The privatisation of relationships of care and dependency is increasing; the new social media is facilitating a "confessional" society and our press is keen to interrogate every dimension of our relationships. The combined cultural effect of these elements has created a paradoxical gap within which women with children may express the previously inexpressible: the ambivalence, difficulty and disappointment of motherhood.
This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to a series of texts that are concerned with maternity; primarily novels and non-fiction books written by women from the 2000s onwards. It also utilizes insights from gender studies, psychoanalytic thought, psychosocial studies and literary and cultural analysis to set out a new paradigm for maternal expression and the delineation of maternal subjects within neoliberal capitalism. Revealing the intense difficulties of conceptualising maternal care and dependent relationships under the capitalist system, it further demonstrates the anxious intensification on the idealisation of women’s care for children and the contradictory effects this has on the women charged to live it out. Students and academics with interests in contemporary fiction, gender studies, sociology and motherhood specifically will find this an important point of reference.
1. Introduction: The Traumatic Gap in (Post)Maternal Discourse
2.
Confessions of the New Capitalist Mother
3. Anxiety and the Alpha Mother:
Mother as CEO and Scientist
4. Producing Monsters: Narratives of Maternal
Disappointment
5. 'A Sound Container for Life?': 'Mothers Without Children'
and the Fertility Marketplace
6. Conclusion: Confessionality and the Public
Life of Privatised Maternity.
Ruth Cain is a Lecturer at the Kent Law School, University of Kent, UK.
