Motherhood and Culture Conference

Monday, June 15, 2015 - 09:00 to Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - 18:00
Iontas Building - Maynooth University

Stories about motherhood have powerfully shaped critical and theoretical directions at least since the publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s intellectually powerful feminist work, The Second Sex in 1949, which devalued maternal labour, a tendency then critiqued by Sara Ruddick’s key work, Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace (1989), which defined maternal thinking and practice as a discipline.

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Recently what has been termed the ‘maternal turn’ in critical theory examines how positioning and expressing motherhood in a range of contexts is critical for understanding changing cultures, populations and media. As Clifford Geertz has argued, culture is the ensemble of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves; culture is not only a reflection of our values, our beliefs and our practices, it also influences and shapes those values, beliefs and practices. This conference seeks then to analyse the cultural meaning of motherhood in the contemporary era through exploring the stories we tell ourselves about mothers, mothering and motherhood through history, across diverse media and from various cultural, national, racial, class and gendered perspectives.

Revaluing the maternal, socio-cultural diversity, and identity politics of mothers, mothering, motherhood frame this exciting international and interdisciplinary conference. This conference will feature researchers from a wide range of disciplines and cultural perspectives, who will share their research in papers that speak to mothers, mothering and motherhood in relationship to the following (and related) topics:

Identity, Diversity, Values, Feminism(s), Queerness, Transgression, Disability, Migration, History, Embodiment, Race, Class, Politics, Neoliberalism, Religion, Philosophy, Spirituality, Sexuality, Nationalism and/or Transnationalism, Psychoanalysis, Art, Music, Literature, Media, Popular Culture, Digital Culture, Language, Theory, Demography and also Non-motherhood, Delaying Motherhood, Refusal of Motherhood.

To mark Bloomsday on 16 June, there will be a series of themed panels on the topic of ‘Joyce and Motherhood’, ‘Mother Ireland’, ‘Motherhood and Dublin’, etc.
 
Key Note Speakers:

Nancy J Chodorow is Professor Emerita in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, Lecturer on Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School/Cambridge Health Alliance, and Training and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. Her curiosity about the inner worlds of women and women's taken-for-granted roles resulted in The Reproduction of Mothering (1978), which spearheaded feminist efforts to reclaim motherhood. In the preface to the 1999 second edition of this foundational work, Professor Chodorow reflects on how her understanding of motherhood has evolved in line with her clinical experience and shifting social attitudes to parenting.  Chodorow's most recent book is Individualizing Gender and Sexuality: Theory and Practice (2012).  Chodorow is in private practice in Cambridge, MA, USA.

Andrea O’Reilly is Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University, Toronto. She is founder of the first and still only research association, journal and press on motherhood (Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement and Demeter Press) She has edited and contributed to eighteen volumes on motherhood including most recently Mothers, Mothering and Motherhood across Cultural Difference: A Reader (2014) and published two monographs, Toni Morrison and Motherhood: A Politics of the Heart (2004) and Rocking the Cradle: Thoughts on Motherhood, Feminism and The Possibility of Empowered Mothering (2006).
 
Registration: Please click here.
For further information, email motherhood.project@mu.ie

Conference Organisers
Dr Valerie Heffernan, School of Modern Languages, Literatures & Cultures
Dr Moynagh Sullivan, School of English, Media and Theatre Studies
Dr Susan Gottlöber, Department of Philosophy
Dr Tanya Cassidy, Department of Anthropology

Sponsors
This conference is generously supported by the Irish Research Council, the Maynooth University Conference and Workshop Fund and Fáilte Ireland.

Identity, Diversity & Values