Two to Tango? The Dance of Maternal Authority and Feeding Practices with Child Eating Behavior

The purpose of this study was to elucidate the relationship between maternal feeding practices and children’s eating problems. Mothers of 292 children aged 5.9 ± 1.1, 50% boys, reported online on parental authority, overt and covert control of the child’s food choices, child feeding practices, and their child’s problematic eating behavior. Structural equation modelling yielded a model with excellent indices of fit (χ(2)(52) = 50.72, p = 0.56; normed fit index (NFI) = 0.94; root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) = 0.001). The model showed that an authoritarian maternal authority style was associated with overt control, which was associated with maternal tendency to pressure children to eat and with maternal restriction of highly processed or calorie-rich snack foods. These, in turn, were positively associated with the child’s satiety response, food fussiness, and slow eating, and negatively with the child’s enjoyment of food. In contrast, a permissive maternal authority style was associated with covert control of the child’s eating, concern over the child being overweight, and the restriction of highly processed and calorie-rich snack foods, which were in turn positively associated with the child’s emotional overeating and the child’s food responsiveness. The model seems to tap into two distinct patterns of mother-child feeding and eating dynamics, apparently related to children with opposing appetitive tendencies.

The ‘most Sacred of Duties’1: Maternal Ideals and Discourses of Authority in Victorian Breastfeeding Advice

The maternal role and its associated practices were subject to much scrutiny throughout the Victorian period. Whilst motherhood was seen as the natural destiny of the (respectable) woman, mothers were nonetheless deemed in need of strict guidance on how best to raise their offspring. This was offered in an extensive range of advice and conduct books, via newspapers, journals, and fiction, and from medical practitioners, and covered pregnancy, childbirth, and all aspects of care for babies and young children. This article considers Victorian advice on infant feeding, focusing in particular on the various strategies deployed to encourage mothers to breastfeed. Advice literature for mothers frequently invoked patriarchal – religious, medical, and (pseudo-) scientific – authority, in line with broader Victorian discourses on femininity. Much of this advice was produced by, or drew on, the authority of (male) medical practitioners, whilst comparatively little emphasis was placed on maternal experience as a source of expertise. Set within the wider historical context of shifting trends in infant feeding, this article analyses the various persuasive techniques employed by the authors of advice literature, which ultimately served as an attempt to control women’s maternal behaviours and to suppress their own maternal authority.

AESTHETICAL EXPERIENCE AS PATHOLOGICAL DISCOURSES OF ABJECTION AND MELANCHOLIA IN THE BEKSINSKI' ART

This article tackles the issue of aesthetic experience from the pathologized everyday discourse viewpoint in the system of relations between I and symbolic order, where transgressed and close to symbolic death I is predominant. The stage, in which I, crossing the symbolic borders, stay readable, appears to be the process of continuous constituting the aesthetic experience and its transforming into the primordial a priori structure of everyday discourse. The problem lies deeply in the preserving of evanescent borders which are said to exist in the cultural palpability and simultaneously to be exiled from the system. The article exemplifies pathological discourses by referring to the Beksinski' works, namely his numerous ways of articulating the ineffable. However, articulated ineffable, similarly to such culturally conditioned reactions as abjection and melancholia, declares double death of the discursive subject: the first time when the separation from primordial presymbolic world takes place and the second time during problematizing the symbolic borders and paradoxical immortalization concerning postulated frontiers. The aim of this article is to dig out kaleidoscope of images and sub-images from Beksinski' works through the motive of crucifixion resulting in the specific value of Christ's body and chimerical things inside the dehumanized catastrophic space. It is demonstrated how pathological discourse of melancholia could be intertwined with the discourse of abjection in the common point of transgressing the limits, making the symbolic space full of details indicating the risk of Ego being disintegrated, staying inside the transgressed limits as constituting aesthetical experience. Inexplicability of terrible post-apocalyptic world is readable via symbolic coordinates insofar as the main primal object (the body of Christ) occurs to be banished. Appearing of aesthetic experience is paralleled to the stages of psychosexual development in the existence of symbolic being where in opposition to classical freudism maternal authority is accentuated. That's how Kristevan style of psychoanalytic ruminations looks like.

“The Only Thing You’ve Managed to Break So Far Is My Heart”: An Analysis of Portal’s Monstrous Mother GLaDOS

This article interrogates Portal’s monstrous antagonist GLaDOS through a psychoanalytical lens, granting specific attention to her maternal coding. The process of presenting maternal authority as monstrous and in need of containment is a patriarchal practice that reinforces the mother gamer’s unwelcome presence within video game culture, outlined through a brief examination of various representational trends regarding the maternal figure in games. These patriarchal signifying practices also operate to preserve broader domestic and societal gendered ideologies. Portal’s projections of maternal monstrousness are located within its villain’s taunting dialogue and her all-pervasive presence within the unsettling game space, representative of the reabsorbing maternal body. The application of Julia Kristeva’s abjection theory and Barbara Creed’s faces of the “monstrous-feminine” inform these observations and the construction of GLaDOS as an abject, abusive, and archaic mother.