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Motherhood

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Full-Text Articles in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Mothering As Feminism, Meera Patel May 2023

Mothering As Feminism, Meera Patel

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This critical essay proposes the concept of mothering-as-feminism, with the intention of interrogating American ideals of mothering and caregiving. Reforming the way we view mothering, as it relates to feminism, requires a re-evaluation of the American role of women and mothers—and how they are portrayed (and therefore seen and understood), valued, and supported. Focusing on the evolution of feminist theory throughout the past 70 years, as well as personal and secondary experiences, I demonstrate how political and social change occurs generationally and is dependent on the education of our children. Ultimately, I show the important role children’s literature plays …

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A Cultural History Of Anti-Feminism In Marvel's Scarlet Witch, Madison M. Kooba May 2023

A Cultural History Of Anti-Feminism In Marvel's Scarlet Witch, Madison M. Kooba

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Marvel Comics character Wanda Maximoff, otherwise known as the Scarlet Witch, has received significant attention in popular culture due to her recent appearances as the primary protagonist and antagonist in television show WandaVision (2021) and film Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022). These depictions foregrounding Wanda’s struggles with mental health have made her an admirable character to many who see her drawing power from her emotions as a celebration of aspects of womanhood that have long been shamed by society. Sourcing these contemporary adaptations, however, lies decades of blatantly anti-feminist and sexist comics that villainize and ridicule Wanda’s …

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Parenting Skills Of African American Young Mothers Who Transitioned From Foster Care, Tamesha Yvonne Townsend-Simmons Jan 2023

Parenting Skills Of African American Young Mothers Who Transitioned From Foster Care, Tamesha Yvonne Townsend-Simmons

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Prior research indicated there is an ongoing social issue in the United States for young single mothers with foster care experiences and their children. This group of women face poor economic and parenting outcomes without assistance from government resources in the form of effective parenting programs. Yet programming lags and there are ongoing assumptions about young mothers' in foster care parenting skills and abilities. The purpose of this qualitative multiple-case study was to better understand the development of parenting skills among a selected group of African American adult young mothers who transitioned from foster care to independence and motherhood between …

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Becoming A Mom: Intersectionality And Fashion Consumption For Millennial Latinas And The Role Of Social Media Influencers, Leslie M. Cuevas Aug 2020

Becoming A Mom: Intersectionality And Fashion Consumption For Millennial Latinas And The Role Of Social Media Influencers, Leslie M. Cuevas

Doctoral Dissertations

When it comes to motherhood for women of color, the topic of women empowerment is scarce, and the media mostly portrays Latinas through traditional ethnic stereotypes. The advent of social media has presented women the opportunity to engage in identity formation as they exercise empowerment in choices and self-monitoring online. A good example of this transition in power involves fashion influencers who use their personal influence to change the meaning of motherhood, making it more accessible and realistic to women in general. However, a lack of diversity remains within the influencer industry as white women are the majority. Drawing upon …

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Muslim Woman:Heavenly Body, Communal Autonomy, Shadyar Omrani Mar 2020

Muslim Woman:Heavenly Body, Communal Autonomy, Shadyar Omrani

Sociology Student Work Collection

This project is a quick review and analysis of different socio-cultural impacts that influence the formation of a Muslim woman’s identity through the embodiment of womanhood and motherhood. I will argue that the self-determination of a Muslim woman’s body and autonomous social identity is highly influenced by their cultural and economic notions of self; the ground, based on which their emancipation can be better paved.

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Material Girls: Consumption And The Making Of Middle Class Identity In The Experiences Of Black Single Mothers In The Washington, Dc Metropolitan Area, Aysha L. Preston Ph.D. Nov 2018

Material Girls: Consumption And The Making Of Middle Class Identity In The Experiences Of Black Single Mothers In The Washington, Dc Metropolitan Area, Aysha L. Preston Ph.D.

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the ways in which black single mothers in the Washington, DC metropolitan area use material goods and consumption practices to inform their identities as members of the middle class. Black middle class women are challenging stereotypes surrounding single mother households, the idea of family, and class status in the United States, as more women overall are having children while single, delaying or deciding against marriage, and are entering the middle and upper-middle classes as a result of advanced education and career opportunities. Because of these demographic and sociocultural shifts, the romanticized “nuclear family” which consists of a …

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The Socially Deviant (M)Other In Euripides' "Medea" And Two Modern Adaptations, Christina Faye Kramer May 2018

The Socially Deviant (M)Other In Euripides' "Medea" And Two Modern Adaptations, Christina Faye Kramer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

For centuries male-dominated societies have developed their own culturally constructed images of the socially acceptable and socially deviant mothers. The thesis explores how the Grecian, Caribbean, and Irish cultures of Euripides’ Medea (431 BC), Steve Carter’s Pecong (1990), and Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats (1998) respectively, all based on the Medea myth, commonly define the social deviant (m)other and condemn her for her “otherness.” It also discusses the limitations of each society’s decision to label the Medea-figure as socially deviant. Euripides creates an impossible dichotomy between the culturally constructed concepts of heroism and motherhood, which he locates in …

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The Gender Wage Gap And The "Motherhood" Effect, Adrianna Decicco Apr 2018

The Gender Wage Gap And The "Motherhood" Effect, Adrianna Decicco

Honors Senior Capstone Projects

This paper discusses the gender pay gap and how motherhood is a major factor toward the inequalities in the workplace. For this paper, the wage gap is defined as the difference between men and women’s yearly income consisting of hourly or salary wages, overtime, benefits and bonuses. It should be noted that men earn more in every category of work, even the categories that are female-dominated professions.

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Monstrous Mothers: The Politics Of Forced Mothering, Gillian Henry Jun 2017

Monstrous Mothers: The Politics Of Forced Mothering, Gillian Henry

Honors Theses

Can a woman be a woman without being a mother? By studying the control of women's bodies around reproduction, my work elucidates the insistence on women becoming "good mothers" for society. Is the childless woman a monster? Analysis of the Medea trope identifies that the most monstrous woman of all is thought to be the woman who kills her children. And while white women fight for reproductive choice, women of color fight for reproductive freedom, as coercive policies such as forced sterilization deprive women of color as even being considered as potential mothers. Society's insistence on women fulfilling their destiny …

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French Women In Art: Reclaiming The Body Through Creation/Les Femmes Artistes Françaises : La Réclamation Du Corps À Travers La Création, Liatris Hethcoat Dec 2016

French Women In Art: Reclaiming The Body Through Creation/Les Femmes Artistes Françaises : La Réclamation Du Corps À Travers La Création, Liatris Hethcoat

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

The research I have conducted for my French Major Senior Thesis is a culmination of my passion for and studies of both French language and culture and the history and practice of Visual Arts. I have examined, across the history of art, the representation of women, and concluded that until the 20th century, these representations have been tools employed by the makers of history and those at the top of the patriarchal system, used to control women’s images and thus women themselves. I survey these representations, which are largely created by men—until the 20th century. I discuss pre-historical …

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Bringing Mothers And Fathers Together: Undergraduate Studies In Anthropology And Sociology, Angela Castañeda, Matthew Oware Sep 2016

Bringing Mothers And Fathers Together: Undergraduate Studies In Anthropology And Sociology, Angela Castañeda, Matthew Oware

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

As social scientists in a combined Sociology and Anthropology department at a small liberal arts institution, we approach research questions on mothering and fathering from our respective disciplines. In the summer of 2014 we made plans to experiment with a first year seminar that would bring our distinct courses together: Oware’s Man Up: Unpacking Manhood and Masculinity, and Castañeda’s Global Perspectives on Reproduction and Childbirth. In the fall of 2014, we combined our courses over two-weeks to discuss the roles of fathering and mothering in our research agendas. As we suspected, our courses were unevenly represented on their own with …

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Navigating The Transition Into Motherhood: Women's Experiences Of Control, Emotions, And Social Ideals, Jody Sue Sauer-Sargent Jan 2016

Navigating The Transition Into Motherhood: Women's Experiences Of Control, Emotions, And Social Ideals, Jody Sue Sauer-Sargent

Wayne State University Dissertations

In this dissertation, I sought to give postpartum women their own voices so that they could help define the postpartum experience on their own terms. It fills important gaps within the literature on new mothers’ experiences. A phenomenological approach was used, emphasizing the lived experiences of the women, with an overlay of autoethnography, where the personal experience of the researcher becomes important primarily in how it illuminates the phenomenon being studied. Thus, my personal experience of pregnancy into early motherhood is interwoven throughout this dissertation. Forty-two women participated in the in-depth, face-to-face interview, followed by a questionnaire. The qualitative data …

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Attitudes Toward Motherhood Among Sexual Minority Women In The United States, Emily Kazyak, Nicholas Park, Julia Mcquillan, Arthur L. Greil Oct 2014

Attitudes Toward Motherhood Among Sexual Minority Women In The United States, Emily Kazyak, Nicholas Park, Julia Mcquillan, Arthur L. Greil

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

In this article, we use data from the National Survey of Fertility Barriers—a national, population-based telephone survey—to examine how sexual minority women construct and value motherhood. We analyze the small (N = 43) random sample of self-identified sexual minority women using “survey-driven narrative construction,” which entails converting the structured answers and open-ended responses for each respondent into narratives and identifying themes. We focused on both sexual minority women’s desires and intentions to parent and on the importance they place on motherhood. We found that there is considerable variation in this population. Many sexual minority women distinguish between having and raising …

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Becoming Mom: Understanding Challenges And Presentations Of Self Among Mothers, Annakeiko Frink Reichel Aug 2014

Becoming Mom: Understanding Challenges And Presentations Of Self Among Mothers, Annakeiko Frink Reichel

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

When a woman becomes a mother it is arguably one of the most life changing and defining moments of their lives. Becoming a mom and the emotions that are involved in the process are often a neglected topic in the United States. It is clear that the social world assumes mothers will automatically adjust to the role of being a mom without asking questions such as, what are the challenges moms face after having children? Or more importantly, how is a mother’s identity shaped after having children and while adjusting to the role as mom? The first author (AR) became …

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Blogging Through Motherhood: Free Labor, Femininity, And The (Re)Production Of Maternity, Kara Mary Van Cleaf Jun 2014

Blogging Through Motherhood: Free Labor, Femininity, And The (Re)Production Of Maternity, Kara Mary Van Cleaf

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Drawing from a thematic analysis of 47 North American mommy blogs over a 2-year period, I situate the genre in critical discussions of feminism, media, and labor, exploring both the technological and cultural shifts that turn mothers into cultural producers and that turn the experience of motherhood into a commodity. I situate the content of such blogs, or what gets said therein, within theories of media, gender, and labor. Examining the blogs within and against such academic discussions allows me to develop an intersectional analysis of feminism, media, and labor studies.

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New Matriarchs: Louisville, Kentucky (Fa 768), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives Sep 2013

New Matriarchs: Louisville, Kentucky (Fa 768), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

FA Finding Aids

Finding aid and representative photographs for Folklife Archives Project 768. The collection details the lives of seven women from around the globe (India, Syria, Mexico, Uganda, Russia, Argentina, and Somalia),all recent immigrants to Louisville, Kentucky.

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The Irony Of Choice, Cam T. Nguyen Sep 2013

The Irony Of Choice, Cam T. Nguyen

SURGE

We are having the inevitable late night conversation. You talk about your eventual wedding, your marriage to the person you love, the timeline you’ve created for yourself, and your plans for what our future children will do together. I clarify that I don’t want to have children, but you can’t seem to understand that decision. You question how happy, satisfied, or fulfilled my life will be without children, the maternal instincts I’m supposed to be feeling, and my desire to have something to care for and love. You’re convinced that I will recognize how empty my life will be sans …

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