Conceiving of and representing mothers without their children seems so paradoxical as to be almost impossible. How can we define a mother in the absence of her child? This compelling volume explores these and other questions from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives, examining experiences, representations, creative manifestations, and embodiments of mothers without their children. In her 1997 book, entitled Mother Without Child: Contemporary Fiction and the Crisis of Motherhood, the critic Elaine Tuttle Hansen urged for critical and feminist engagement with what she described as ?the borders of motherhood and the women who really live there, neither fully inside nor fully outside some recognizable ?family unit?, and often exiles from their children?. This book extends and expands this important enquiry, looking at maternal experience and mothering on the borders of motherhood in different historical and cultural contexts, thereby opening up the way in which we imagine and represent mothers without their children to reassessment and revision, and encouraging further dialogue about what it might mean to mother on the borders of motherhood.
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Researching and Re-Imagining Mothers Without Their Children
Charlotte Beyer
I. Textualities and Ambiguous Mothering Status
? The Birth Mother without Child in Joanna Murray-Smith?s Pennsylvania Avenue
Emma Dalton
? For The Love Of: A Motherline Of State Violence And Affective Residues
Lizbett Benge
II. Institutional Frontiers and Othered Mothers
? ?It was like my soul was back?: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood during Incarceration
Brittnie Aiello
? Mothering Interrupted: Mother-child separation via incarceration in England and Ireland
Sinead O?Malley and Lucy Baldwin
? ?No Girl Could Keep Her Baby?: Depictions of Irish Mother and Baby Homes in June Goulding?s Memoirs The Light in the Window
Charlotte Beyer
? Protests and Plans: The Mothers of Compton Place Ragged School, 1850 ? 1867
Laura M. Mair
III. Having to Live and Mother Through It: Economic, Geographic, Political, and Racialized Inequities
? Grieving Absent Children in ?Three Seasons?
Kristin Lucas
? Mothers? Voice from the Margin: Representation of Motherhood in Mahasweta Devi?s Two Short Stories
Indrani Karmakar
? Toward Reproductive Justice: Single Mothers? Activism against the U.S. Child Welfare System
Shihoko Nakagawa
? Towards Solidarity in Mothering at the Borderlands: Suggestions for Better Legal and Social Treatment of Mothers Migrating Across Borders Without Children to Work
Rebecca Jaremko Bromwich
IV. Motherhood Reconfigured by Death
? Grieving in Silence: Repercussions of the Family Ideal on Women with Pregnancy Loss
Sheri McClure
? The Immigrant
Maya Bhave
? Figure Drawing
Rachel O?Donnell
? Suppress and Express: Breast Milk Donation After Neonatal Death
Katherine Carroll and Brydan Lenne
V. Navigating and Resisting Exile
? ?You?re Not Really There?: Mothering on the Border of Identity
Marilyn Preston
? Newborn Custodial Loss from the Perspective of a Midwife
Andrea Lea Robertson
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