Motherhood

Le présent article vise à appréhender la gestation pour autrui (GPA) sous l’angle de l’accès aux origines et à mettre en exergue les difficultés et les questions susceptibles de se poser lors de la recherche de ses origines par un enfant/adulte né par le
biais de cette méthode particulière.

Never entirely analyzed until now, the pictorial iconography of Maria Carolina looks more vivacious and interesting than that of her sister Marie-Antoinette, queen of France, both for its various languages from different countries, as the Neapolitan late baroque, the French rococo, the German neoclassic, and for the iconography and the iconology, as shown by the suggestive presence of the Antique, the allusions to the maternity and even some Masonic references.

The archetypal Death Mother symbolizes women whose behaviour or feelings threaten the lives of their children. Western culture, however, believes that women evolved to love their children instinctively and selflessly, and that women who abandon, neglect, harm or kill their children are unnatural. Thus the Death Mother has no place in our cultural consciousness. This can be problematic, because it means that the Death Mother is buried deep in the shadow and surrounded with shame. 

In this article, I introduce Jungian and psychodynamic perspectives on the Death Mother, archetype and then focus on evolutionary and anthropological perspectives. My aim is to show that when the Death Mother is approached with compassionate curiosity, we can better help the mothers who are living this frightening energy, as well as those who grow up traumatized by her impact. In particular, I propose that that when we bring the Death Mother into consciousness, learn about her evolutionary roots, and humanize her, we start to dismantle the self-perpetuating cycles of shame that constellate around her archetypal energy, thereby opening the doors to meaningful change.

‘Becoming on YouTube: Exploring the Automedial Identities and Narratives of Australian Mummy Vlogging’ examines 37 Australian mummy vloggers on YouTube and explores how these women construct and present their automedial identities and narratives in the participatory, networked digital space. Using a method of virtual ethnography, consisting of long-term observation and participation in the space, the thesis tracks how these women use vlogging to negotiate their social role as mothers, and construct their own performance of the role, in dialogue with all participants in the network including viewers, vloggers, technology, media, products and brands. Situating the automedial practice of vlogging as an intimate yet public process of ‘becoming’ that resembles the published diary online, this thesis finds that the automedial identities and narratives of Australian mummy vloggers are shaped and managed by community, reliant upon authenticity, include intimate and vulnerable others (children), and are ephemeral, always changing, appearing and disappearing. ‘Becoming on YouTube: Exploring the Automedial Identities and Narratives of Australian Mummy Vlogging’ contributes to scholarship in Communication and Media Studies, including Internet Research, particularly in the areas of Networked Digital Media and Identity, and to scholarship in Life Writing Studies, including Auto/Biography Studies, particularly in the area of contemporary digital life writing practices, and the emerging field of Automediality.

A tribute to Sonya Michel and her influential scholarship, this essay argues that, to understand the transformation of gender ideology in the twentieth-century United States, we need to appreciate the power of " anti-maternalism. " As I define it, " anti-maternalism " refers to the belief that motherhood had become too freighted with political meaning and too laden with sentiment, and that it ought to be construed in a more limited and rational manner. From the 1920s through the early 1960s, numerous American critics advanced anti-maternalist arguments to discredit some of the central principles that undergirded the dominant maternal ideal. They typically fell into one of three categories: modernist commentators who railed against sentimentality, hypocrisy and sexual repression; social scientists and psychologists who sought to extend their professional expertise; and women who disliked the Victorian construction of motherhood, with its associations of self-sacrifice and suffering. Some consciously rejected the ideal of the self-sacrificing mother as a worthy goal, while others simply lashed out at modern mothers for falling short of it. But in both cases, anti-maternalist critics helped to erode the ideological bedrock of mater-nalist politics—the image of American mothers as high-minded, politically disinterested actors who worked on behalf of the public good. As a result, mainstream American culture ceased to represent motherhood as a lifelong , all-encompassing identity rooted in notions of self-sacrifice. Instead, it came to be widely viewed in more narrow terms—as a private, deeply fulfilling experience, and a single (albeit still central) component of a more multifaceted female identity.

ABSTRACT: Since the eighteenth century, the feeling of guilt has been as tied to motherhood as the ideals of dedication and love. Recently, discussions concerning motherhood have increased, including on social networking sites. These debates seek, among other goals, to rethink values traditionally associated with maternal activity. The article explores the historical and subjective changes that allowed women to talk about an intimate issue (motherhood) in a shared environment. To reach such goal, the paper analyzes some comments made by mothers on the social network site Facebook reporting their maternal experiences, based on the concepts of Nietzsche’s rumination (19th century) and Freud’s guilt (20th century). By triggering two of the most influential modern thinkers to reflect on contemporary manifestations, it is perceived that the speeches produced by the mothers stray from the feeling of maternal guilt in a process that approaches what Nietzsche classifies as a rumination of experiences.

RESUMO: Desde o século XVIII, o sentimento de culpa esteve tão atrelado à maternidade quanto os ideais de dedicação e amor. Recentemente, discussões sobre ela têm aumentado, sobretudo nos sites de redes sociais. São debates que buscam, entre outros objetivos, repensar valores tradicionalmente associados à atividade materna. O artigo explora as modificações históricas e subjetivas que permitiram que mulheres falassem sobre uma questão íntima (a maternidade) em um ambiente compartilhado. Para isso, analisa alguns comentários feitos por mães no site de rede social Facebook sobre suas vivências maternas, tomando por base os conceitos de ruminação de Nietzsche (século XIX) e de culpa de Freud (século XX). Ao acionar dois dos mais influentes pensadores modernos para refletir sobre manifestações contemporâneas, percebe-se que os discursos produzidos pelas mães procuram se afastar do sentimento de culpa materna, em um processo que se aproxima do que Nietzsche classifica como ruminação das experiências.

Why do women in contemporary western societies experience contradiction between their autonomous and maternal selves? What are the origins of this contradiction and the associated ‘double shift’ that result in widespread calls to either ‘lean in’ or ‘opt out’? How are some mothers subverting these contradictions and finding meaningful ways of reconciling their autonomous and maternal selves?


In Modern Motherhood and Women’s Dual Identities, Petra Bueskens argues that western modernisation consigned women to the home and released them from it in historically unprecedented, yet interconnected, ways. Her ground-breaking formulation is that western women are free as ‘individuals’ and constrained as mothers, with the twist that it is the former that produces the latter.


Bueskens’ theoretical contribution consists of the identification and analysis of modern women’s duality drawing on political philosophy, feminist theory and sociology tracking the changing nature of discourses of women, freedom and motherhood across three centuries. While the current literature points to the pervasiveness of contradiction and double-shifts for mothers, very little attention has been paid to how (some) women are subverting contradiction and ‘rewriting the sexual contract’. Bridging this gap, Bueskens’ interviews ten ‘revolving mothers’ to reveal how periodic absence, exceeding the standard work-day, disrupts the default position assigned to mothers in the home, and in turn disturbs the gendered dynamics of household work.


A provocative and original work, Modern Motherhood and Women’s Dual Identities will appeal to graduate students and researchers interested in fields such as Women and Gender Studies, Sociology of Motherhood and Social and Political Theory.


Endorsements:


Petra Bueskens has been in the forefront of the new, and very welcome field of motherhood studies.  In Modern Motherhood and Women's Dual Identities: Rewriting the Sexual Contact [she analyses] the psychic, social, cultural and political challenges posed by the dual identities of mother and citizen, elegantly and capaciously ranges across 400 years of theory, up to the present, that address them, as well as providing psychologically-attuned interview documentation of how women feel and think, daily and throughout their maternal lives.
Nancy J Chodorow
Author, The Reproduction of Mothering, The Power of Feelings, Individualizing Gender and Sexuality, and other works Professor Emerita of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley


This creative and theoretically rich book re-examines the social contradictions and penalties faced by women who want to be both caring mothers and autonomous public individuals.  Taking us beyond the logic of the "sexual contract," Bueskens introduces us to the "revolving mothers" who offer a glimpse of the social revolution required to undo the gendered separation of spheres.  A fascinating and compelling study.
Dr. Sharon Hays, author of the The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood



In this lucid, timely and important new book, Petra Bueskens takes up the formidable task of investigating the 'new sexual contract' in late modernity that leaves women strung out between the promise of autonomy in the public sphere, and the demands of motherhood that isolate and intensify mothering work in the home, both freeing and constraining women at once. Bueskens brings into view this impossible contradictory duality by producing both a new social theory of dualism, and the empirical evidence to show that it is possible to force changes in the sexual contract at the level of individual family organization. Through tracking a small group of women who both choose to mother and also spend protracted periods of time away from the family, she shows how these women produce radical shifts in the gendered dynamics of the household. Her bold and vital claim is that we can rewrite the sexual contract only if we understand the historical and contemporary double-bind that produces women's liberty as it undermines it, making motherhood still the unfinished business of feminism.
Dr. Lisa Baraitser, Reader in Psychosocial Studies, Birckbeck University, author of Maternal Encounters


Modern Mothers' Dual Identities: Rewriting the Sexual Contract cogently and compellingly elucidates a central debate in motherhood studies and a persistent dilemma in most mothers' lives; namely the contradiction between women's maternal and individualized selves.  Through her lucid theoretical ruminations on the 'new sexual contract' in late modernity and by way of an innovative empirical study on 'revolving mothers', Bueskens delivers the needed blueprints to actualize the potential of what she incisively terms 'the individualized mother'.
Dr. Andrea O'Reilly, Professor of Women's Studies, York University, Toronto, Founder and Director of the Motherhood Initiative and author of Matricentric Feminism.



In this engaging and timely book, Petra Bueskens tackles a central challenge of modern life - how to reconcile the contradictory roles of women as citizens, individual workers and mothers. She traces the history through the theoretical views of motherhood, integrating the multiple strands in a sophisticated and fascinating synthesis. She highlights periodic maternal absence as a bridge between individualism and constraint, revealing both the ambiguities and a potential way to progress women's liberation. The book is an absorbing read that makes an invaluable contribution to our understanding of contemporary motherhood.
Dr. Lyn Craig, Professor of Sociology/ARC Future Fellow, The University of Melbourne, author of Contemporary Motherhood.

This particular research is a section from my upcoming book called: “Are We (America) The Greatest and Safest Country in the World?”

The book will amaze you with factual data which will contradict many of our preconceived notions that American is the safest, healthiest, happiest or even… the most democratic country on earth, as our politicians make us believe.

In rekto:verso (1 september 2020) klaagt Anne Van den Dool de schaamtecultuur aan rond bewuste kinderloosheid en twijfels of spijt over moederschap. Ze verwijst naar het recente werk van drie auteurs: Sheila Heti, die in Moederschap haar eigen kinderloosheid probeert te verantwoorden; Rachel Cusk, die de shock van het moederschap beschrijft in A Life’s Work; en Saskia De Coster, die moederschap en schrijverschap moeilijk kan verzoenen in Nachtouders. De werken konden op negatieve reacties rekenen, en het artikel noemt die schaamtecultuur dan ook een taboe, maar is dat wel zo? Er zijn heel wat recente series (Kinderwens, Motherland…) en opiniestukken (Linde Merckpoel in De Standaard, 10 augustus 2020) met dezelfde boodschap. Het thema verhit de gemoederen, maar wordt wel besproken. Waar veel minder over wordt gepraat – en wat misschien een groter taboe is – is dat moederschap waardevol is.

Academic setting could generate transference and counter transference between students and professors. An academic environment is also a group or individual psychotherapy setting, and the role of motherhood or gender in this psychodynamic phenomenon between therapists or Professors and patients or students remains uncertain. We applied a Teaching Performance Evaluation Questionnaire to 105 female and 41 male students; It was analyzed together to their regular medical physiology course grades. We found that students of any gender evaluated professor independent to grades. The teaching performance scores depends on motherhood and gender, the female students evaluated better the only professor that is mother, than male students. Male student obtained better scores in neurophysiology and biophysics modules than female student. These results strongly suggest that transference and counter transference processes do exist between university students and their professors, where gender and motherhood play relevant roles.

Since the advent of digital and mobile communication technologies, scholars have been investigating how these technologies are changing experiences of migration and mobility. In the field of gender and migration, researchers have shown how the experience of migration can change maternal practices, and alter understandings of ‘good motherhood’. These ‘digital migrant’ and ‘migrant motherhood’ literatures have intersected in studies of technologically mediated transnational mothering, in the context of mother–child separation. In contrast, this study focuses on migrant mothers in Australia who are co-located with their children. Drawing on interviews with migrant mothers from a range of migrant communities in Sydney and Melbourne, this article explores how the use of online migrant maternal communities helps women to navigate motherhood in a migrant context. Specifically, it draws attention to the ways migrant mothers use the affordances of social media to work through their complex and ambivalent feelings about their migrant maternal identities and practices, and about co-ethnic social networks. The paper foregrounds the role of the imagination and relationships in shaping migrant identities and experiences and proposes the ‘migrant maternal imaginary’ as a valuable concept for understanding migrant motherhood.

KEYWORDS: Migration, motherhood, Facebook, social media, coethnicity, Australia

This paper contradicts interpretations of James Bond’s M, played by Judi Dench, as a feminist triumph. Through a focus on aging, it argues that the initially powerful M is ultimately reinscribed into patriarchy. In Dench’s eight films, M undergoes two processes of age-based reconfiguration: “post-sexualization” and “domestication.” Drawing on Mulvey’s and Butler’s psychoanalytic theories, this paper shows that, early on, M is post-sexualized as she is distanced from youthful femininity and aligned with phallic masculinity. Following this, and contrary to consensus that M’s domestication began in the Daniel Craig era, this paper contends that by the middle of the Pierce Brosnan era, M’s power is already exposed as a façade and she consequently enters the maternal realm. Expanding on Tasker’s writing on women in action films, this paper details how M’s authority not only shifts entirely into the maternal sphere but is also systematically stripped until she becomes a peculiar mother-child. Finally, this paper identifies an emerging pattern within popular media of turning Ma’ams to Moms to martyrs. Evidence is taken from Dench’s final Bond films and other contemporary action film series (Star Wars, The Hunger Games, and Divergent). This paper concludes that age has become a post-feminist strategy to neuter powerful women and return them to patriarchal and heteronormative frameworks.

The term ‘Third Culture Kid’ (TCK) is commonly used to denote children living in a host culture other than their passport culture during their developmental years. However, its meaning in relation to other terminology referring to a similar concept is a source of interest for many stakeholders. This paper opens up opportunities for further exploring and critiquing the definition of TCK, and opening this up to case studies within the context of the United Arab Emirates and more widely. It is critical to clarify the terminology in light of unprecedented levels of international migration throughout the world. This paper reviews the meaning of culture in relation to TCKs, and explores the meaning of the TCK concept as well as a number of other terms used as alternatives to TCK. A contextualization of the literature follows in relation to the researchers’ own lived experiences in the United Arab Emirates. The term TCK can be seen as part of the general stock of theoretical concepts. This...

In literature, as in life, mothers get blamed for just about everything. They are held responsible for being overly attentive, or not attentive enough; for providing bad examples, or establishing impossible standards; for staying with unworthy men, or leaving good men.

The Museum of Motherhood (M.O.M.) is an exhibition and education center dedicated to the exploration of family – past, present, and future.

M.O.M.’s mission is to start great conversations, feature thought-provoking exhibits, and share information and education about mothers, fathers, and families. Our aim is to acknowledge and preserve books, artifacts, digital collections, and research on the science, art, and history of all aspects of procreation, birth, and caregiving as well as those who engage in these activities.

A commitment to healthy family foodways is a means of demonstrating responsible individualism and self-care. In the current UK foodscape “good” food is usually “healthy” and feeding the family “healthy” food has high symbolic and cultural value. In this article I examine the implications of such rigid conceptualizations of appropriate feeding practices and feeding healthy food as a means of doing “good” mothering. I conducted a qualitative study over nine months in early 2011, inviting respondents to document their life histories around food through a series of asynchronous in depth on line interviews. There were two interrelated purposes, firstly to explore the food memories of others, and secondly to critically examine the social and cultural milieu in which these were articulated. Three quarters of respondents were parents and some considered food important for health and a source of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). This meant a commitment to the hyper surveillance of dietary practices in the interests of controlling health and/or illness, either theirs or others (children, partners, families). For one family this meant that they were forced to use “unhealthy” food in order to treat their child’s drug resistant epilepsy. The diet was highly successful, yet potentially problematic for maternal identity. How can a “good” mother feed her family “bad” food? I argue that one way of transcending this dualistic and absolutist approach to feeding is by engaging in intensive mothering.

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Selected as the winner of the International Award for Excellence for Volume 4 of Food Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal from among the ten highest-ranked papers emerging from the peer review process and according to the selection criteria outlined in the referee guidelines.

As its own micro institution, the family provides the day-to-day context in which roles and relationships are repeatedly (re)established, reinforced, and (re)negotiated. Consequently, parent-child interaction becomes a fertile site for exploring moments of conflict and resistance, as well as nurture and comfort. In no other parent-child- configuration are such moments prominently displayed as in the interaction between mothers and daughters – deemed one of the most conflictive, complex, and connective familial relationships. Despite ample interdisciplinary research on the maternal figure and the mother-daughter relationship, there is a paucity of studies analyzing the discourse of mothers and adolescent daughters in everyday interaction. Given also the highly scrutinized images of the maternal figure, a discourse analytic study provides another lens through which to view and understand this dynamic figure. The current study aims to contribute to the ongoing dialogue on the mother- daughter relationship, in general, and on the maternal figure, specifically, by examining (1) how various maternal roles emerge and shift in the daily interaction of one mother and her adolescent daughter; (2) what discursive strategies the mother employs when in these roles; and (3) how the mother’s roles and discourse strategies affect the interactional outcome with the adolescent daughter. Using videotaped and transcribed interactions between a mother and her 15 year old daughter in their family home over a two week period, the data were analyzed primarily from an interactional sociolinguistic perspective, using conversation analytic techniques as a tool for transcription and discursive analysis. Findings revealed that when the mother’s talk indexes the role of nurturer, interaction with the adolescent daughter is less contentious. Mother as Nurturer has positive interactional outcomes for the mother-daughter pair, despite the discursive strategies she employs when in this role. When the mother steps out of this role, and becomes the target of blame, partakes in martyrdom, engages in troubles telling or is being critical, the interactional outcome is disharmonious to varying degrees. The findings of this study contribute to the literature on the maternal figure. They also reveal the roles and interactional cues that bring about harmonious and disharmonious outcomes within the mother-daughter relationship. © Copyright Domenica Luvera DelPrete 2015 All Rights Reserved

This article examines seventeen children poems by Sylvia Plath written in the years 1960-63, in relation to the poetics of romantic love. Drawing on motherhood studies (Klein, 1975; O’Reilly, 2010; Rich, 1976; Winnicott, 1956, 1965, 1967), the maternal shift in psychoanalysis (see Bueskens, 2014: 3-6), and attachment theory (Bowlby, 1950, 1969, 1988), it reads love as a continuous human disposition, informed by one’s attachment history, and realized at different stages of one’s life (Hazan & Shaver, 1987). It specifically refers to Daniel Stern’s and Anthony Giddens’s largely overlapping concepts of maternal and romantic love to argue that Plath’s children poems are significantly infused with a poetics of romantic love. This poetics, however, becomes gradually compromised by a poetics of ambivalence, withdrawal, and self-effacement.

Historienne du genre et des champs culturels, féministe, francophile, Marilyn Yalom est chercheuse à l’université de Stanford. Son premier séjour en France date de 1952, lors d’un échange universitaire avec Wellesley College. Son histoire d’amour avec la France n’a cessé depuis. Elle a notamment publié Blood Sisters. The French Revolution in Women’s Memory (Basic Books, 1993) et Le Sein, une histoire (Galaade, 2010).
Nous l’avons rencontrée à l’occasion de la sortie en France de son dernier ouvrage, How the French Invented Love. Nine Hundred Years of Passion and Romance (Harper Perennial, 2012) : à travers une étude de grands textes littéraires, c’est à une histoire de l’amour à la française que l’historienne américaine nous convie.

We compare employment rates of mothers and childless women over the life course across the birth cohorts from 1940 to 1979 in Austria. By following synthetic cohorts of mothers and childless women up to retirement age, we are able to study both short-term and long-term consequences of having a child. We consider employment participation as well as working time and also perform analyses by educational level. Our study is based on the Austrian microcensus (labour force survey), conducted between 1986 and 2016. The results show that although employment rates of mothers have increased across cohorts, the spread of part-time work has led to a declining work volume of mothers with young children. Return to the workplace is increasingly concentrated when the child is 3 to 5 years old. Part-time employment is primarily adopted (at least with younger children) by highly educated mothers and often remains a long-term arrangement.

This study contemplates one facet of academic motherhood through the use of artful research approaches in qualitative research to examine the (im)balance of being a mother writing academic works while raising and caring for a young child, as presented in an online hashtag Facebook campaign, #amwritingwithbaby. Specifically, this study uses an analysis of online posts and arts-based representations of findings through a comparison of narrative, poem, and word clouds. Through using popular media for representing the findings, this study helps address the accessibility of artful inquiry into the growing body of works seeking equity for women and mothers in academia.

This paper historically examines how Coatlicue is a mirror and map in the tumultuous culture of the Aztecan colonization period. As a mirror, she reflects women as powerful, fertile, and sacrificial in Aztec culture while being a terrifying reflection of what Christian colonizers feared. Similarly, she is a map to self-transformation and power in Aztec culture, yet also a map to ruination for the Eurocentric colonizers’ way of life. In this way, Coatlicue is the antithesis of Eurocentric androcentric Christian thought and belief. This antithesis is further demonstrated through a close analysis of the “influential indigenous female” power dynamic related to one of Coatlicue’s aspectual forms (La Malinche), which demonstrates the inherent social anxieties of the colonizers as being ethnocentric castration anxiety as a whole.

Nie da się ukryć: feminizm ma kłopot z macierzyństwem. To doświadczenie, które podważa nasze przekonania dotyczące woli i podmiotowości. A zwłaszcza o „wyborze”. Pracować czy poświęcić uwagę i czas wychowaniu? – większość kobiet stoi tu wobec konieczności, nie wyboru. Opieka nad małym dzieckiem pożera ogromnie dużo czasu, energii i funduszy, a także emocjonalnego zaangażowania. Tak dużo, że na niewiele innego tych zasobów starcza. Czy oznacza to, że matka nie może być feministką? Oczywiście, że nie. Tyle tylko, że to feminizm szczególny – sceptyczny wobec rynku, wymagający wobec ojców, uważny na to, co dzieje się w domu i w piaskownicy.  Matka Feministka to zadziorny przewodnik po doświadczeniu macierzyństwa w kraju, gdzie przekonanie, że rodzina jest najważniejsza jest odwrotnie proporcjonalne do środków przeznaczanych na politykę rodzinną. Wszystko, co w polskiej rzeczywistości budzi rozgoryczenie, wściekłość, a często wręcz rozpacz matek, znajdziesz w tej książce. I jeszcze mocne dowody na to, że równość jest wartością rodzinną.

This is a forward to Andrea O'Reilly's new book Matricentric Feminism: Theory, Activism, Practice (Demeter Press, 2016)

"Mothers are, O’Reilly contends, the unfinished business of feminism.
Perhaps this is why there is still such ambivalence around the
topic and why motherhood is so often conflated with “essentialism”
and dismissed as the realm of the privileged. Sadly, as O’Reilly
shows, such charges often come from within academic feminism
itself. Could anything be further from the truth? Motherhood is
itself an index of oppression as we can see in the career profiles and
interrupted work histories, income, leisure (or lack thereof), and
domestic inequality of mothers. Indeed, it is on this basis that a
matricentric feminism is needed!"

In the Hungarian pedagogical literature only few studies deal with the pedagogical analysis of paintings whose theme is childhood, except for Béla Pukánszky's (2001), Katalin Péter's (1996 and Orsolya Endrődy-Nagy's (2010, 2013) studies. In this study I make an attempt to follow these researchers' approach as the subject of my article is the representation of mother-child relationships in Adolf Fényes ' (1867-1945) paintings. Myaim is to demonstrate the concept and perception of children in archaic peasant societies by highlighting main motifs, sentiments, attitudes, and ideas (Panofsky, 2011, pp. 254-257) in the paintings, presenting several aspects of everyday life (Goffman, 1999) for analysis. My conclusions verify the theory of "archaic love" (Bálint, 1941), the mother-child relationship as a sociobiological category (continuity theory -Pollock, 1998, pp. 176-210), the idea of a "protector, guardian mother," and the perception of the "helpless child".

As I lie on the couch, my chin rubbing against the peach fuzz hair on top of Evangeline's head, I fight back the sting of tears threatening to fall from my eyes. How could something so small, so fragile be prone to depression? I worry about this as Evangeline (Evi) and I lie there; her head is snuggled between my breasts as she sleeps soundly in the middle of the afternoon. Her eyes are tightly shut, and the smooth skin of her face reminds me of a doll, a doll with no worries in the world. As I settle deeper into the couch cushion, conscious that the television is on and a pill commercial is running, I think about my daily medicine routine and how sometimes Caroline, my other child and a toddler, stands beside me staring as I take my pills. Will either one or both of my daughters be required to take a combination of antianxiety and antidepression meds? If they experience pervasive depression, will they understand why they feel a certain way? Will they be able to deal with the symptoms? Will they turn to alcohol for help like others in our family have? I ponder all these questions, as my chin moves back and forth on the fuzzy hair of my daughter's five-month-old head. My eyes begin to drift shut as Evi and I lie on the couch; my ears are on alert as I listen for the stirring of my two-year-old. While my body is telling me to nap with Evi, my conscious mind will not stop running, worrying about how I will know when or if my girls may need my help for depression or alcoholism. Caroline has already been through so much in her short lifetime: failure to thrive, asthma, and now glasses for farsightedness. I begin to worry if her mood

En los últimos años hemos vivido y estamos viviendo un conjunto de transformaciones en las formas de reproducción y filiación que han sido acompañadas por similares transformaciones en los estudios so- bre ellas desde la antropología.
A principios de la década de 1990, las obras de Ginsburg y Rapp (1991), Strathern (1992), Bouquet (1993) y Ragoné (1994), entre otras, iniciaban un nuevo camino en el estudio de la reproducción y la filiación marcado por la expansión de la reproducción asistida.
Como señalaron Ginsburg y Rapp en una obra posterior (1995) uno de cuyos objetivos era transformar el tradicional análisis antropológico de la reproducción, las «nuevas» formas de reproducción asistida, a través de tecnologías de reproducción (TRA), subrogación o adopción, requerían de nuevos paradigmas teóricos deabordaje. en una línea que vinculaba sus orígenes a las obras de S. Colen (1986, 1989, 1990 y 1995) sobre reproducción estratificada, J. Collier y S. Yanagisako (1987) sobre género y parentesco y A. Anagnost (1991) sobre violencia eufemística, F. Ginsburg y R. Rapp (1995) propusieron abordar la reproducción y la filiación teniendo en cuenta la existencia de personas con capacidad para reproducirse, criar y enculturar y otras incapacitadas para ello. si bien las autoras no circunscribían, explícitamente, su propuesta de transformación del tradicional análisis antropológico de la reproducción al análisis de la maternidad, su reconocimiento en el prefacio de la misma obra de haberse «criado», antropológicamente, a caballo entre la teoría feminista y el activismo social, y las contribuciones incluidas en la obra —mayoritariamente centradas en diversas formas de maternidad—, convirtieron la misma en una de las más importantes aportaciones a la antropología del maternaje (anthropology of mothering), definido como el trabajo de madre o de maternar.
M. Walks (2011), en uno de los más recientes estados de la cuestión sobre la antropología del maternaje realizado para prologar una obra coral, luego de señalar que la antropología ha estudiado desde el principio a las madres, la maternidad, el maternaje y el trabajo de las madres, ubica el origen del incremento sistemático del interés y la producción sobre el tema en la obra de S. Kitzinger (1978) y vincula su expansión a los estudios de género y parentesco (Collier y Yanagi- sako, 1987) y de la antropología de la reproducción (Ginsburg y Rapp, 1991 y 1995).