Maternal Ambivalence - GMC Thesis 21717.doc

Dominant cultural ideologies of motherhood define the nature of mother love. Recent developments in motherhood studies, and the work of a small number of feminist philosophers and scholars of motherhood, have challenged the tenets of these ideologies by daring to speak the “unspeakable”: that mother love is often and for all mothers, whether consciously or not, permeated by powerful negative and conflicting emotions termed maternal ambivalence. In this essay, relying on recorded personal narratives by Bosnian women who are raising children born of wartime rape, as well as recent studies on empowered motherhood, my aim is to show that maternal love, like love in any other close relationship, encompasses and assimilates healthy ambivalence, and can inform maternal care in a constructive and positive manner. I argue that the acknowledgment of healthy maternal ambivalence as an integral aspect of mother love involves honoring the mother's subjectivity and validates her personhood, and as such it opens up the possibility of redefining mother love in terms that are empowering to mothers.

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2012

This book is a welcome and provocative contribution to feminist and psychoanalytical theories of motherhood and philosophical conceptions of subjectivity. There is little discussion of motherhood in psychoanalytic theory, where the main protagonist is the child and its difficult process of becoming a sexed speaking subject. With its presumption of universality, the philosophical conception of rational subjectivity not only marginalizes femininity but is in fact predicated upon the exclusion of body, affectivity, care, and relationality characteristic of maternal experience. Thus Stone rightly claims that the philosophical conception of subjectivity, action, and agency is at odds with motherhood, which, within these premises, would represent the loss of agency and the subsequent subservience of the self to the child's needs. Even in feminist theory there is a paucity of analyses of motherhood because of the lingering suspicions that even a critical focus on maternity might be complicit with the patriarchal heteronormative prescription in service of gender domination and at odds with the professional aspirations of women. As Stone puts it, Second Wave feminism is primarily a daughter's discourse. Thus, if motherhood represents a different kind of subjectivity, it is still an invisible subject, undertheorized and philosophically unaccounted for. Consequently, by providing a feminist articulation of maternal subjectivity, Stone's book represents an important intervention into all three of these disciplines: psychoanalysis, feminism, and philosophy.

Hypatia, 2016

Dominant cultural ideologies of motherhood define the nature of mother love. Recent developments in motherhood studies, and the work of a small number of feminist philosophers and scholars of motherhood, have challenged the tenets of these ideologies by daring to speak the “unspeakable”: that mother love is often and for all mothers, whether consciously or not, permeated by powerful negative and conflicting emotions termed maternal ambivalence. In this essay, relying on recorded personal narratives by Bosnian women who are raising children born of wartime rape, as well as recent studies on empowered motherhood, my aim is to show that maternal love, like love in any other close relationship, encompasses and assimilates healthy ambivalence, and can inform maternal care in a constructive and positive manner. I argue that the acknowledgment of healthy maternal ambivalence as an integral aspect of mother love involves honoring the mother's subjectivity and validates her personhood, a...

Feminist theorists have been trying to answer the ambivalent feelings towards motherhood, yet, there are still gaps that need to be filled in order to understand motherhood not only from the feminists point of view but also from ordinary women and mothers who are questioning their roles in the society and the given roles by the society upon them in their quest for identities as women and mothers. This study presents the voices of women from different countries in Asia in their personal journeys as women and mothers. Their perspectives in motherhood are important source of knowledge in understanding motherhood in all its aspects: family, society, and the self and identity. These women are from different professions, religious and cultural background. Only the phase of motherhood makes them similar. Humanities and Social Sciences: Multidiscipline beyond Frontiers 18-19 December 2014 Faculty of Humanities, Kasetsart University Bangkok, Thailand

1985

Radical Psychology, Volume 9 Issue 2, 2011

Studies in the Maternal