Binding: Paperback
Description: Winner of the 2009 Feminist & Women's Studies Association (UK & Ireland) Book Award! Many women find mothering a shocking experience in terms of the extremity of feelings it provokes and the profound changes it seems to prompt in identity relationship and sense of self. However although motherhood can catapult us into a state of internal disarray it can also provide us with a unique chance to make ourselves anew. How then do we understand this radical potential for transformation within maternal experience? In Maternal Encounters Lisa Baraitser takes up this question through the analysis of a series of maternal anecdotes charting key destabilizing moments in the life of just one mother and using these to discuss many questions that have remained resistant to theoretical analysis the possibility for a specific feminine - maternal subjectivity relationality and reciprocity ethics and otherness. Working across contemporary philosophies of feminist ethics as well as psychoanalysis and social theory the maternal subject in Baraitser's account becomes an emblematic and enigmatic formation of a subjectivity called into being through a relation to another she comes to name and claim as her child. As she navigates through the peculiarity of maternal experience Baraitser takes us on a journey in which the mother emerges in the most unlikely precarious and unstable of places as a subject of alterity transformation interruption heightened sentience viscosity encumberment and love. This book presents a major new theory of maternal subjectivity and an innovative and accessible way into our understanding of contemporary motherhood. As such it will be of interest to students of family studies gender studies psychoanalysis critical psychology and feminist philosophy as well as counselling and psychotherapy.
Title: Maternal Encounters The Ethics Of Interruption
Author(s): Baraitser Lisa
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
Barcode: 9780415455015
Pages: 200 Pages
Publication Date: 1/1/2009
Series: Women and Psychology
Category: Sociology: Family & Relationships