narrating kayoz

Taboos and the trouble with abortion politics

In her book, A feminist account of pregnancy loss in America, Linda Layne talks about the way (wanted) ambryo's have personhood bestowed on them far earlier now than they would have a generation of two ago, when a woman often didn't even go to the doctor until the second missed period. But then, "the very people participating with us in the construction of this new social person - your mother-in-law or your friend or whoever was saying 'Everything you do is important to the health of the baby, every cup of coffee matters' - they suddenly revoke that personhood [when you have a miscarriage]. It's like nothing ever happened."

Peggy Orenstein quotes Layne in her article 'Mourning My Miscarriage' (New York Times Magazine, Apr 21, 2002, p.38-41). She talks about why people often don't talk about their miscarriages, why there is still a taboo. And then she goes on:

But for me, there is another uncomfortable truth: my own pro-abortion-rights politics defy me. Social personhood may be distinct from biological and legal personhood, yet the zing of connection between me and my embryo felt startingly real, and at direct odds with everything I believe about when life begins. Nor have those beliefs - a complicated calculus of science, politics and ethics - changed. I tell myself that this wasn't a person. It wasn't a child. At the same time, I can't deny that it was something. How can I mourn what I don't believe existed? The debate over abortion has become so polarized that exploring such a contradiction feels too risky. In the political discussion, there has been no vocabulary of nuance.

I have more to say about this, but no time to say it. Today is the day my master's project is supposed to be finished. It is basically done, though the essay still needs a significant amount of polish I think. I have the next several nights to get to that, plus to write an abstract and figure out what details need to go on the title page, then the plan is to print, bind and post the whole thing on Friday. That's the plan.

Quote of the day: what the hell is "post-feminism"?

"Journalists and commentators write of ‘post-feminism’, as if to suggest that the need to challenge patriarchal power or to analyse the complexities of gendered subjectivities had suddenly gone away, and as if texts were no longer the products of material realities in which bodies are shaped  and categorised not only by gender, but by class, race, religion and sexuality."
(Gill Plain and Susan Sellers in the 'Introduction' to A History of Feminist Literary Criticism, in the context of explaining that the book is not intended as a history of something complete, but more an 'our story so far' summary (and analysis) of an ongoing project.)

Nonsexist books - where they succeed and where they don't.

In "Learning to Be Little Women and Little Men: The Inequitable Gender Equality of Nonsexist Children's Literature," Amanda B. Dickman and Sara K. Murnen found that "Nonsexist books succeeded in portraying female characters as adopting the characteristics and roles identified with the masculine gender role, but they did not portray male characters as adopting aspects of the feminine gender role or female characters as shedding the feminine gender role" (381).

(Lisa Rowe Fraustino, 'The Berenstain Bears and the Reproduction of Mothering' The Lion and the Unicorn, 31.3 (2007), 250-263, p. 257)

I'm sure I've said this before, but there's no harm in repeating myself - any recommendations of children's books that succeed in doing any of the above (better yet all, but as the authors note, that is rare), I am all ears.

 

feminist thoughts on motherhood: a drama in three parts

Often, though not always, the story of feminists thinking about motherhood since the early 1960s is told as a drama in three acts: repudiation, recuperation, and, in the latest and most difficult stage to conceptualize, an emerging critique of recuperation that co-exists with ongoing efforts to deploy recuperative strategies.
(Hansen, ibid, p. 5)

This comes, of course, from a book published in 1997, a decade ago now. Any suggestions for movement beyond this point, or are we still there?

Also she observes in a note that

Simons, among others, argues that the gap between between feminist repudiation and recuperation of motherhood is less "absolute" than it is sometimes said to be, and she discusses the possibility of a more "integrative feminist resolution" of this opposition.
(p. 240, referring to Margaret A. Simons, "Motherhood, Feminism, and Identity" in Hypatia Reborn: Essays in Feminism Philosophy, ed Azizah Y. Al-Hibri and Simons, 1990.)

Mother without Child

...[C]onventional sentiments about motherhood inadequately describe and serve to mystify the actual circumstances of most women who mother, even as they may also sublimate the fear and resentment of men who cannot be mothers, or of the always unsatisfied inner child. It is commonly recognized, in some circles at least, that the position of the mother in our culture and our language is riddled with its history of psychic and social contradictions. Motherhood offers women a site of both power and oppression, self esteem and self-sacrifice, reverence and debasement.
(Hansen, ET, Mother Without Child: Contemporary Fiction and the Crisis of Motherhood, University of Califorina Press, Berkeley, 1997, p. 3.)

What is taken for granted... is the relational aspect of the concept of mother. Implicitly... mother in the primary sense of the word is someone, maybe a woman or maybe not, who gives birth to a child or seeks protection and control of a child or is affectionately reverenced and looked up to by a child. The force of those prepositions is felt in feminist argument as well. ...

Certainly we cannot and should not ignore the relational components of motherhood. yet this component merits and rewards closer scrutiny. Both mother and child are problematic terms to conceptualize, not least of all because they are relational words, marking partial, quasi-temporary identities. (p. 4)

I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do with this idea - if anything - but it grabs me in a way. Mother is an important identity for many, and yet it is relational, dependant on someone else.

...[L]anguage is a conventional system and what we say always bears the burden of where we have been, what we have done, and that we believe. At the same time, language can function in a prescriptive as well as descriptive way; as others have argued, women have been harmed by cultural, legal, medical and psychological discourses about motherhood. (pp. 4-5)

Once people talk, things change (or thinking 'aloud' about my research project)

In a 2005 article Elissa Foster records a friend’s experience of pregnancy and miscarriage in 2000. Noting that keeping a pregnancy secret in the early months is a common practice, Foster wonders how her friend’s experience “may have been different if her story had joined others in a collective tale of desire and loss” (Foster, 2005, p. 67).

Geraldine Dooge answers this question, in part, in her forward to Always a part of me: Surviving Childbearing Loss (Collinge, A, et al., ABC Books, Sydney 2002) when she writes: "Once people talk, things change" (p. xiii). That may seem somewhat simplistic, but at the same time, it's true. Until people talk, nothing changes.

Foster notes that women’s stories have traditionally been consigned to the private rather than public sphere, considered as gossip. Following Dale Spender (1985) she notes that the “political implication of trivializing women’s talk is that women remain powerless when they remain isolated from each other, and unable to voice their experiences in ways that might transform existing power structures” (p. 63).

This is at least partially where my interest in life writing comes from, which in the context of my research project is extending to an interest in autoethnography, narrative theory, and of course literature. My piece of fiction for this project mimics (I think) autoethnography, but of course the narrator is fictional, and so are the stories she tells, her own and other's. So where does fiction fit into this process, and what's the difference between the roles of 'literature' and popular fiction?

I suppose one might expect that literature would tend to challenge, undermine or at least revise master narratives by giving voice to counter narratives. Whereas popular fiction would presumably be expected to support and reinforce the master narratives, or dominant narratives of our culture. For instance, that all women want children, that those who don't have them are to be pitied and/or reviled (to put it bluntly). But does popular fiction have to do this? And can't it reinforce some while undermining others? This literary vs popular fiction question is just a sidetrack really, but something I have kept coming back to ever since I started this masters.

Of course, part of my interest in all things life writing probably comes from the simple fact that I keep a blog; that I have been doing so now for eight years. But it goes both ways: one of my reasons to continue to keep a blog is this idea that when people talk, things change. And when we don't, nothing does. So maybe I'm only talking to five people. Maybe I'm not talking to anyone today. But if I don't put it out there...

And on that note I must close, because my house guests have just called for final directions to my house.  :)

__________

Dooge, G, (2002), 'Forward' in Collinge, A, et al., Always a part of me: Surviving Childbearing Loss, ABC Books, Sydney

Foster, E. (2005, Spring), “Desiring Dialectical Discourse: A Feminist Ponders the Transition to Motherhood”, Women’s Studies in Communication, Vol. 28, no. 1,  pp. 57-83.

Feminisim's 'dilemma of difference'

['The dilemma of difference'] refers to the way in which feminism and feminist theory must deny of disavow women's difference, and differences among women, in order to argue for women's equality and to mobilize women women as a group, but must also rely on the concept of difference to analyze the specificity of women's situations and experiences and to theorize differences among women. ...

By insisting on women's difference, for instance in analyzing women's situations and experience of mothering and their effects on consciousness and social relations, difference feminism jeopardizes feminism's claim to women's equal human subjectivity. On the other hand, the possible benefits for feminism and feminist theory of taking these risks of difference are also considerable. These benefits include the rearticulation of understandings of mothering that more adequately conceptualize mothering, more strenuously challenge individualism, and thus more strongly support the changes in the social organisation of mothering that feminism advocates. The difficulty for feminist theory is that, in an individualist ideological context, the subversive and liberatory possibilities of accounts of mothering that challenge individualism in terms of difference are never far removed from the risks of reconsolidating elements of essential motherhood that occur in the project of theorising motherhood.   
(Patrice DiQuinzio, The Impossibility of Motherhood, as previously cited, pp. xv-xvi.)

In other words, if we talk about how women, and their experience as mothers, are different to (say, for instance) men, then we set ourselves up for all the old sexist arguments about women's place (barefoot, pregnant, in the kitchen etc). But if we don't, then we can't adequately theorise mothering at all, and also, for instance, can't challenge (western, capitalist) individualism in terms of its emphasis on subjectivity in traditionally 'masculine' terms. It's tricky.

PS must aim to get women's issues into the mainstream

From my latest CPSU (union) news:

Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Pru Goward, has challenged the Public Service to mainstream so-called 'women's issues' and link them more directly with the national interest. In a thought-provoking article in the Canberra Times, Goward argues that this should not mean "...every department having a dinky little women's unit producing pink-toned promotional pamphlets: it means all departments running a gender ruler over their programs, policies and legislation."

The body of the article is below the fold...

Too busy to blog...

I have numerous topics I want to blog about and just about no time.  I am writing now while Chris gives Liam a bath.  Following that is books & Mummy-milk (with me)  and bed time (with Chris).  I have vowed that tonight once bedtime hits, I will get straight to studying.  So this is it.

Of course, I wanted to write about the Jakarta bombing, except... no, actually I didn't.  I really have nothing useful to say  - another tragedy, more lives lost, for no valid reason that I can imagine.  Like others I hope the politicians avoid using it for election fodder, though I can't imagine they will.

I wanted to write about the Work & Family Test Case currently being heard: ACTU Claims Rights For Parents & Carers.    "Australia ranks very low internationally in terms of work and family. Leaving aside former Eastern bloc nations, Australia is ranked thirteenth out of fourteen OECD nations." That's not very good folks. Surely we can do better, especially when the evidence suggests that the cost for business would in fact be negligible if not non-existent. But I don't have time to give you the run down, so if you're interested take a look at those articles, or if you're really interested have a scan of Cath Bowtell’s Opening Address To The ACTU Work And Family Test Case (that's a 37 page pdf). She makes the case very well for the family friendly policies they're asking for.  Basic things like two years unpaid parental leave instead of one. Of course the Howard government is opposing the case.

Since I'm in a links away mode, here's a link to an interesting post at a blog Chris found recently. The key point of the post is "Cheney seems to be saying that the reason there won't be another attack if he is reelected is because he will keep fighting "preemptive" wars." Yep, that's certainly something to think about if you have the ability to vote in the US presidential elections. The blog is subtitled "Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion" and is written by a history professor at the University of Michigan.

There are numerous other things I wanted to blog about - Liam's new constant companion, for instance: Peter the dog, aka a green wooden pull along caterpillar. And I still haven't responded to David's questions over at  Treppenwitz, so if you think that maybe US foreign policy (for one) has played some part in the upsurge in international terrorism lately, feel free to go and answer him on my behalf. He makes such good points that they really deserve an equally considered response.

Right now I hear Liam packing up his bath toys, which means we're not far away from book time. So that's it for me.  Posting might be scarce over the next two weeks while I get this essay finished and then write that article. If it's not, that will be a bad sign!