Welcome to our book review site www.go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
After the Happily Ever After: Empowering Women and Mothers in Relationships
This book is about the two-tiered system and invisible imbalance that operates within the framework of the family. It is about the fantasy of the “happily-ever- after,” which the wedding industry promotes and Western society reinforces. Why are we hanging onto this faux happiness at the expense of our future well-being? Why don’t we wonder what happened after “they lived happily ever after” and if, in fact, they really do? What I hope to achieve by writing this book is to rattle the cage of young brides, about to embark on this journey, to talk about these issues with their future partners and to set the system up in a more equal way, so no one is caught off guard if and when things crumble. It will be difficult to achieve this task because no one wants to think about things falling apart before the marriage even begins, and most certainly it sours the sweetness of the fantasy of the “happily ever after,” as we know it. What we don’t realize is that there will be less bitterness and upset for the family, especially for the children, if we pursue this line of thinking. Isn’t that the real “happily-ever-after?”
Refiguring Motherhood Beyond Biology
This book unpacks and interrogates dominant constructions of mothering, making use of interdisciplinary, ideological and theoretical perspectives to investigate how new rhetorics of mothering can expand the realm of maternal care-givers beyond the biological definitions of motherhood. This diverse collection is at the cutting-edge of rhetoric, feminism, and motherhood studies, and the chapters challenge the confines of biological parenting as heteronormative within the neo-liberal nuclear family. The contributors examine, how despite the diversity of parental relationships, many are excluded by the understanding of mothers biologically tied to their children. The volume seeks to expose the underpinnings of biological primacy and argues that 21st-century families and familial circumstances are ill-served by biological ideology. Topics include Re-Imagining Queer Black Motherhood, Chicana Feminist approaches to reproductive justice, the commercialization and medicalization of infertility, and ableism and motherhood. This is a unique and fascinating book suitable for students and scholars in gender studies, sexuality studies, communication studies, sociology, and cultural studies.
Militarized Maternity
The rights of pregnant workers as well as (the lack of) paid maternity leave have increasingly become topics of a major policy debate in the United States. Yet, few discussions have focused on the U.S. military, where many of the latest policy changes focus on these very issues. Despite the armed forces' increases to maternity-related benefits, servicewomen continue to be stigmatized for being pregnant and taking advantage of maternity policies. In an effort to understand this disconnect, Megan McFarlane analyzes military documents and conducts interviews with enlisted servicewomen and female officers. She finds a policy/culture disparity within the military that pregnant servicewomen themselves often co-construct, making the policy changes significantly less effective. McFarlane ends by offering suggestions for how these policy changes can have more impact and how they could potentially serve as an example for the broader societal debate.
Productivity, Professionalism, and Parenting in Academia
Drawing on time use diary analysis, this unique and detailed study fills in the larger narrative about what it takes, hour by hour, to navigate academic motherhood with a rhetoric and composition career. Looking specifically at the intersections between parenting and writing for publication in order to find out how and when writing for career-advancing tasks such as publication occur, but also through the lens of disciplinary time constraints including heavy grading and administrative workloads, the book examines support systems noted within diary entries that make combining motherhood and a career in rhetoric and composition possible. Using both quantitative analysis of hours and qualitative coding of time use diaries from rhet comp moms, this book answers questions about publishing, professionalism, and parenting. This book will interest scholars and graduate students working in the discipline of rhetoric, writing, and composition, particularly those working on labor and professional issues, on gender and equality within the discipline, and anyone working in all fields looking for ways to foster a better work–life balance.
Parenting/Internet/Kids: Domesticating Technologies
Parenting/Internet/Kids, with three key terms slashed together, conveys the idea that the practice of parenting may extend both to the Internet and to our children— to the extent that both require attention, care, and forms of regulation, and, in turn, provide support and enjoyment. While the triadic title is somewhat playful, it also strikes a serious note and introduces layered possibilities: we are not simply raising children who have grown up in the internet age, but also Domesticating Technologies by "managing" the computer (relatively young in age, too, having established itself in homes in the 1980s). Including perspectives from scholars and parents living in Australia, Canada, India, Japan, the UK, and the USA, the collection examines how the intimate presence of computer technology in our homes and on our bodies affects not only mothers and parenting, but family life more broadly.
Bikini-Ready Moms
Argues that expectations for mothering include a new core principle of body work. The requirements of good motherhood used to primarily involve the care of children, but now contemporary mothers are also pressured to become bikini-ready immediately postpartum. Lynn OBrien Hallstein analyzes celebrity mom profiles to determine the various ways that they encourage all mothers to engage in body work as the energizing solution to solve any work-life balance struggles they might experience. Bikini-Ready Moms also considers the ways that maternal body work erases any evidence of mothers contributions both at home and in professional contexts. Hallstein theorizes possible ways to fuel a necessary mothers revolution, while also pointing to initial strategies of resistance. Bikini-Ready Moms contributes a great deal to understanding both the obsession with celebrity mom profiles and the pressure that mothers are under to conform to and perform intensive mothering as it shifts into another gear to control women. Fiona Joy Green, author of Practicing Feminist Mothering
Critical Perspectives on Wives: Roles, Representations, Identities, Work
This interdisciplinary volume opens an innovative space for critical discussion, and production of new imaginaries within, feminist scholarship, analysis and feminist politics, about what is and has been meant by, involved in, required of, and what it means to be, a “wife.” Contributions within this volume together critically explore and tease out, intersections, overlaps, and distinctions between the social categories of wife and mother, and the link, and separate, labours of wife-work and maternal caregiving labour. This volume brings together diverse critical perspectives through creative contributions, personal narratives, and scholarly works. Chapters discuss critical theorizing about roles, representations, identities, and work associated with being a “wife.”
Mothering in the Third Wave
"Mothering in the Third Wave is a welcome addition to scholarship on both third-wave feminism and feminist mothering. The volume continues in the tradition of earlier third-wave anthologies in its inclusive and diverse vision of feminisms and feminists, while forging new ground in its focus on third-wave mothers and third-wave practices of mothering. In exploring how the institution of motherhood is shaped by today's political and social realities, Mothering in the Third Wave examines contemporary experiences of feminist mothering while connecting to earlier writing on the subject since the 1970s. Recommended for readers of any generation interested in the complexities of feminist mothering in the twenty-first century." - Astrid Henry, author of Not My Mother's Sister: Generational Conflict and Third-Wave Feminism
White Feminists and Contemporary Maternity
This work explores matrophobia - the fear not of one s mother or of motherhood but of becoming one s mother - in past and present white feminist analyses of motherhood and mothering. By tracing white second wave feminism s strategic choice to organize first as sisters then as daughters, O Brien Hallstein argues matrophobia became embedded in past and continues to linger in contemporary feminist analyses. As a result, contemporary analyses reveal crucially important but limited understandings of contemporary motherhood and mothering. This important work concludes that matrophobia can be reduced and eliminated by reorienting analyses to mutual responsiveness between sisters and daughters, second and third wave feminists.
Psychoanalysis and the Portrayal of Desire in Twentieth Century Fiction
Explores the concept of desire through psychoanalytic theory.
