Motherhood and Space

CAROLINE WIEDMER is Director of the Cultural Studies Programme at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.SARAH HARDY is Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Hampden Sydney College, Virginia, USA.

"These well crafted, insightful essays join together feminist revisions of mothering with conceptions of space as active, generative, and often political. With evident respect for nuance of thought and complexities of mothers' lives, Sarah Hardy and Caroline Wiedmer have created not only a fine book but a strikingly original refreshing new subject: The Spaces of Motherhood." - Sara Ruddick, author of Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace "These insightful and thought provoking essays bring feminist theory, social geography, and discourse analysis together to provide significant new understandings of feminine and maternal subjectivities. On the basis of their complex and thorough analyses of material and discursive spaces and structures, these essays illuminate maternal experiences and meanings of mothering as well as the variety of ways in which human experiences can be situated in space and time. They make a very important contribution to the literature on motherhood." - Patrice DiQuinzio, Muhlenberg College, author of The Impossibility of Motherhood: Feminism, Individualism, and the Problem of Mothering

• Configuring the Maternal: An Introduction; S.Hardy & C.Wiedmer SECTION I: MOTHERHOOD AND SPACES OF NATION, LAW, AND CIVIC INSTITUTIONS MotherSpace: Disciplining through the Material and Discursive; M.Marotta Magdalene Versus the Nation: Ireland as a Space of Compulsory Motherhood in Edna O'Brien's Down by the River ; S.Gerend Till Death Do You Part: The Spaces of Motherhood in Contemporary Swiss Family Law; C.Wiedmer The Maternity Hospital: Blueprint for Redesigning Childbirth; L.Kanes Weisman The Birthplace; B.Katz Rothman SECTION II: MOTHERHOOD AND SPACES OF HOME House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme; I.M.Young Space, Time and Renegotiating Motherhood: An Exploration of the Domestic Workplace; I.Dyck Locating Lesbian Parent Families; J.Gabb Like A Mother: Paid 'Mother-work' Performed in Private Spaces; A.Mullin 'You Just Have to Make a Conscious Effort to Keep Snapping Away I Think': A Case Study of Family Photos, Mothering and Familial Space; G.Rose Uneasy Spaces: The Domestic Uncanny in Contemporary Installation Art; F.Carson SECTION III: MOTHERHOOD AND SPACES OF EMBODIMENT Proximity, Publicity, and the Boundaries of Maternal Bodies; R.Kukla When We are Other: The Womb as Alien Space in the X-Files; S.Hardy Winnicott's Maternal Aesthetic: Absorption and Beholding in Potential Space; E.Brinks Further Variations on a Theme: Maternal Presence and the Practices of Mothering; S.Ruddick Epilogue; D.Spain