Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in
Palgrave Macmillan

21st-Century Narratives of Maternal Ambivalence

  • Book
  • © 2023

Overview

Authors:
  1. Rachel Williamson

    1. University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

  • Critically examines new twenty-first century texts about motherhood
  • Considers how maternal ambivalence can be used as a structural framework for reimagining subjectivity as relational
  • Offers an original perspective on the transformative shift from maternal ambivalence to maternal resilience

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender (PSRG)

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this book

Log in via an institution
eBook USD 99.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book USD 129.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access

Licence this eBook for your library

Institutional subscriptions

Table of contents (7 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-ix
    Download chapter PDF

  2. Introduction: ‘An Exquisite Suffering’

    • Rachel Williamson
    Pages 1-33

  3. Contextualising Ambivalence: Intensive Mothering Under Neoliberalism

    • Rachel Williamson
    Pages 35-81

  4. ‘It Takes a Village’: Resisting the Repudiation of the ‘Bad’ Mother

    • Rachel Williamson
    Pages 83-109

  5. Embodying Ambivalence: Abjection and the Problematic Maternal Body

    • Rachel Williamson
    Pages 111-144

  6. The Body in Extremis: Vocalising Maternal Corporeality

    • Rachel Williamson
    Pages 145-174

  7. Surviving Motherhood: From Maternal Ambivalence to Maternal Resilience

    • Rachel Williamson
    Pages 175-198

  8. “Strange and Wild”: Towards an Aesthetics of Ambivalence

    • Rachel Williamson
    Pages 199-231

  9. Back Matter

    Pages 233-237
    Download chapter PDF
Back to top

Keywords

About this book

Motherhood has long been depicted in reductive or limited terms. At once valorized and configured as the ultimate end-goal for socially condoned femininity, maternity is also highly mediated and scrutinized. This has resulted in a representational tradition that persists in imagining maternal subjects in rigid binary terms, pitting good mothers against bad. Largely in response to this repressive schema, recent years have marked the emergence of a diverse range of visual and literary texts about motherhood. While such texts vary in style, genre and form, this book argues that they are unified in their efforts to publicize embodied maternal experience and foreground maternal ambivalence, a concept that is best understood as a mother’s capacity to simultaneously love and hate her child. Although maternal ambivalence has become an increasingly popular topic of study with maternal scholars, its articulation within contemporary representations and narratives has yet to be adequately theorized and addressed, and this book aims to fill this gap.



Authors and Affiliations

  • University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

    Rachel Williamson

About the author

Rachel Williamson is a policy advisor and senior trainer at domestic violence specialist organization SHINE (Safer Homes in New Zealand Everyday), working with employers and government departments to recognize and respond appropriately to staff experiencing domestic violence. She obtained her PhD in Cultural Studies from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Her articles have appeared in Continuum, Labour and Industry and In Media Res, and she has two chapters in the edited collections Maternal Connections: When Daughter Becomes Mother and Maternal Regret: Resistances, Renunciations, and Reflections.



Bibliographic Information

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Back to top

Search

Navigation