The Neutered Mother The Sexual Family And Other Twentieth Century Tragedies

Calling for nothing less than a radical reform of family law and a reconception of intimacy, The Neutered Mother,The Sexual Family, and Other Twentieth Century Tragedies argues strongly against current legal and social policy discussions about the family because they do not have at their core the crucial concepts of caregiving and dependency, as well as the best interests of women and children. The Neutered Mother scrutinizes the definitions of family and mother throughout the volume while paying close attention to issues of race, class and sexuality. In addition, Fienman convincingly contests society's refusal to dignify, support and respond to the needs of caregivers and illustrates the burden they must bear due to this treatment. This book is a crucial step toward defining America's most pressing social policy problems having to do with women, motherhood and the family.

Calling for nothing less than a radical reform of family law and a reconception of intimacy, The Neutered Mother, The Sexual Family, and Other Twentieth Century Tragedies argues strongly against current legal and social policy discussions about the family because they do not have at their core the crucial concepts of caregiving and dependency, as well as the best interests of women and children. The Neutered Mother scrutinizes the definitions of family and mother throughout the volume while paying close attention to issues of race, class and sexuality. In addition, Fienman convincingly contests society's refusal to dignify, support and respond to the needs of caregivers and illustrates the burden they must bear due to this treatment. This book is a crucial step toward defining America's most pressing social policy problems having to do with women, motherhood and the family.

Review of The neutered mother, the sexual family, and other twentieth century tragedies, by Martha Albertson Fineman.

Feminist and Queer Legal Theory: Intimate Encounters, Uncomfortable Conversations is a groundbreaking collection that brings together leading scholars in contemporary legal theory. The volume explores, at times contentiously, convergences and departures among a variety of feminist and queer political projects. These explorations - foregrounded by legal issues such as marriage equality, sexual harassment, workers' rights, and privacy - re-draw and re-imagine the alliances and antagonisms constituting feminist and queer theory. The essays cross a spectrum of disciplinary matrixes, including jurisprudence, political philosophy, literary theory, critical race theory, women's studies, and gay and lesbian studies. The authors occupy a variety of political positions vis-à-vis questions of identity, rights, the state, cultural normalization, and economic liberalism. The richness and vitality of feminist and queer theory, as well as their relevance to matters central to the law and politics of our time, are on full display in this volume.

"This is a conceptually innovative book which expands the meaning of motherhood to include mothers 'without child'; it is also a compassionate political book which refuses the boundary between 'good enough' and 'bad' mothers. Mother Without Child is an engaging, witty, and provocative literary study which should fascinate anyone who is interested in mothering or in looking for new ways to talk about motherhood without erasing some women's experience or dividing mothers from each other."--Sara Ruddick, author of Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace "Hansen positions her study in a genuinely new space . . . taboo ground, which demands not only a great deal of courage to address, but also enormous intelligence and insight. Hansen is up to this task. . . hers is a pioneer study that will have a significant impact on the ways that non-procreative motherhood is discussed and understood." --Madelon Sprengnether, author of The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis "Since the beginnings of the second wave of feminism in the 1960s, feminist scholars have been obsessed with motherhood. Mother Without Child takes us to the next stage in this fascinated and fascinating exploration. Through illuminating readings of contemporary stories of thwarted motherhood, Hansen challenges the persistent and constraining definitions of the good and even the good-enough mother. She enjoins us to listen to the moving, devastating, and often inspiring stories of mothers who survive the loss of their children and she urges us to find there not the angry voices of feminist daughters who cannot forgive their patriarchal mothers, but alternative stories of a different maternity that can lead us to alternative plots and visions of women's lives. We need this book."--Marianne Hirsch, author of The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism "A careful, committed, and freshly clarifying voice. Hansen's graceful prose and finely interwoven explorations are much needed at this time. Through readings of contemporary fiction, she enriches our vocabulary for discussing the overdetermined topic of motherhood and deepens our understanding of both its psychological and contemporary political dimensions. Mother Without Child is a book for historians and social scientists as well as literary scholars."--Laura Doyle, author of Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture

In the last decade, the topic of motherhood has emerged as a distinct and established field of scholarly inquiry. A cursory review of motherhood research reveals that hundreds of scholarly articles have been published on almost every motherhood theme imaginable. The Encyclopedia of Motherhood is a collection of approximately 700 articles in a three-volume, A-to-Z set exploring major topics related to motherhood, from geographical, historical and cultural entries to anthropological and psychological contributions. In human society, few institutions are as important as motherhood, and this unique encyclopedia captures the interdisciplinary foundation of the subject in one convenient reference. The Encyclopedia is a comprehensive resource designed to provide an understanding of the complexities of motherhood for academic and public libraries, and is written by academics and institutional experts in the social and behavioural sciences.

Socio-legal research on the legal experiences of the poor reflects an understanding of the close connection between economic inequality and law. The first two parts of this volume illustrate general analytical approaches to law and poverty. The remaining parts include essays which examine more specific issues such as race and gender, access to law, legal consciousness and social change. Research on the relationships between poverty, inequality and governance still leaves many questions unanswered but the work presented here reflects the important contribution that sociolegal research makes to the ongoing debate.

The first edition of Do Men Mother? (2006) was awarded the John Porter Tradition of Excellence Book Award from the Canadian Sociological Association and remains one of the most widely cited books on primary caregiving fathers and stay-at-home fathers. This second edition of Do Men Mother? builds on interviews conducted between 2000 and 2004 with 101 fathers and 14 mother/father couples, and follow-up interviews with six of the mother/father couples about a decade later. It charts how fathers and mothers navigate and negotiate parental and breadwinning responsibilities and calls attention to the generative changes that occur for men when they share responsibilities for their children’s care. Working closely with Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking (1989), Doucet advocates for a wider maternal lens that focuses on entanglements between dependence/independence/inter-dependence and argues that fathers’ stories expand how we think about mothering and caregiving In this expanded second edition, with a new Preface and two new chapters, Doucet takes on three revisiting projects: returning to interview several research participants; re-entering scholarly fields of work, care, and parenting in shifting neoliberal contexts; and rethinking her approach to knowledge making, concepts, and narratives. Bringing together what she calls "diffractive" readings of feminist philosopher Lorraine Code’s ecological approach to knowledge making and historical sociologist Margaret Somers’ genealogical and relational approach to concepts and her non-representational approach to narratives, Doucet lays out an innovative ecological and non-representational approach to knowledge making, concepts, and narratives about care work and paid work. This book calls for greater attention not only to what we claim to know, but also to how we come to know, write about, and intervene in shifting practices, concepts, and narratives of work and care, the politics of care, and growing crises of care.

An exposé of flaws in American policies regarding the self-reliance of families argues that policymakers have compromised the well-being of everyday individuals by limiting the definition of acceptable family units and placing unrealistic responsibilities on contemporary families, presenting a model for "caretaking relationships" that provides extra support for children and the elderly. Reprint.

This volume is the first collection of Martha Albertson Fineman’s most important and influential work. Feminist legal theorist Martha Albertson Fineman has spent decades pushing the boundaries of law, questioning and reconceptualizing legal and social definitions of family, dependency, vulnerability, and state responsibility. The pieces collected in this book trace the arc of Fineman’s scholarship, from gender equality; to the role of the family as a social institution; to dependency; to autonomy; to the legal subject and vulnerability theory. This book reflects a lifetime of radical reimagining of the relationship between the state, individuals, families, and other social institutions that is just as relevant today, if not more so. In this book, Fineman offers a foundation for the achievement of true social justice, through the centering of our shared human vulnerability and dependency, grounded in the recognition of the ontological body and its material needs. Arranged in sections, and introduced by leading scholars in the field, these pieces ask us to re-examine our legally enshrined commitment to formal equality and the “mythological” autonomous independent legal subject; recognizing instead that we must call for an active and responsive state that meaningfully provides resilience through its social institutions. This collection demonstrates an evolution of heretical thought that has always pressed for a deeper understanding of the foundations of law and society, offering a model for other scholars on how to keep pressing through the hard work of thinking and rethinking the conceptual basics of language, law, society, and justice. This book will appeal to academics, policymakers, lawyers, activists, and students in law and politics theory with interests in law and society, human dependency and vulnerability, state responsibility, and feminism and the family; as well as others who have applied Fineman’s vulnerability theory to issues in the fields of bioethics, artificial intelligence, and policing, to name just a few.