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.)

More on the Panayotov book

I finally finished In Vitro Fertility Goddess. By the end, it finally got me in.

I assume it’s doing fairly well (here in Oz anyway), judging by the amount of publicity it seems to have had, so I wish they’d put out a revised edition – one that’s been professionally edited. Because as Leslie Cannold said, it could be a lot more readable with some editing out of repetition, and (I say) the addition of a few more pronouns and articles.

One of Sol Stein’s “little things that damage the writer’s authority” is glitches that yank the reader out of their experience. That’s what all those missing pronouns etc were for me. Leaving out a few gives an impression. Doing it all the time got annoying (quickly), as I had to keep re-reading sentences to get the meaning.

As regards the content of the book, the only part I found really got me in was the last bit when she was finally pregnant. Despite the subchorionic hematoma that had her bleeding on and off, and therefore worrying constantly, for most of the first trimester, and the placenta previa and its accompanying complications later, it made me want to be pregnant again, or more particularly, it made me want to give birth to a tiny new baby again. Also this was the part of the book where I finally laughed. Twice, even.

I can see how this part of the book might be the most annoying part to people currently experiencing infertility though. Although she suffers miscarriages and took a long time to finally achieve a sustained pregnancy, Panayotov was quickly successful once she turned to IVF. That makes her unusual, despite the cultural image we have of IVF being the quick solution to infertility. Most of the time its not. And that’s another annoyance – that the book perpetuates that stereotype – though one can hardly fault Panayotov for not faking a few unsuccessful cycles for the sake of a counter-narrative.

I don’t know if it’s the fact that I have been pregnant, while I haven’t suffered from sustained infertility,* that makes the last part of the book more palatable to me. I suspect it might be as much to do with the fact that it lacks the over-the-top contempt towards pregnant women and mothers, and indeed women in general, that in the rest of the book becomes boringly repetitious at best and quite offensive at worst. It is the sort of comedy that depends on belittling and stereotyping – not uncommon, but not to my taste.

It also probably has to do with the fact that the reader knows from the start that Panayotov ends up with a baby. At least you do if you’ve ever heard her interviewed or just read the back of the book. And it’s pretty clear from the title just how she achieves that pregnancy. So there’s no page turning motivation early on in the book. It’s only once she safely pregnant, following an embryo transfer, that I started to be really interested in the outcome – how will the pregnancy go, what sort of birth will she end up with? Perhaps it’s also that at this point she starts treating other characters with some empathy instead of as cardboard cutouts put there to annoy her.

In any case, I did eventually come to care about Panayotov’s story, but it took a good while. The obsessive insanity aspect of the infertility narrative is probably something a lot of women can relate too, although I think they might relate more if it were toned down some. And of course the outcome – a healthy baby at the end – could be hopeful and inspiring to those setting out on a similar journey. But for those four years into IVF with no baby in sight (or even with a baby, but only after several years and as many egg collections), it could be downright galling.

___________
*We had only just begun serious investigation – ie going beyond what my GP could do – when I fell pregnant with Mikaela.

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)

Rules of an infantocracy

"The most important was this: If both children are crying, no adults can cry. Hard to follow, but vital." (Kim Todd of the period after her twins were born, in 'Under the Skin, Lesson's in Transformation' at Literary Mama)

Infertility and /or new parenthood in fiction

There seem to be plenty of memoirs being published, not to mention other forms of life writing (blogs included), either about or incorporating narratives of infertility and new parenthood (achieved via infertility or not). For example: Child of Mine: Original Essays on Becoming a Mother, Waiting for Daisy, Mothershock, loving every (other) minute of it, A Little Pregnant, and In Vitro Fertility Goddess, among others. But I can't find much contemporary fiction covering the same areas. (By contemporary in this case I mean the last decade or less.) Why is that?

The fiction I have turned up so far includes Ben Elton's Inconceivable (which I'm in the queue to get from the library), Tick Tock, by Jane Freeman and The Woman Next Door, by Barbara Delinsky. I've read the Freeman book and from memory it didn't do a lot to challenge the normative narratives about infertility, and I haven't been able to get hold of the Delinsky book.

Edited to add: I have found a few short stories in Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined, and on the Literary Mama site. But is this the only source of them?

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.

Stepping back

In allowing them to learn simple tasks and to feel their way into responsibility for the groups and for the camps, thereby making them their own, she had to break a lifelong habit of organizing chivvying and taking over. She had to let them blunder; she had to wait while they did in hours what she'd do in minutes; and she had to accepts that some would fail. (Drusilla Modjeska, Poppy, McPhee Gribble, Ringwood, 1990, p. 146.)

When I find myself at a loss in my writing I sometimes pick up Poppy, or some other novel I admire, and read a bit to see what inspiration it might give me. But in this case I am more reminded of parenting than inspired in writing. I'm not terribly good at this part of parenting - stepping back and letting Liam do in hours what I could do in minutes, without "chivvying and taking over". I need to get better at it.

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.

Variety in mothering

"Many mothers report that mothering is a deeply ambivalent experience in which, at one time or another, they feel exaltation, despair, and many other emotions in between." (Patrice DiQuinzio, The Impossibility of Motherhood: feminism, individualism, and the problem of mothering, Routledge, New York, 1999, p. viii.)

Realism is reassuring

The experience of reading a realistic text is ultimately reassuring, however harrowing the events of the story, because the world evoked in the fiction, in patterns of cause and effect, of social relationships and moral values, largely confirm the patterns of the world we seems to know.
(Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice, 2nd edn, Routlegde, London, 2002, quoted in Hazel Smith, The Writing Experiment, Allen and Unwin, Crows Nest, 2005, pp. 28-29.)

Opening up conversations

Carolyn Ellis, writing about autoethnography, says

...[O]ur goal is to open up conversations about how people live,
rather than close down with a definitive description and analytic statements
about the world as it ‘truly’ exists outside the contingencies of language and
culture. I believe the conversational style of communicating has more
potential to transform and change the world for the better. As a multivoiced
form, conversation offers the possibility of opening hearts and increasing
understanding of difference.
    'Analyzing Analytic Autoethnography: An Autopsy', Ellis, Carolyn S.; Bochner, Arthur P., Journal Of Contemporary Ethnography, vol. 35, no. 4, pp. 429-449, August 2006, p. 435.

I think my central narrator in the fiction I'm working on may be an autoethnographer, so I'm doing a bit of research into what the hell it is.

Narrating lives

One of the key functions of master narratives is that they offer people a way of identifying what is assumed to be a normative experience. In this way, such storylines serve as a blueprint for all stories; they become the vehicle through which we comprehend not only the stories of others, but crucially of ourselves as well. ...  How can we make sense of ourselves, and our lives, if the shape of our life story looks deviant compared to the regular lines of the dominant stories?
  Molly Andrews in Considering Counter-Narratives: Narrating, resisting, making sense, edited by Michael Bamberg and Molly Andrews

Splintered selves

What is the point of changing the subject position in this way? Most significantly it explodes, at a fundamental and grammatical level, the idea of an unproblematic, unified self. It emphasises that we all consist of split, or even splintered, selves.
       Hazel Smith, The Writing Experiment, Allen and Unwin, Crows Nest, 2005, p. 93.

Note to self: this could be a useful idea in writing this motherhood piece I am working on.