Description:
Becoming a mother is cataclysmic. It is experienced in a myriad of ways but always the act signals change. As an academic, I turned to words, thoughts, and ideas to help me understand what I felt to be a complete and sometimes terrifying transformation of maternity. I found a copy of Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born and read it. Rich’s descriptions of the joys of mothering as well as her honest and critical insights into the institution of motherhood spoke about her journey into maternity. She was also speaking parts of my story of mothering. At the time that I discovered Rich’s maternal writings, I had completed a project on the “bold new territory” of cyberspace. Having enjoyed the fiery feminism of the geekgirls, grrrls, and other activists as well as being excited by Rich’s work, I turned to cyberspace, hungry for stories of mothering. What I found intriguing in this domain was the comingling of convention and subversion, and the enormous possibility for change. In the hope of finding representations of maternal bodies going beyond the normative images, I looked to an investigation of the cyber-realm and the potential of this domain to overturn dominant discourses of motherhood. "From chapter"
Description:
Young mothers’ stories of motherhood are often invisible within the broader contexts of society, and young mothers may themselves be negatively affected by and unable to resist dominant cultural narratives circulated about them. Early motherhood manifests itself as a problem and social concern in academic literature policy and public discourses (Arai; Breheny and Stephens). Much of it invariably details the negative outcomes faced by young mothers, including poor parenting skills, health issues, welfare dependency, and lower educational attainment with little opportunity for future employability, which exacerbates their likelihood of living in poverty (Keegan and Corliss). Community judgment invariably considers young.