Wendy Hollway explores a subject that is largely absent from the topical literature on care. Humans are not born with a capacity to care, and this volume explores how this capacity is achieved through the experiences of primary care, gender development and later, parenting.

In this book, the author addresses the assumption that the capacity to care is innate. She argues that key processes in the early development of babies and young children create the capability for individuals to care, with a focus on the role of intersubjective experience and parent-child relations. The...

Wendy Hollway explores a subject that is largely absent from the topical literature on care. Humans are not born with a capacity to care, and this volume explores how this capacity is achieved through the experiences of primary care, gender development and later, parenting.

In this book, the author addresses the assumption that the capacity to care is innate. She argues that key processes in the early development of babies and young children create the capability for individuals to care, with a focus on the role of intersubjective experience and parent-child relations. The...

Winner of the 2009 Feminist & Women's Studies Association (UK & Ireland) Book Award

Many women find mothering a shocking experience in terms of the extremity of feelings it provokes, and the profound changes it seems to prompt in identity, relationship and 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 within maternal experience? In Maternal Encounters, Lisa...

This book draws on interviews carried out over a period of eight years, as well as novels, films, and domestic violence literature, to explain the role of storytelling in the history of the battered women's movement. The author shows how cultural contexts shape how stories about domestic abuse get told, and offers critical tools for bringing psychology into discussions of group dynamics in the domestic violence field.

The book enlists psychoanalytic-feminist theory to analyse storytelling practices and to re-visit four areas of tension in the movement where signs of battle...

Winner of the Rhodes University Vice-Chancellor's Book Award 2012

Winner of the 2011 Distinguished Publication Award of the Association for Women in Psychology

Why, despite evidence to the contrary, does the narrative of the negative consequences of teenage pregnancy, abortion and childbearing persist? This book argues that the negativity surrounding early reproduction is underpinned by a particular understanding of adolescence. It traces the invention of "adolescence" and the imaginary wall that the notion constructs between young people...

Knowing Victims explores the theme of victimhood in contemporary feminism and politics. It focuses on popular and scholarly constructions of feminism as 'victim feminism' - an ideology of passive victimhood that denies women's agency - and provides the first comprehensive analysis of the debate about this ideology which has unfolded among feminists since the 1980s.

The book critically examines a movement away from the language of victimhood across a wide array of discourses, and the neoliberal replacement of the concept of structural oppression with the concept of...

Feminist scholars have demonstrated how dominant discourses and master narratives frequently reflect patriarchal influence, thereby distorting and depoliticizing women s storying of their own lives. In this groundbreaking volume a number of internationally recognized researchers, working across a range of disciplines, provide a detailed examination of women s attempts to counter-story their lives when prevailing discourses are unhelpful or, indeed, harmful. As such, it is an exploration of women s agency and resistance, which highlights the challenges and complexities of such discursive...

Feminist scholars have demonstrated how dominant discourses and master narratives frequently reflect patriarchal influence, thereby distorting and depoliticizing women s storying of their own lives. In this groundbreaking volume a number of internationally recognized researchers, working across a range of disciplines, provide a detailed examination of women s attempts to counter-story their lives when prevailing discourses are unhelpful or, indeed, harmful. As such, it is an exploration of women s agency and resistance, which highlights the challenges and complexities of such discursive...