... but perilous ordeal of childbirth.” This chapter explores the ways that playwrights confront head on the limited choices for women in terms of sex, marriage, and reproduction, separating motherhood from marriage. It also considers how plays tackle themes such as sexual selection, childhood, the relationship...

... of biological determinism, gender essentialism, the maternal instinct, and the “cult of motherhood.” It is likely that more people encountered evolution at the theater than through any other art form in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries....

...This book confronts the core claims of postmaternal thought and criticizes dominant representations of feminism as having forgotten motherhood. It does this through an investigation of oral histories, life narratives, web blogs, and other rich and varied sources. The book highlights the deep...

... primarily on a traditionally feminine enterprise, the chapter discusses how motherhood can develop notions of the human being, the good, and the ethical. It also presents the layout of subsequent chapters, which includes the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir, Iris Marion Young, and Linda...

... passionate love for their children paired with fantasies of suicide, infanticide, or accidental death as the only way out of motherhood. The existence of maternal aggression, depression, and ambivalence in various times and places does not prove its universality, nor deny its relationship to cultural...

...When a mother kills her child, we call her a bad mother, but, as this book shows, even mothers who intend to do their children harm are not easily categorized as “mad” or “bad.” Maternal love is a complex emotion rich with contradictory impulses and desires, and motherhood is a conflicted state...

... Zhao utilized idealized images of motherhood associated with Māyā to cast herself as a latter-day “Buddha mother”. Buddha demiurgic energy Mair Victor Mãyã Śuddhodana Kasyapa mothers auspicious omens 85 bodhisattvas Buddhas–to–be Daoxuan divinities Flower Garland Sutra Huayan jing pillar...

... every crisis. More than any other person, this is what a mother is expected to do for her children; thus ethical failure is a constant threat to her. Beauvoir describes how motherhood increases the painful tensions of ethical life, and leads to an attitude of ambivalence toward one's children. Her...

...This chapter examines how plays in the 1890s and the first few decades of the twentieth century engaged with the idea of gender essentialism: whether motherhood was the true calling for women, whether the bond with the infant was inevitable and instinctive, whether woman's evolutionary role...

...This chapter documents the whirlwind of online activity around motherhood. It analyzes the extent to which the so-called new mothers’ movement points to a reconfigured maternalism or reproduces the problems associated with the maternalism of the past. It also raises questions about maternalist...

...This concluding chapter offers some provisional reflections on the problems posed by a degendered feminism, the dominant strain of feminism in public policy debates today. It makes specific references to the way the materiality of embodied motherhood is ignored in many policy initiatives. It gives...

...This chapter contains text from the Lienü zhuan, compiled by Liu Xiang, and includes biographies of fourteen women who are held to be exemplars of motherhood: the two consorts of Youyu; Jiang Yuan, mother of Qi; Jiandi, mother of Xie; Tushan, mother of Qi; Youshen, consort of Tang...

... between intimacy and the consequences of globalization. He also uses the combination of motherhood and migration to reflect on the confrontation between globalization and intimacy against the backdrop of a nonoppositional binary of singularity and universality. Through a discussion of Nothing...

...This epilogue presents the author's final points for the reader. The perspectives people hold in understanding the phenomena of pregnancy and motherhood seem insufficient. A more informed view of the phenomena would be one in which cooperation and conflict is viewed as inevitable parts...