Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption

ISBN-13: 9780415455008 / Angielski / Twarda / 2009 / 200 str.

Lisa Baraitser;Jane Ussher

Opis

Many women find mothering a shocking experience in terms of the extremity of feelings it provokes, and the profound changes it prompts in their sense of self. However, although motherhood can catapult us into a state of internal disarray, it can also provide us with a unique chance to make ourselves anew. How then do we understand this radical potential for transformation in maternal experience? In Maternal Encounters, Lisa Baraitser takes up this question through the analysis of a series of maternal anecdotes, charting key destabilizing moments in the life of just one mother, and using these as points through which to think through questions of female subjectivity, relationality, ethics and otherness.

Drawing on contemporary philosophies of feminist ethics as well as psychoanalytic theorists, the maternal subject becomes an emblematic and enigmatic formation of a subjectivity 'called into being' through a relation to her child. As she navigates through the peculiarity of maternal experience, Baraitser takes us on a journey in which the mother of her account emerges in the most unlikely places as a subject of transformation, interruption, heightened sentience, viscosity, encumberment and love.

This book addresses a gap in theoretical work on contemporary motherhood and as such will be of interest to students of family studies, gender studies, psychoanalysis, critical psychology and feminist philosophy as well as counselling and family therapy.

Spis treści

Maternal Encounters. Maternal Alterity: Mum’s the Word. Maternal Transformations: Oi Mother, Keep Ye' Hair On! Maternal Interruptions: I, Yi, Yi, Yi, Yi, I Like You Very Much, Si, Si, Si, Si, Si, I Think You're Grand. Maternal Love: On Mother Love and Unexpected Weeping. Maternal Stuff: Maternity and the Encumbered Body. Intentions, Inconsistencies, Inconclusions.

O autorze

Lisa Baraitser is Lecturer in Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, a feminist theorist, writer and theatre director, and a psychotherapist with a particular interest in working with mothers. Her research is currently concerned with articulations of the maternal in the fields of psychoanalysis, social theory, feminism and philosophy.