Maternities

Gender, Bodies and Space

Robyn Longhurst

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781134237470
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies

Over the past decade geographers have shown a growing interest in 'the body' as an important co-ordinate of subjectivity and as a way of understanding further relationships between people, place and space. To date, however geographers have published little on what is one of, if not the, most important of all bodies - bodies that conceive, give birth and nurture other bodies. It is time that feminist, social, and cultural geographers contributed more to debates about maternal bodies. This book offers a series of windows on the ways in which maternal bodies influence, and are influenced by, social and spatial processes. Topics covered include women 'coming out' as pregnant at work, changing fashion for pregnant women, being disabled and pregnant, the politics of home versus hospital birth, breastfeeding practices that sit outside the norm, women who are constructed as 'bad' mothers, and 'e-mums' (mothers who go on-line).

1 A Series of Windows

This book provides a series of windows on maternities highlighting issues of gender, bodies and space. It demonstrates the multiple ways in which mothering and maternal bodies influence and are influenced by social and cultural processes and the politics of space. Over the past two decades geographers have shown a growing interest in bodies, including gendered bodies, as an important co-ordinate of subjectivity and as a way of understanding further relationships between people, place and space. There have been numerous sessions on bodies at conferences such as the Association of American Geographers. Copious articles on bodies have been published in geographical journals such as Gender, Place and Culture. Edited collections such as Elizabeth Teather’s (1999) Embodied Geographies and authored books such as Steve Pile’s (1996) The Body and the City can now be found on library shelves. In short, there has been a burgeoning of literature on bodies and space.

Attention has been focused on the ways in which embodied subjectivity and spatiality are intimately entwined (Probyn 2003). Bodies are always located (Longhurst 2001a; Moss and Dyck 2002; Nast and Pile 1998) and interpellated by a range of discourses and ideological systems. People inhabit different subjectivities (sometimes contradictory) in different spaces. Bodies both produce space and are produced by space. Bodies and space rub against, fold, and sometimes disintegrate (see Davidson 2003 on agoraphobia) into each other.

Much of this literature on bodies and space necessarily involves a discussion of gender because bodies are not simply human bodies, they are gendered bodies (Gatens 1991: 82; also see Davis 1997). Over the past decade feminist geographers have embarked upon much research on gender relations and gendered bodies (for example see Duncan 1996; Johnson 1989; Johnston 1997; McDowell and Court 1994; Moss and Dyck 2002; Nelson 1999; Pratt with the Philippine Women’s Center 1998). This research has challenged processes that lead to inequalities between men and women (Massey 1994; Rose G 1993). But even more than this, feminist geographers have reflected ‘on what the categories “women” and “men” mean, and on the concept of gender, in the context of social identities and social relations more generally’ (Bondi and Davidson 2005: 15).

Despite the attention paid to gender, to date, geographers have published little on what surely must be one of, if not the, most important of all bodies — bodies that conceive, give birth, and nurture other bodies — that is, maternal bodies (but there are exceptions such as Madge, Noxolo and Raghuram 2004; Madge and O’Connor 2005; Mahon-Daly and Andrews 2002). This absence in the geographical literature is all the more surprising given that over the past decade work on maternities by feminists, psychologists, anthropologists and sociologists has expanded dramatically.

Over the past decade, the literature on maternity and motherhood has expanded dramatically. … feminist scholarship has turned from the initial problem of the role of maternity in defining femaleness to interrogating its place in the social relations between men and women and among women, the meanings with which maternity as experience and status are imbued, and the tensions and accommodations of reproduction and production institutionally and personally in different places and under different systems of production. (Manderson 1998: 26)

Lenore Manderson (1998) makes an important point. Maternities and motherhood are produced differently in different places. Geographer Sarah Holloway (1999: 91) argues ‘Far from being a simply natural experience, motherhood is a complex social phenomenon: it varies over time and space, and is intimately bound up with normative ideas about femininity.’

This inextricability of bodies, gender, place and culture can be demonstrated through the example of Māori women in New Zealand. Like all bodies, Māori women’s bodies cannot be understood outside of the cultural practices and spaces within which they are constructed, and in turn construct. For example, Wikitoria August (2005) explains that when Māori women are hapū (pregnant) they face restrictions from cultural spaces such as cemeteries and sites of food gathering. August (2005) argues that these restrictions, however, cannot simply be read through a Western framework as exclusion or marginalisation. Māori women, rather than feeling restricted from particular spaces, often feel that they are showing respect for particular spaces, and a respect for their pregnant bodies and for tikanga (customs).

Understanding maternities through different cultural lenses does not deny the fact that there is a ‘real’ material or physical body — a body in which sperm travels up a Fallopian tube, an egg is fertilized, a fetus grows and eventually is born. Rather, it suggests that there is not simply a ‘real’ material body on the one hand and its various cultural representations on the other. In other words, representations, understandings and cultural inscriptions quite literally constitute maternal bodies and help to produce them as such. Maternal bodies are socially, sexually, ethnically, class specific bodies that are mutable in terms of their cultural production. It is important to extend the notion of physicality that dominates biological and medical sciences to illustrate that bodies are materialities that are not containable in physical terms alone. This is not to suggest that biological, medical, and popularist accounts or analyses of maternities are ‘wrong’ but rather that the guiding assumptions and prevailing methods used by these writers and researchers have tangible effects on maternal bodies.

It is timely, therefore, for feminist, social and cultural geographers to contribute more to these debates about maternal bodies, spaces and places. Examining maternities through social and spatial concepts common to many geographers (such as radical revisions of nature, cultural (re)production and relations, shifting moral boundaries, and deconstructions of binaries such as private/public and in the closet/out of the closet) is potentially rich. Such an approach offers opportunities to rethink maternal bodies as inseparable from the spaces and places of their (re)production.

In short then this book explores the diversity and complexity of embodied experiences of maternity and illustrates that maternal bodies are constructed differently through different social and cultural networks and through different spaces and places. My hope is that it will add to the geography literature by addressing previously ignored bodies and spaces and that it will add to the maternities literature by offering a spatial perspective. In other words, maternal bodies need to be examined further through a spatial lens. Geographers have a great deal to offer those in other disciplines by adding space as a critical component in the construction of specific embodied performances (Butler 1990).

MATERNAL BODIES

This research is positioned simultaneously both in social feminist geographical literatures on bodies and in a broader interdisciplinary literature on mothers, mothering, and maternal bodies (a literature that often combines health, disability, sociology, anthropology, psychology, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies). Like Margaret Jolly (1998), a historical anthropologist who has written extensively on gender in the Pacific, I tend to use the term ‘maternities’ rather than ‘mothering.’ Jolly (1998: 1) explains she made this decision in the edited collection Maternities and Modernities (Ram and Jolly 1998) to ‘highlight the corporeal processes of being pregnant, giving birth and nurturing’. Jolly (1998: 2) is quick to point out, however, that these ‘corporeal processes’ or ‘seemingly natural processes’ of ‘swelling, bearing and suckling, the flows of blood, semen and milk are constituted and fixed not just by the force of cultural conception but by coagulations of power.’

It is important to remember, as Sara Ruddick (1989: 48) notes, ‘Pregnancy, birth, and lactation are different in kind from other maternal work and, measured by the life of one child, are brief episodes in years of mothering.’ Other kinds of mothering work such as looking after a toddler, helping children with homework, guiding a teenager through a complex ethical dilemma are perhaps more characteristic of the demands on a mother than carrying a fetus, or feeding an infant. Nevertheless, pregnancy, birth and lactation are often experienced as profound and life-changing events that prompt careful consideration of bodies and space (see Teather 1999 on rites of passage) and therefore this book tends to focus on some of the initial journeys into motherhood.

‘New’ mothers or ‘becoming’ mothers — maternal bodies engaged in the production of new selves — are useful to examine because they are often the most acutely aware of their changed corporeality and social status as they begin to confront what it means to be a ‘mother’. It is acknowledged that elderly women still ‘mother’ their adult children, and ‘grandmother’ their grandchildren but this book focuses mainly on the processes involved in taking up maternal subject positions. It makes an argument for understanding maternal bodies as historically and geographically constituted, for understanding the social and spatial processes that help make mothers.

Hopefully it has become apparent by now that maternal bodies are not simply sets of biomedical facts which are gradually being uncovered by science (see Morgan and Scott 1993: 7–10). What it means to be a mother shifts across time and space. The signifier ‘maternity’ — which has been derived from the fifteenth century Medieval Latin māternālis, from Latin māternus, from māter mother — is not fixed (Collins English Dictionary 1979: 909). The word maternity carries with it several different meanings that are used in different contexts at different times. First, it is sometimes used to refer to the state of being pregnant; the period from conception to birth when a woman carries a developing fetus in her uterus. Second, it is used to refer to the kinship relation between an offspring and the mother. Third, the term is used to refer to the quality of having or showing the tenderness and warmth and affection of or befitting a ‘proper’ or ‘good’ mother.

The book draws on all these meanings. It aims to examine the embodied experiences of mothers but also the ways in which maternities are constituted in discourses. Maternal bodies, contrary to popular belief, are not entirely ‘natural’, rather they are an interface between nature and culture, biology and the social, materiality and discourse. They are always located in time and space, that is, they have histories and geographies. In other writing (Longhurst 2001a) I have problematized pregnant bodies arguing that ‘It is not possible simply to add pregnancy to a body, nor is it possible simply to add a body to something called pregnancy’ (Longhurst 2001a: 3). Pregnant bodies trouble binary thinking. They undergo a bodily process that transgresses the boundary between inside and outside, self and other, subject and object, and often female and male (when women carry boys). Likewise, it is not possible simply to add something called maternity to a body nor is it possible simply to add a body to something called maternity. Discourses and materialities of maternity vary greatly over space but also time.

Older mothers aged in their 60s and beyond, for example, often talk about how different life was for them than for their daughters. In New Zealand in the 1950s and 1960s the dictum ‘spare the rod, spoil the child’ was common. Mothers often hit their children believing that such discipline was required to ensure their children would not grow up ‘spoilt’. In 2005 a Member of Parliament in New Zealand put forward a bill to repeal Section 59 of the New Zealand Crimes Act that allows a parent to defend an assault charge by arguing that he or she was using ‘reasonable force’ in physically punishing a child (Tunnah 2005). The Section of the Act has been heavily criticized in high-profile cases of child abuse with claims being made that allowing a parent to use such a defense for beating a child is ‘barbaric’. Others think that the law requires no repealing (see Christians vow to break smacking law, 9 June 2006, available <http://www.nzherald.co.nz>, accessed 29 August 2006).

What this example illustrates is that the discourses that surround hitting or smacking children are changing. Smacking is now less likely to be seen as a maternal act that is in the child’s best interest. Maternal performances of disciplining children’s bodies change over time. ‘Positive parenting techniques’ such as ‘time out’ are now seen as preferable to smacking.

There is no stable foundation, no essence, to being a mother or to the practices surrounding motherhood. Claire Madge and Henrietta O’Connor (2005: 94) explain:

There is no preconstituted ‘body’ on to which motherhood is inscribed; what it means to be a mother is constantly produced and reproduced through varying and competing discourses and practices from a variety of different people and places. The construction of mother as a category is not a pre-given, coherent and stable subject position.

If the category of mother is not pre-given, this raises the question can anyone become a mother? Can a woman who has not given birth become mother? Can a man become a mother? Society deems some women to be ‘inappropriate’ mothers — too selfish, too old, too young, too queer, and/or have too many children already. Not all women want to have children or to be mothers. Some men, however, embrace the gendered expectations of mothering and delight in nurturing, fostering and taking care of children (see Doucet 2006 on men mothering). As Stuart Aitken (2000: 581) suggests ‘Our enduring myths of social reproduction do not seem to support forms of masculinity that encompass a sense of self that is nurturing and domestically orientated’ but that is not to say that men cannot and do not mother.

DECONSTRUCTING MATERNITIES AND PATERNITIES

In 2005 I asked a class of geography graduate students what comes to mind when you think about mothers and mothering? Most answered that mothering speaks to a woman’s relationships with her child or children usually involving unconditional love, commitment, vast responsibilities, sacrifice, nurturing, comforting, protecting, disciplining, educating, feeding and toileting. A few students also noted that sometimes mothers treat their children badly. They abuse, hurt, suffocate, maybe even kill or abandon their children. Continuing this conversation, I asked students, given that men can love, nurture and comfort children, is it possible for men to become mothers? Their responses were overwhelmingly ‘no’. One student asked ‘wouldn’t men who mother — nurture and comfort — be fathers?’ This is an excellent question that gets to the heart of attempts to understand and problematise maternities, gender, bodies and space.

Aitken also ponders this question and offers the following insight:

There is a strange immiscibility between fathering and child care that I am not quite sure how to reconcile. Can it be that part of the problem relates to men’s inability to bear children and provide them with ‘natural’ sustenance as infants? To suggest such is to return to a form of naturalism that is groundless in light of contemporary feminist and poststructuralist critiques … our contemporary critiques of empiricism suggest that no fact — such as ability to bear and nurse children — entails or excludes a moral right or commitment. As a father, then, I am comforted and liberated by the idea that gender is a socially imposed division of the sexes, and that there is no ‘natural opposition’ between men and women. But current fatherhood ideology and social science research continues to define a father’s relationship with his children as co-parenting that is interdependent with, and sometimes in opposition to, mothering. (Aitken 2000: 581–582)

I agree with Aitken that the gender performances surrounding care-giving tend to be constructed differently for men and women. This is not surprising given that the terms ‘maternity’ and ‘paternity’ reverberate differently (despite the fact that mothers and fathers are both parents). Paternity is described in the Collins English Dictionary (1979: 1075) as being derived from the Latin pater, meaning father. Whereas mothers have long been associated with traits such as love, nurturing and affection, fathers have long been associated with traits such as origin, responsibility and respect. Some common phrases that include the term ‘father’ are Church Father, Father Time, and Father Christmas. Some common phrases that include the term ‘mother’ are mother country, mother tongue, Mother Goose, Mother Hubbard and, the more derogatory, mother fucker. While maternity and paternity both fall under the umbrella of ‘parenthood’, each has a different resonance that attaches to what are seen to be ‘appropriately’ sexed and gendered bodily performances. Supposedly mothers (women) are maternal while fathers (men) are paternal. To construct a binary division between these terms, however, is unhelpful in that it shuts down a variety of rich and complex subjectivities inhabited by women and men.

To return for a moment to the conversation with the graduate students, the trouble they had connecting motherhood and men reflects a widespread belief in the West and beyond that mothering is natural and connected to essential femininity. Sarah Holloway (1999: 91) says ‘Motherhood is often regarded as a natural phenomenon: it is looked upon as normal for a woman to want to bear and raise children’. Terms such as women/men, maternity/paternity, and mothers/fathers are locked in a binary relationship. Without wanting to rehash already well rehearsed arguments, poststructuralist feminists such as Elizabeth Grosz (1989: xvi) have explained that when a continuous spectrum is divided into discrete self-contained elements which exist in opposition to each other, this is known as a dualism, dichotomy or binary. ‘Dualism is the belief that there are two mutually exclusive types of “thing” … that compose the universe in general and subjectivity in particular’ (Grosz 1994: vii), for example, white/black, good/bad, rich/poor, light/darkness, mental/physical, mind/body. Pamela Moss and Isabel Dyck (2002: 13) add to this:

What is so insidious about dualisms is that they permeate all realms of thought and pose, support, and reproduce a polarized understanding of what it is to exist, to know, and to act. By providing only ‘either/or’ patterns for understanding bodies, dualisms systematically relegate bodily knowledge, as well as the bodies themselves, into multiple sets of binarisms.

This book aims to present a way of understanding bodies as sites where both mind and body, rationality and irrationality, masculinity and femininity, and most importantly, paternity and maternity, are simultaneously l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 A Series of Windows
• 2 ‘Mum’s the Word’: ‘Coming Out’ as Pregnant at Work
• 3 (Ad)dressing Pregnant Bodies: Clothing, Fashion, Subjectivities and Spatialities
• 4 Pregnant and Disabled: ‘Body Troubles’?
• 5 A Pornography of Birth: Crossing Moral Boundaries
• 6 At Home with Birth
• 7 ‘Queer Breastfeeding’: (Im)proper Spaces of Lactation
• 8 ‘Bad’ Mothers: (Re)presentations of Lack
• 9 Clubmom.com: Constructing Maternal Identities in Cyberspace
• 10 Conclusion: The Contradictory Spaces of Mothering
• Appendix: Research Methods
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index