Bearing the Weight of the World

"The maternal body is a site of contested dynamics of power, identity, experience, autonomy, occupation, and control. Representations of the maternal body can mis/represent the childbearing and mothering form variously, often as monstrous, idealized, limited, scrutinized, or occupied, whilst dominant discourses limit motherhood through social devaluation. The maternal body has long been a hypervisible artifact: at once bracketed out in the interest of elevating the contributions of sperm-carriers or fetal status; and regarded with hostility and suspicion as out of control, such arguments being. deployed to justify surveillance mechanisms, medical scrutiny, and expectation of self-discipline."-- "This volume helps to develop a more critical understanding of what it means to be an embodied woman, an embodied mother. The materiality of female experience, and its centrality to family and social life, remains too often viewed as a 'fringe' subject, the province of feminists, activists, hysterical women. For too long, women have been subject to 'expert' advice, guidance, censure and control. We are at risk of being commodified and diminished, having our bodily realities reduced to mechan