Categories
Billets Work in progress

Mapping the field of maternal studies: psychoanalytic approaches

More conflict and guilt

Mothers are conflicted, we have seen plenty of evidence of that. They are conflicted because they have been told they could “have it all” and then realised that, sometimes, they couldn’t; because they feel that they should be mothers first, but that their love is stifling; or that they should prioritise their own wellbeing, but that they are abandoning their children in the process and probably turning them into sociopaths. No one, it seems, can win this game, and the constant tensions between conflicting cultural prescriptions is fueling the fire of mother guilt, which burns in all our hearts.

Categories
Billets Work in progress

Mapping the field of maternal studies : part 1

Problems, paradoxes and contradictions

Today is Wednesday and I’m sitting at my computer working on my overview of the field of maternal studies. I’m on a sabbatical and I have been reading and writing in silence for the best part of the day. Yet there is no school on Wednesday. In order to be able to go on focusing on my presentation, I took my children to the centre de loisirs, which is a community-run daycare centre for school-age children, like I do every Wednesday. They’re probably having a lot of fun playing ball with the other children, drawing, building Lego constructions. I’m certainly enjoying my time alone working without being interrupted. Yet I can’t help feeling racked with guilt. “Other mothers are keeping their children at home on Wednesdays”, I keep thinking, all the while reading book after book on the contradictions of motherhood. I don’t think my children’s father feels remotely the same.

Categories
Billets Work in progress

Representing childbirth in literature: from third to first person

What matters in representing childbirth in literature is making it visible. In a literary tradition in which the male experience has long been the main reference for any sort of human experience, childbirth as a life event has often been kept silent, relegated to the margins of discourse, like many typically female experiences such as puberty, pregnancy or menopause. In self-life writing written by men the main foundational event is often the first sexual experience, and if we go back earlier in time, participation in the war. Childbirth has only recently become an object of literary representation in its own right.

Categories
Work in progress

The Birthing Stories project

This project, speaheaded by Charlotte Danino, from the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, aims at bringing together the expertise of academics (linguists, literature specialists, etc.) and medical staff in order to analyse the birth narratives told by women on social media, in interviews, novels, poems, etc. The main idea is to make sense of the particular words they use, their intonations, hesitations, which words and ideas they still find difficult to articulate in order to better understand what women are really saying when they are narrating this peculiar moment in their lives. I would like to look at the images female authors use when they write about their experience of childbirth, and interrogate how genre matters in how it is delievered.

The first aim is to establish a corpus of birthing narratives from the mothers themselves, and to complete it with a literary corpus composed of autobiographical narrative, memoirs, poems. The aim is then to work hand in hand with medical specialists, midwives, gynaecologists, and see what can be made of this insight into women’s interior perception of the event.

Watch this space as I will be posting the calendar for our new seminar, as well as news for the first of two conferences, which we hope to hold some time in the Spring or Fall of 2021. In the meantime, go and check out our website to find out more about what the project is about.

Categories
Work in progress

Why so few babies in literature?

Why indeed?

This is one of the first questions Marie Darrieussecq asks in the memoir she wrote to recount the birth of her first child and her transition to motherhood. (Read the review of this book here)

What is a baby?

Why so few babies in literature?

What about the discourses around them? Why do we say “baby” and not “the baby”?

What is a mother? And why women rather than men?

Marie Darrieussecq, Le Bébé, 2013 (jacket blurb)
Search OpenEdition Search

You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search