived notions of what it means to be a grandmother and provides insight into the multifaceted nature of grandmothering.

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From dour old women to buzzkills who can’t take a joke, the stereotype of the humourless feminist has repeatedly been deployed to derail and delegitimize the women’s rights movement. This collection skips the tired debates that ask whether feminists can be funny – we know the answer to this already – to instead investigate contemporary expressions and functions of humour within international feminist movements and communities. This interdisciplinary volume showcases critical analyses of cultural texts and events, personal accounts of producing and encountering feminist humour, and creative interruptions that pair laughter with insight. As a whole, this work seeks to sideline caricatures of the humourless feminist by promoting a vision of a diverse movement vibrant with innovative, generous, threatening, and, ultimately, triumphant laughter.

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In a world full of messages about the joys of motherhood, ticking biological clocks, pronatalist ideologies and socio-cultural imperatives for women to mother, what does the alternative look like? That is, what is the experience of women who choose, or find themselves without progeny, when they are deemed 'other', instead of being a 'mother'? This anthology of interdisciplinary work links to sociology, anthropology, psychology, demography, religion, language, literature, popular media, medicine and child and family studies. Are women that choose to be childfree always narcissistic, self-obsessed, and lonely? Or can they be free, mobile, and successful? Do all women who choose to be childfree do it in the same way or have the same motivation? What is the role of age, partnership status, trauma or poverty in this decision? Using techniques such as literature review, ethnographic interviews, autoethnography, and textual analysis and reframing, these sixteen authors from around the globe unpack largely pronatalist, racist, sexist and heteronormative views and assumptions about childfree women.

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A woman muses about buying lovely new panties; another journeys inward and outward to redefine her life, a blogger offers information, support, and community to perimenopausal women; researchers uncover myths and misconceptions about migrant and refugee women’s experiences of menopause; a gerontology scholar extrapolates for menopause the meanings of cultural representations of childbirth; a sociologist and intersex advocate challenges her medically constructed menopause; young women’s stories inform an inquiry into the health and social repercussions of primary ovarian insufficiency—all in a collection of research papers and personal narratives that moves far beyond the idea of menopause as a mere biological marker. While biomedical and feminist researchers agree that menopause is a time of transition and border crossing, they offer diverse viewpoints about whether perimenopause and menopause signal deficiency and burden, or growth and freedom, or both. So too, contributors to this collection—influenced by factors of age, cultural background, societal context, and physical and psychological experience—vary significantly in their perspectives of this process. Research, analysis, narrative, poetry, and art intermingle to create a multi-textured montage that challenges stereotypes, probes relationships, and defies categorization. Musings on Perimenopause and Menopause: Identity, Experience, Transition, provides insight into how women think about and experience the transition to menopause in contemporary times.

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This volume explores the intersections of welfare, gender and mothering work in the context this political reality. It explores austerity and the policies of neoliberal governments that work to deprive some mothers of their welfare. This volume also explores how motherhood is socially constructed in various social locations and places around the world. Last, it examines different ways of thinking about mothering and what changes to laws and policies are required to assist all who are mothering and provide better support to their families.

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Feminist Parenting: Perspectives from Africa and Beyond asks and considers: What is feminist parenting? Is it something for all parents? What does it mean to be a feminist parent in practice? The collection aims to fill a gap on feminist parenting in the existing literature by bringing timely post-Western perspectives. More specifically, the anthology’s main contribution is its explicit focus on feminist parenting from the margins to the global periphery: from Africa and its diaspora, from the Global South to Europe and America. The 27 parents from diverse backgrounds, walks of life and countries gathered in this anthology share powerful responses to the above questions by narrating their experiences of some of the challenges, dilemmas, promises and compromises of parenting with a feminist perspective. The volume is the one of the first collections published with first-person essays describing very touching, beautiful and sometimes painful stories of what it means and more importantly what it costs to become a feminist parent with an intersectional approach. In doing so, the authors of this book aim at (re)claiming parenting as a necessarily political terrain for subversion, radical transformation and resistance to patriarchal oppression and sexism.

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This book examines the complexities of mothers who are entrepreneurs in different parts of the world. This uniqueness and contribution to the area of women's entrepreneurship presents many challenges. One must historicize context; focus on socio-political realms and on lived realities. All challenging endeavours, when focusing on mothering and entrepreneurship, in different global contexts. What of the workers in these contexts? More specifically what of female workers within these contexts? How have women negotiated gendered roles within old and new structures? What complexities have preconfigured the diverse realities and positionalities of maternal-workers? How have these intricacies shifted the boundaries of work-family interface? This book focuses on a specific subset of work and the economy for mothers who are entrepreneurs in different parts of the world. In this edited collection, we examine how mothers are negotiating their entrepreneurial endeavors within the contexts of local and global economic shifts. We explore how the socio-cultural, economic and national contexts that (re)structure and (re)frame multiple nodes of power, difference, and realities for mothers as workers across diverse contexts. This type of contextual analysis allows for new lines of inquiry and questions that move beyond the descriptive profiling and gendered assessment of women entrepreneurs. Lastly, the mother-entrepreneur-worker-life balance frames our discussion. We particularly set the work-family discourse within many points of contentions related to how the researchers have conceptualized work-life interface, the specific assumptions embedded within these investigations, and the implications of these for how we (re)present the dynamics related to mothering and entrepreneurship. The participation of mothers within entrepreneurial space offers a rich site for analyzing the contextual nature of maternal identity, work life relationships and entrepreneurial identities. In so doing, the chapters addressed the different histories of oppression, movement of people, socio-economic conditions that underpin that experience, the various axes of power that affect the precariousness of work and citizenship on a global scale. Where existing examinations also center on the concerns for work-life interface, such scrutiny also brings to bear the complexities and ambiguities of working within these two boundaries. This is presented as a way of reframing not just work life interface, but also, that of how these affect the specific practices, choices, and responses of entrepreneurial mothers within specific localities and positionalities. No doubt, these insights provide important foundations for advancing theorizations on entrepreneurial mothers.

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This interdisciplinary volume opens an innovative space for critical discussion, and production of new imaginaries within, feminist scholarship, analysis and feminist politics, about what is and has been meant by, involved in, required of, and what it means to be, a “wife.” Contributions within this volume together critically explore and tease out, intersections, overlaps, and distinctions between the social categories of wife and mother, and the link, and separate, labours of wife-work and maternal caregiving labour. This volume brings together diverse critical perspectives through creative contributions, personal narratives, and scholarly works. Chapters discuss critical theorizing about roles, representations, identities, and work associated with being a “wife.”

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Though the negative effects of social exclusion are well documented, there is a paucity of research on women’s experiences of social exclusion as they relate to mothering within the institution of motherhood. Social exclusion is a socially constructed concept; it refers to a multi-dimensional form of systematic discrimination driven by unequal power relationships. It is the denial of equal opportunities, resources, rights, goods, and services for some, by others, within economic, social, cultural, and political arenas. Carrying, birthing, and mothering children place women in a unique position to face social exclusion based on their role as mothers. Perhaps at no other time in our lives could we benefit more from feeling as though we are engaged in our community than when we enter into and are experiencing the patriarchal institution of motherhood. As the widely used proverb states, “It takes a village to raise a child”, it also takes a village (of societal institutions) to support mothers. This collection explores motherhood in the context of social exclusion. The book is divided into four parts, each exploring the topic from a different perspective: A Historical Look at Motherhood; Mothers and Crime; Disability, Care Work, and Motherhood; and Personal Narratives.

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“Don’t women with children travel?” Marybeth Bond and Pamela Michael enquire, in their book A Mother’s World: Journeys of the Heart (1998), when discovering the absence of portrayals of travelling mothers. Addressing this absence, our book Travellin’ Mama: Mothers, Mothering and Travel explores the multiple dimensions of motherhood and travel. Through a variety of compelling creative pieces and critical essays with a global outlook and wide-ranging historical, cultural, and national perspectives, Travellin’ Mama: Mothers, Mothering and Travel examines the vital contributions made to travel writing and representations of travel by mothers. Autoethnographical approaches inform many of the pieces in this book, illustrating the significance of the personal and writing the self in re-imagining our cultural narratives and representations of travel, and the mothers who undertake it. This book is about mothers who travel, for mothers who travel with their children, and all those readers who have travelled in any capacity, with or without family.

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Heavy Burdens: Stories of Motherhood and Fatness seeks to address the systemic ways in which the moral panic around 'obesity' impacts fat mothers and fat children. Taking a life-course approach, the book begins with analyses of the ways in which fatphobia is enacted on pregnant (or even not-yet-pregnant) women, whose bodies immediately become viewed as objects warranting external control by not only medical professionals, but family members, and even passers-by. The story unfolds as adults recount childhood stories of growing up fat, or growing up in fear of being fat, and how their mothers' relationships with their own bodies and attempted weight-loss experiences shaped how food, exercise, and body management were approached in their homes in sometimes harmful ways. Finally, the book concludes with stories of women who have since become mothers, examining the ways in which having their own children altered their views on their own bodies and their perceptions of their mothers' actions, and working to find fat-friendly futures via their own parenting (or grand-parenting) techniques.

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Interweaving my experiences as a Canadian Muslim woman, mother, (grand)daughter, educator, and scholar throughout this work, I write about living and narratively inquiring (Clandinin and Connelly, Narrative Inquiry; Clandinin) alongside three Muslim mothers and daughters during our daughters’ transition into adolescence. I was interested in mother-and-daughter experiences during this time of life transition because my eldest daughter, Malak, was in the midst of transitioning into adolescence as I embarked upon my doctoral research. I had many wonders about Malak’s experiences, my experiences as a mother, and the experiences of other Muslim daughters and mothers in the midst of similar life transitions. I wondered about how dominant narratives from within and across Muslim and other communities in Canada shape our lives and experiences. For, while we are often storied as victims of various oppressions in media, literature, and elsewhere, little is known about our diverse experiences—par-ticularly the experiences of Muslim mothers and daughters composing our selves and lives alongside one another in familial places.

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While the image or construct of the “good mother” has been the focus of many research projects, the “bad mother,” as a discursive construct, and also mothers who do “bad” things as complicated, agentic social actors, have been quite neglected, despite the prevalence of the image of the bad mother across late modern societies. The few researchers who address this powerful social image point out that bad mothers are culturally identified by what they do, yet they are also socially recognized by who they are. Mothers become potentially bad when they behave or express opinions that diverge from, or challenge, social or gender norms, or when they deviate from mainstream, white, middle class, heterosexual, nondisabled normativity. When suspected of being bad mothers, women are surveilled, and may be disciplined, punished or otherwise excluded, by various official agents (i.e. legal, medical and welfare institutions), as well as by their relatives, friends and communities. Too often, women are judged and punished without clear evidence that they are neglecting or abusing their children. Frequently they are blamed for the marginal sociocultural context in which they are mothering. This anthology presents empirical, theoretical and creative works that address the construct of the bad mother and the lived realities of mothers labeled as bad. Throughout the volume, the editors consider voices and acts of resistance to bad mother constructions, demonstrating that mothers, across time and across domains, have individually and collectively taken a stand against this destructive label.

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Missing, dead, disappeared, or otherwise absent mothers haunt us and the stories we tell ourselves. Our literature, from fairytales like Cinderella and The Little Mermaid to popular narratives like Cheryl Strayed's recent book Wild, is peopled with motherless children. The absent mother, whether in literature or life, may force us to forge an independent identity. But she can also leave a mother-shaped hole and a howling loneliness that dogs us through our adult lives. This anthology explores the theme of absent mothers from scholars and creative writers, who tell personal stories and provide the theoretical framework to recognize and begin to understand the impact of motherlessness that ripples through our cultures and our art.

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This book provides a rare and in-depth examination of the narratives, experiences, and lived realities of abused mothers—a group of women who, despite being the victims, are often criticized, vilified, and stigmatized for failing to meet dominant ideologies of what a “good mother” is/should be, because they have lived and mothered in domestic abuse relationships. Based on a qualitative research study conducted with 29 abused mothers residing in abused women’s shelters in Calgary, Alberta, this book highlights the ways that these mothers experience the dominant ideology of intensive mothering, negotiate the resulting discourses of the “good” and the “bad” mother, and ultimately find ways to exercise agency, resistance, and empowerment in and through their mothering. This book discusses how abused mothers engage in empowered mothering by constructing valued, fortified, and liberating identities for themselves as mothers in the face of an ideology of intensive mothering that delegitimizes and subjugates them. These mothers are not passive victims, but rather are active agents who resist and question the idealized standards of intensive mothering as being restrictive and unachievable; who view their mothering in a positive light even though they have lived and mothered in social milieus deemed outside the boundaries of acceptable mothering; and who uphold that they are indeed worthy mothers despite their stigmatized status. Particular attention is given to the ways that intersections of gender, race, and social class shape and influence abused mothers constructions of their mothering identities. This book calls into question the false notion that there is only one standard, one definition, and one social location in which effective mothering is performed. It is a voice against the judgment of mothers, a call to end the oppressive and restrictive bifurcation of mothers into categories of either “good” or “bad” mothers, and an attempt to re-envision a more inclusive understanding of mothering. This book is a movement towards the empowerment of all mothers, regardless of differences in their lives and social circumstances.

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While the existence of maternal ambivalence has been evident for centuries, it has only recently been recognized as central to the lived experience of mothering. This accessible, yet intellectually rigorous, interdisciplinary collection demonstrates its presence and meaning in relation to numerous topics such as pregnancy, birth, Caesarean sections, sleep, self-estrangement, helicopter parenting, poverty, environmental degradation, depression, anxiety, queer mothering, disability, neglect, filicide and war rape. Its authors deny the assumption that mothers who experience ambivalence are bad, evil, unnatural, or insane. Moreover, historical records and cross-cultural narratives indicate that maternal ambivalence appears in a wide range of circumstances; but that it becomes unmanageable in circumstances of inequity, deprivation and violence. From this premise, the authors in this collection raise imperative ethical, social, and political questions, suggesting possibilities for vital cultural transformations. These candid explorations demand we rethink our basic assumptions about how mothering is experienced in everyday life.

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“Motherhood” and “military” are often viewed as dichotomous concepts, with the former symbolizing feminine ideals and expectations, and the latter suggesting masculine ideals and norms. Mothers, Military, and Society contributes to a growing body of research that disrupts this false dichotomy. This interdisciplinary and international volume explores the many ways in which mothers and the military converse, align, contest, and intersect in society. Through various chapters that include in-depth case studies, theoretical perspectives and personal narratives, this book offers insights into the complex relationship between motherhood and the military in ways that will engage both academic and non-academic readers alike.

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Laboring Positions aims to disrupt the dominant discourse on academic women’s mothering experiences. Black women’s maternity is assumed, and yet is also silenced within the disembodied, patriarchal, racist, antifamily, and increasingly neoliberal work environment of academia. This volume acknowledges the salience of the institutional challenges facing contemporary caregiving academics; yet it is centrally concerned with expanding the academic mothering conversation by speaking against the private/public spheres approach. Laboring Positionsdoes so by privileging the hybridity between Black women’s mothering experiences and their working lives within and beyond the academy. The collection also intentionally blurs essentialist boundaries of mother and “other”, which dictates and generates alternate border zones of knowledge production concerning Black academic women’s working lives. In doing so, the diverse perspectives captured herein offer us cogent starting points from which to interrogate the interlocking cultural, political, and economic hierarchies of the academy. The editorial goal of Laboring Positions is to offer a polyvocal collection embodying themes that privilege and arouse Black mothering as central in the narratives, research, and models of existence and resistance for Black women’s survival within the academy. The contributors utilize a wide variety of methods and perspectives including Black feminist theory, intersectional feminism, Womanist research ethics, hip-hop feminism, African-centered epistemologies, literary analysis, autoethnography, policy analysis, memoir, qualitative research, survival strategies and frameworks, and situated testimony that are all collectively bound by Black women’s intellectual lives, activist impulses, and experiences of mothering or being mothered. The critical embodied perspectives herein serve as evidence that Black women exist beyond the institutional and ideological boundaries that have attempted to define their journeys. Laboring Positions’; chapters speak to each other and some conversations are louder than others; yet together they offer us a complexly nuanced portrait of the emergent literature on race, gender, mothering, and work.

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Motherhood is an experience that is ever-present yet invisible in the global music genre of hip-hop. This aspect of wom- en’s experience has garnered little attention from journalists, writers and scholars of hip-hop culture. Nor do we have any understanding of how mothers who remain hip-hop culture enthusiasts negotiate their relationship to the culture of hip-hop and its music with their children. Furthermore, what are the discursive spaces that motherhood occupies in hiphop? Are there ways of understanding mothering in hip-hop along a historical continuum? What are some of the ways that motherhood complicates the hyper-masculinity so dominant in hip-hop? What does empowered and feminist mothering in the context of hip-hop look like, and how might it challenge the status quo? How are mothers engaging with hiphop, both locally and globally? Broad themes covered in this volume include: representations of motherhood in rap, feminist analyses of mothering in hip-hop, and experiential reflections on mothering in the process of artistic production.

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While scholarship on Caribbean women’s literature has grown into an established discipline, there are not many studies explicitly connected to the maternal subject matter, and among them only a few book-length texts have focalized motherhood and maternity in writings by Caribbean women. Reading/Speaking/Writing the Mother Text: Essays on Caribbean Women’s Writing encourages a crucial dialogue surrounding the state of motherhood scholarship within the Caribbean literary landscape, to call for attention on a theme that, although highly visible, remains understudied by academics. While this collection presents a similar comparative and diasporic approach to other book-length studies on Caribbean women’s writing, it deals with the complexity of including a wider geographical, linguistic, ethnic and generic diversity, while exposing the myriad ways in which Caribbean women authors shape and construct their texts to theorize motherhood, mothering, maternity, and mother-daughter relationships.

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In December of 2012 in Delhi, India a woman was gang raped, tortured, and inflicted with such bodily violence that she died as a result of the injuries. The case caused massive public protests in Delhi and throughout the Indian subcontinent. These large scale public mobilizations lead to attempts to change national laws pertaining to sexual violence. One year after this case, The Supreme Court of India made the contentious decision to uphold Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. Section 377, instituted by British colonizers dates back to 1860 and criminalizes sexual activities deemed to be 'unnatural,' namely queer sex and queer people. In December of 2013, massive protests also occurred throughout India regarding this decision. Both these cases received worldwide media attention and lead to public demonstrations and debates regarding sexual politics throughout Asia and globally. There was a resilient refrain heard at many of the political protests that took place: A¯za¯di¯. A¯za¯di is loosely translated into freedom. Drawing on interviews done in the Indian subcontinent, this book suggests that while colonial violence haunts postcolonial sexualities, anti-colonial resistance also remains, echoing in the streets like the chorus of an old song ~ A¯za¯di¯.

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What’s Cooking, Mom? offers original and inventive narratives, including auto-ethnographic discussions of representations, discourses and practices about and by mothers regarding food and families. These narratives discuss the multiple strategies through which mothers manage feeding themselves and others, and how these are shaped by international and regional food politics, by global and local food cultures and by their own ethical values and preference, as well as by those of the ones they feed.

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Many people have been victims of rape, but we are all victims of what has been called a “rape culture.” This topic deserves more attention towards education and prevention, and not just on the college campus. Rape culture is an idea that links rape and sexual violence to the culture of a society, and in which commonly-held beliefs, attitudes and practices normalize, excuse, tolerate, and even condone rape. This edited collection examines rape culture in the context of the current programming–attitudes, education, and awareness. Contributors explore changing the programming in terms of educational processes, practices and experiences associated with rape culture across diverse cultural, historical, and geographic locations. The complexity of rape culture is discussed from a variety of contexts and perspectives, as this volume contains interdisciplinary academic submissions from educators and students, as well as experiential accounts from members of various community settings who are doing work aimed at making a positive difference towards programming change.

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Abortion and Mothering: Research, Stories, and Artistic Expressions of a Common Intersection is a collection of academic research, personal narratives, and art that comments on different perspectives on abortion and mothering. Scholarly research is balanced with voices and experiences from outside of academia, through the inclusion of personal narratives, poetry, and art. The collection is rooted in the idea that there are not ‘women who have abortions’ and ‘women who have babies’, but that they are the same women at different points in their lives. By considering the intersection of abortion and mothering, and the liminal spaces in between, the reader is challenged to explore some of the culturally and socially constructed complexities that surround the decisions that people make about to their reproductive lives.

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Moving Meals and Migrating Mothers: Culinary cultures, diasporic dishes and familial foodways explores the complex interplay between the important global issues of food, families and migration. We have an introduction and twelve additional chapters which we have organised into three parts: Part I Moving Meals, Markets and Migrant Mothers; Part II Migrating Mothers Performing Identity through Moving Meals; Part III Meanings and Experiences of Migrant Maternal Meals. Although these parts are not mutually exclusive, they are meant to emphasize socio-cultural and economic considerations of migration (Part I), the food itself (Part II) and families (Part III). We have a wide geographic representation, including Europe (Ireland and France), the USA, Canada, New Zealand, and Korea. In addition, we have contributors from all stages of career, including full professors, as well recent doctoral graduates. Overall the contributions are interdisciplinary, and therefore use a variety of methodologies, although most make use of traditional social sciences methods, including interviews and ethnographic observations.

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The two phenomena highlighted in this edited volume ‘motherhood/mothering and masculinities’ are each recent areas of development in critical Feminist and Men’s Studies. In contributing to these areas of gender studies, this book draws attention to the fact that much can also be gained when we explore relationships between them, an idea that may not readily come to mind. While femininities and masculinities are co-constructed, motherhood and mothering bring additional perspectives to the study of femininity that affect the construction of masculinity in complex ways. The 12 chapters in this volume allow readers to ponder some of these complexities and may suggest other issues that require investigation. Spanning many continents, the essays have both a global and historical reach emphasising cultural differences and historical changes. Of import is the idea that mothers have agency and are active in constructions affecting their lives. They are able to bring motherhood out of the shadows as they strive to build, re-evaluate or alter their roles within families and communities. These have an impact on developments in masculinities. The book is divided into three parts and the chapters investigate a wide range of issues including cultural constructs, gender in parent/child, relationships, non-binary developments, the impact of war on mothering, decolonisation struggles, and much more.

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This collection presents diverse critical perspectives and discussion about the keeping or telling of children’s originstories as a part of contemporary mothering labor. The first two sections outline perspectives from mother authors about how they strategically craft complex origin stories for their child(ren), as well as how the telling and retelling of origin stories may be passed on as generational knowledge. The third section discusses mothering and origin stories from multiple perspectives: that of a father by adoption, of single mothers positioning stories of absent fathers, and a multi-perspective chapter that includes a mother by adoption, her adult child, and her child’s birthmother. Based within feminist scholarship with chapters written from the first person positionality of the authors, this anthology encourages dialogue about a mothering issue that is often unaddressed, in part due to remaining patriarchal expectations about what makes a family and/or a mother. This interdisciplinary work also embraces the complex and multi-actor worlds in which mothering takes place and includes both creative and scholarly works as well as illustrations that are included as a part of the mothers communicating origin stories.

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This collection broaches the intersections of critical motherhood studies and feminist geography. Contributors demonstrate that an important dimension of the social construction of motherhood is how mothering happens in space and place, leading to the articulation of diverse maternal geographies. Through 16 concise chapters divided into three thematic sections, the contributors provide an account of motherhood and mothering as spatial practices that are embedded in relations of power across time and place. While some contributors explore how dominant discourses of motherhood seek to keep mothers in their place, others take up the notion of maternal geographies as productive in their own right and follow their subjects as they create a new sense of place. Collectively, the authors demonstrate that mothers are produced and regulated as subjects in relation to space and place, and also that practices of mothering produce spatial relationships. The scholars gathered here bring interdisciplinary approaches from diverse fields including women’s and gender studies, sexuality studies, social geography, sociology, anthropology, fine arts, literary studies, and film studies. Chapters include submissions from authors who reference the geographical contexts of Aotearoa/New Zealand, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, the Eastern Caribbean, Great Britain, Japan and Samoa, and the United States.

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Each of the 8 chapters in this volume addresses menstruation and/or menstrual blood in various media sites with a view to answering the question, what does blood perform? Menstrual blood may be enduringly feminine but it is never just one thing. Menstruation Now contains a chapter on advertising: the shifting “conversation” of menstruation in contemporary advertising leads to youtube videos and other online sources. Fiction: The central character in Alice Munro’s short story, “Chance,” discovers her period while on a train ride. Menstrual blood metaphorically spills over to inform the leaky narrative, the shape of the story, and the “female complaint.” Legal Discourse: Both sides in the legal battle over whether Terry Schiavo (who had been in a persistent vegetative state) should live or have the right to die invoked the fact of her menstrual blood to signify what each wanted, i.e., different definitions of womanhood and life. Pornographic films: Menstrual blood in pornographic films is analyzed as a “para-text,” what happens off-scene but is still caught on camera and becomes part of the fluidity of desire. A media icon: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s phantasized menstrual blood – her uterine utterance – is argued to take the place of the verbal utterances she wouldn’t emit (she was a witness to, but wholly silent about, the assassination and her marriage before that). Art: Contemporary menstrual art is examined with a view to understanding how it exposes, normalizes and aestheticizes the phenomenological experience of bleeding. Film: Menstrual blood in Ingmar Bergman’s film Cries and Whispers is seen as a liminal space of transition and ritual: both blood and liminality are charged with irrationality (and hence the potential for affirmation and re-performance). Television: Orange is the New Black (Netflix) contains comical plot-lines about menstruation and menstrual products in its prison setting. Unruly blood is analyzed in conjunction with characters – inmates – who are always-already unruly: they are in prison, i.e., in necessity of restraint. Feminine comedy itself is a challenge to discursive authority; menstrual blood in this context is positioned as a noisy disruption and reigned in by the small screen and the comedic apparatus. In sum, blood is performative and never means only one thing. It can thus, now as always, be performed again in the service of new meanings and experiences.

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This anthology is a collection of personal accounts, research, treatment approaches and policy commentary exploring women's experiences of mothering in the context of addiction. Individual chapters focus on a variety of addictions during pregnancy or mothering including misuse of substances, food and smartphones. A central theme of the book is the meaning of women's maternal identity as key to recovery. Part I focusses on women's lived experiences of mothering through their addiction and recovery. The chapters in part II report findings from studies that have prioritized the perspective of mothers living with addiction. In Part III of this collection, we expand our view of addiction and turn to approaches for supporting mothers of daughters with eating disorders and prevention of smartphone addiction. In part IV, contributors expand on the themes of harm reduction and restorative, healing approaches to the treatment of mothers' addictions that have echoed throughout the chapters of this book. The anthology concludes with a gendered analysis and critique of addiction programs and policy.

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