Writing Maternity, Writing the Self: Contemporary Motherhood Memoirs between Institution and Experience

von Rütte, Sabine (16 September 2021). Writing Maternity, Writing the Self: Contemporary Motherhood Memoirs between Institution and Experience (Unpublished). In: Forschungsplattform Auto_Bio_Grafie: Migrating the Self. University of Bern. 16.09.2021.

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This paper focuses on contemporary motherhood memoirs that offer timely negotiations of the maternal self between the individual experience and the social institution of motherhood. Namely, the paper looks at three particularly compelling and formally innovative examples: Sheila Heti’s autofictional novel Motherhood (2018) and Maggie Nelson’s autotheoretical work The Argonauts (2015). Confronted with the social realities of the institution of motherhood, many authors still grapple with the integration of their writerly and maternal selves. In patriarchal Western societies that have historically devalued care work and still remain largely unsupportive – if not outright hostile – towards mothers, writers such as Adrienne Rich (1975), Cherrie Moraga (1996) or Rachel Cusk (2001) have tackled their maternal identities in their autobiographical self-examinations. Such motherhood memoirs, life narratives written from and engaging with the “social location of ‘mother’” (Hewett 2019), provide us with a record of not only shifting, but also static landscapes of societal attitudes towards gender and parenting. The motherhood memoirs examined in this paper challenge gender norms and formally innovate the genre of life writing to provide new perspectives on the social location of mother.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Division/Institute:	06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies > Institute of English Languages and Literatures 06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies > Institute of English Languages and Literatures > American Studies
UniBE Contributor:	von Rütte, Sabine Jeanne
Subjects:	800 Literature, rhetoric & criticism 800 Literature, rhetoric & criticism > 820 English & Old English literatures
Language:	English
Submitter:	Federico Erba
Date Deposited:	07 Jan 2022 08:19
Last Modified:	14 Mar 2024 12:31
URI:	https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/163320