Mothering against motherhood: doula work, xenohospitality and the idea of the momrade

2022 ◽  
pp. 146470012110595
Author(s):  
Sophie A. Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Present State ◽  
First Century ◽  
Online Forums ◽  
Kin Relations ◽  
The Family ◽  
Conditions Of Possibility ◽  
Class Struggles ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Point Of Departure

Today, a new vein of queer Marxist-feminist family-abolitionist theorising is reviving contemporary feminists’ willingness to imagine, politically, what women's liberationists in the 1970s called ‘mothering against motherhood’. Concurrently, the jokey portmanteau ‘momrade’, i.e. mom  +  comrade, has circulated persistently in the twenty-first century on online forums maintained by communities of mothers and/or leftists. This article asks: what if, in the name of abolishing the family, we took the joke entirely seriously? What makes a ‘mom’ a ‘momrade’, or vice versa? In what ways does the work of reproduction, conceivably, actively participate in class struggles, producing new worlds (and un-producing others)? How do the collective arts of mothering unmake selves? And how does the verb ‘to mother’ work to abolish the present state of things? The chosen point of departure for exploring these questions is the concept of xenohospitality; a term I borrow from Helen Hester – one of the authors of the Xenofeminist Manifesto – who defines it as openness to the alien, a definition I link closely to ‘comradeliness’. Further, the meaning of the term ‘family abolition’, here, is aptly summed up by the formula ‘xenofam ≥ biofam’; to abolish the family is not to destroy relationships of care and nurturance, but on the contrary, to expand and proliferate them. Reflecting on the conditions of possibility for such universally xenofamilial – that is to say, comradely – kin relations, this article implicitly argues for utopia(nism) in feminist kinship studies. It grounds this utopianism, however, in first-hand experiences of informal ‘death doula’ labour. The labour of mothering one's mother is offered as a potential practice of un-mothering oneself and others. In fact, the argument pivots on these auto-ethnographic observations about maternal bereavement, because the event of the author's mother's death interrupted and intruded upon the feminist theorising involved.

Ancient and Modern Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the West

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
The Self ◽  
First Century ◽  
Care Of The Self ◽  
The West ◽  
City Life ◽  
Good Citizen ◽  
The Past ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Point Of Departure

What does it mean to be a good citizen today? What are practices of citizenship? And what can we learn from the past about these practices to better engage in city life in the twenty-first century? Ancient and Modern Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the West: Care of the Self is a collection of papers that examine these questions. The contributors come from a variety of different disciplines, including architecture, urbanism, philosophy, and history, and their essays make comparative examinations of the practices of citizenship from the ancient world to the present day in both the East and the West. The papers’ comparative approaches, between East and West, and ancient and modern, leads to a greater understanding of the challenges facing citizens in the urbanized twenty-first century, and by looking at past examples, suggests ways of addressing them. While the book’s point of departure is philosophical, its key aim is to examine how philosophy can be applied to everyday life for the betterment of citizens in cities not just in Asia and the West but everywhere.

Multisituated

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kaushik Sunder Rajan
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
First Century ◽  
Conditions Of Possibility ◽  
Political Intervention ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The University

In Multisituated Kaushik Sunder Rajan evaluates the promises and potentials of multisited ethnography with regard to contemporary debates around decolonizing anthropology and the university. He observes that at the current moment, anthropology is increasingly peopled by diasporic students and researchers, all of whom are accountable to multiple communities beyond the discipline. In this light, Sunder Rajan draws on his pedagogical experience and dialogues to reconceptualize ethnography as a multisituated practice of knowledge production, ethical interlocution, and political intervention. Such a multisituated ethnography responds to contemporary anthropology’s myriad commitments as it privileges attention to questions of scale, comparison, and the politics of ethnographic encounters. Foregrounding the conditions of possibility and difficulty for those doing and teaching ethnography in the twenty-first-century, Sunder Rajan gestures toward an ethos and praxis of ethnography that would open new forms of engagement and research.

Manual Labor

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda C. Seaman
Keyword(s):  
Social Enterprise ◽  
Japanese Society ◽  
Medical Profession ◽  
First Century ◽  
Manual Labor ◽  
Due Date ◽  
The Family ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Moment

The twenty-first century canonical pregnancy in Japan is one where from the moment of conception the incipient mother is molded internally and externally by both the medical profession and the advice manual industry. In two works, authors push back against the notion of canonical motherhood, by rejecting the idea of the mother-fetus dyad. Pregnancy they say is a social enterprise, demanding that the mother develop or strengthen bonds with her husband and family. In Kakuta Mitsuyo’s My Due Date is Jimmy Page’s Birthday (2007), she traces a conventional story of how a woman grows closer to her husband and family through her pregnancy. In Tadano Miako’s 2005 Three Year Pregnancy, her protagonist remains pregnant for three years while she works out her relationship with her husband, her mother, and finally her sister. These narratives reflect changes in Japanese society—the woman’s demand for the father’s participation in the family.

Gothic Comedy

2019 ◽  
pp. 189-202
Author(s):  
Catherine Spooner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
First Century ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Romantic Comedy ◽  
Significant Function ◽  
Politics Of Difference ◽  
The Family ◽  
Twenty First Century

Comedy has become an increasingly prevalent feature of Gothic in the twenty-first century, and thus Gothic comedy can be found across a multitude of media. This chapter surveys the kinds of comedy that appear in contemporary Gothic (such as sitcom, stand-up, romantic comedy, mock-documentary) and argues that, in the twenty-first century, Gothic comedy often functions to travesty culturally significant concepts of family, domesticity and childhood in the light of a liberal identity politics. Beginning with twentieth-century precedents such as television sitcom The Addams Family (1964–6) and Edward Gorey’s illustrations, the chapter analyses a range of contemporary texts including The League of Gentlemen (1999–2017), Corpse Bride (2005), Ruby Gloom (2006–8),Hotel Transylvania (2012) and What We Do in the Shadows (2014). It concludes that far from being frivolous or disposable, contemporary Gothic comedy forms a politically significant function in its tendency to undermine right-wing ideologies of the family and promote a celebratory politics of difference and inclusion.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 273-278
Author(s):  
Cristina I. Tica
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Sociocultural Contexts ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Point Of Departure

Frontiers and borders are likely to remain significant on the world stage in the twenty-first century in political, economic, and sociocultural contexts. Frontiers are dynamic areas where identities are created, contested, maintained, negotiated, or manipulated. Different aspects of frontiers and borders are illustrated in this volume, and by taking the border and the frontier as a point of departure, this collection of studies seeks to shift the analytical focus from center to someplace else, from locus of power to places of contested power, and from places with presumed stability to places of presumed disorder, tension, and instability. There is much work in this area for bioarchaeologists, and with this volume we hope to concurrently open more venues to frontiers and borders studies and to raise many more questions.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Drew Massey
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
First Century ◽  
Frames Of Reference ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
General Perspective

The chapter introduces the general perspective from which I consider the music of Thomas Adès from the beginning of his career up until The Exterminating Angel. Broadly speaking, I frame a consideration of his work as a dialectic, but also synthesis, of a variety of different themes in music of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. In particular, I orient the reader by briefly considering Adorno’s notion of a Musique Informelle, alongside a theory of cultural production for the twenty-first century known as “metamodernism.” While neither one of these frames of reference totally captures the dynamics of the music that I seek to explore in the chapters that follow, they provide a useful point of departure for considering why Adès’s music has attracted the attention that it has.

scholarly journals Beyond black and white: heibaika, neuroparenting, and lay neuroscience

BioSocieties ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jia-shin Chen
Keyword(s):  
Postpartum Care ◽  
First Century ◽  
Knowledge Transmission ◽  
Online Forums ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Science And Culture ◽  
Infant Brain ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Interview Analysis

AbstractHeibaika (Mandarin for black-and-white cards) are tools that Taiwanese parents use for infants below 3 months old. These cards are claimed to stimulate vision and enhance the brain. Although the scientific efficacy of heibaika is questionable, the wide circulation of these cards illustrates the ways some try to urge laypeople to imagine and picture the infant brain. Thus, the use of heibaika constitutes a good example of neuroparenting and neuroculture, where flourishing neuroscience transforms the parenting culture. In the present study, multiple methodologies are applied, and the emergence of heibaika is identified as a twenty-first century phenomenon popularised by online forums and postpartum care centres, among many other channels. Heibaika are contextualised in the globalisation of neuroparenting through translation since the 1990s and the rising anxiety of contemporary Taiwanese parents. Through interview analysis, parents are classified into believers, sceptics, and cautious experimenters. Their anticipations and worries are further elaborated. The paper concludes by highlighting its three major contributions: the importance of studying lay neuroscience as a way to rethink and problematise the boundary between science and culture, the enrichment of the concept of neuroparenting, and the emphasis on the dimension of globalisation and knowledge transmission.

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