By Julie Stephens
Public discourse continues a deep cultural nervousness round expressions of maternalism and the appliance of maternal values to the society as a complete. In a coverage context, postmaternalism is the concern given to women’s claims as staff over their political claims as moms. Julie Stephens strikes past those coverage definitions and advances a idea of postmaternal considering to sign this starting to be unease with maternal kinds of subjectivity and maternalist views. In defining the contours of postmaternal idea, she details
the difficult strategies of cultural forgetting that pass hand in hand with the ascendancy of postmaternalism.
Postmaternal considering is determined by a questionable memory—that feminism failed motherhood—and casts second-wave feminists as being antagonistic to maternal expressions and beliefs. Reclaiming an alternate feminist place via oral background, lifestyles narratives, web-blogs, and different wealthy assets, Stephens repudiates the middle claims of postmaternal concept and confronts the misrepresentation of feminism as having forgotten motherhood. Deploying the interpretive framework of reminiscence experiences, she examines the political constructions of forgetting that encompass the maternal and the weakening of nurture and care within the public area. She perspectives the advertising of an illusory, self-sufficient individualism as profoundly hooked up to the ethos, politics, and financial practices of neoliberalism and lays the rules for a much broader social critique of such corrosive advancements. In rejecting either conventional maternalism and the hot postmaternalism, Stephens demanding situations dominant paradigms via new perspectives of attachment and care and appeals for an alternate feminist maternalism centering on a politics of care.
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Additional resources for Confronting Postmaternal Thinking : Feminism, Memory, and Care
Example text
Indd 14 11/30/11 10:16 AM The book is structured along the following lines. The project of building the foundations for a concept of postmaternal thinking is undertaken in the opening chapter. Here key concepts such as neoliberalism will be further defined and interpreted. The most recent debates about the relationship between feminism and neoliberalism will be examined alongside other elements that contribute to an unmothering of society as a whole. In keeping with the effort to theorize postmaternal thinking, chapter 1 will provide a more detailed analysis of Sara Ruddick’s conception of maternal thinking as well as some of the “afterlives” of her influential book.
8 If we take Williams’s depiction here, of a world indeed turned upside down, where solutions have become problems and problems solutions, it is little wonder that in the written narratives and oral testimonies I later discuss there is such a strong perception at the personal and public level of a general failure of care, in short, of feeling unmothered. Often the American social policy landscape that Williams describes is depicted as being at the extreme end of the spectrum. However, returning to Orloff, one can see similar policy shifts in the 1990s throughout the developed world.
Rather the universal centers on the fact of the ubiquitous vulnerability of all children. According to Ruddick, children are vulnerable no matter how privileged their social circumstances. ”36 A particular moral vantage point is not ascribed to mothers but to mothering. In my view, the shared vulnerability of children and their need for mothering is a strong universal. It resonates at both everyday and philosophical levels and challenges essentialist conceptions of women. At a broader level, it offers a different model of social relations and heralds the possibility of an alternative politics of maternalism.