Paper short abstract:

Becoming a mother can be an isolating and lonely experience. This paper explores some of the strategies women use to unwork, skirt around, disrupt or otherwise reconfigure their structured loneliness in an effort to (re)weave and (re)imagine more deeply entangled and supported mothering lifeworlds.

Paper long abstract:

For women living in Euro-American societies, becoming a mother can be an isolating and lonely rite of passage. And for many of the women who participated in my research, this was compounded by their experience of mothering as a stigmatising and marginalising practice because they were mothering in non-normative ways. They critiqued the individualisation of their mothering roles and their separation from broader society, insisting that mothering should be more of a collective project and way of being, and that they did not want to do it on their own. Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork in Australia with women who identified their style of mothering as natural or holistic, this paper explores how some of the women attempted to transform their solitary mothering lives by experimenting with ways to feel more emotionally connected and supported by like-minded (m)others, where their overarching strategy was to not mother alone. It examines the pressing need that women have to mother together in spite of the challenges they face, and how they go about connecting with other mothers in an increasingly fragmented society. It analyses the strategies they deployed in their attempts to unwork, skirt around, disrupt or otherwise reconfigure their structured loneliness in an effort to (re)weave and (re)imagine more deeply entangled and supported mothering lifeworlds. Where, in contesting the separations that structurally configure family life in Australia, they were striving to create alternative, less separate futures by mothering together.

Paper short abstract:

In promotion discourses, breastfeeding is deemed optimising children's psycho-emotional development, with mental health benefits extending to their adult life, contributing to a better society. This paper explores the breastfeeding journeys of mothers committed to on-demand, long-term breastfeeding.

Paper long abstract:

Since the 1990s, in most countries, breastfeeding has been promoted by public health agencies and child health experts as the most appropriate infant-feeding mode. In addition to epidemiological considerations, according to developmental psychology, breastfeeding would favour mother and child “bonding”, fostering a “secure” attachment for children and optimising their brain development. In this perspective, a failure in the attachment process may have long-term consequences, beyond childhood and the family unit, possibly leading to deviant behaviours and social troubles, while breastfeeding would protect from these hazards. Breastfeeding then becomes a moral obligation for mothers, and their role as primary care taker is enhanced and naturalised.

Based on an ethnography of home-birth parents’ breastfeeding journey in Switzerland from the first hours after birth to weaning, this paper discusses how mothers conceptualise breastfeeding as a means to raise kind and compassionate human beings, hoping to build a better future. They engage in a “child-centred” approach to parenting, including on-demand breastfeeding and child-led weaning, driven by a commitment to communicating with their child. Through their breastfeeding projects, these mothers challenge neoliberal individualistic values, and pledge for a “proximal”, body-anchored mothering. At the same time, self-sufficiency remains their objective, as children’s dependence is deemed a key transition step for building solid emotional foundations ultimately leading to their autonomy. As it unfolds over time, tensions may arise, and breastfeeding appears as a process mothers constantly negotiate, with their child, their partner, their relatives, but also with themselves and their commitment to their parenting project.

Paper short abstract:

The paper looks at homeschooling and stay-at-home mothers in Slovenia through their daily lives and practices, and by analysing the broader social and political circumstances that led to their decision to stay at home in a time of uncertainty.

Paper long abstract:

Mothering practices are linked to broader social processes and politics. At the same time, they reveal deeply intimate choices and concrete ways of engaging with everyday life and strategies. This paper addresses how mothering functions as a means of empowerment and transformation and, at the same time, as an intersection of trials for housewives or stay-at-home mothers in Slovenia who have chosen to homeschool their children. In addition to the broader social and political circumstances (e.g., the Covid crisis), I will present the individual choices of homeschooling mothers as reflected in their daily lives and practices, as well as in the practical division of labor. That is, how housework, homeschooling, and motherhood function as a way of life (namely, through routines, rhythms, organisation of tasks, and the like).

Paper short abstract:

In documenting the emotional and sensory quality of maternal loneliness, this paper outlines how a visual autoethnographic process can be a way to describe and critique socio cultural realities and experience of new motherhood.

Paper long abstract:

I explore the loneliness of new motherhood through a presentation of my visual autoethnographic research. Asking questions about the sensory quality of maternal loneliness, this paper outlines a process I term emotional thick description as a way to describe and critique socio cultural realities and experience of new motherhood.

Focusing particularly on mother’s everyday tasks and labours as a lens to explore loneliness, I examine my own experience of day-to-day routines in the home, as well as the everyday theatre of leaving the house to go out with my daughter. I examine maternal identity making in these contexts using theories of becoming (Braidotti, 2002); performativity (Butler, 1990); and draw together feminist existential thinking (Battersby, 2006) to critically develop anthropological ideas about being and place (Ingold, 2000). By scrutinising the sensory and emotional interiorities of maternal identity making in these ways, I elucidate the challenges many women face in being at home in and feeling part of the world once they become mothers.

I will present photography and short film excerpts from my research to highlight how visually documenting women's everyday lives as mothers can challenge narratives that individuate and make deviant their experience of distress, struggle and isolation (Kristeva, 2005). My discussion concludes drawing from mad studies (Sweeny and Taylor, 2021) to argue that maternal loneliness is often pathologised with a mental health diagnosis rather than this isolation from community, body and self being understood as a symptom of patriarchal socio-economic pressures and structures women face in contemporary western culture.

Paper short abstract:

Recently Georgia has become one of the centers of commercial gestational surrogacy. This paper shows how Surrogate mothers manage to stay within cultural scripts of motherhood as they approach surrogacy as an only way of being a "proper” mother to their “own” children.

Paper long abstract:

The assisted reproductive practice of surrogacy questions cultural scripts that take for granted inseparability of mother-child union. In response, essentialist discourse frames surrogacy as cultural anomaly (Teman, 2010) and represents surrogate mothers as abnormal women, who are capable to give away the child (Roberts, 1998). Recently Georgia has become one of the centers of commercial gestational surrogacy, with growing demand for surrogate mothers. Our research aims to show how local women manage to stay within cultural scripts of motherhood while acting as surrogate mothers.

The paper is based on in-depth interviews with surrogate mothers in Georgia (2020-2021). For broader picture we also use observations and the interviews conducted with other actors of this complex phenomenon: intended mothers, doctors and representatives of surrogacy agencies.

We argue that surrogate mothers' justifications take material from exact repository of cultural scripts. Their basic argument is that they do not give away their “own child”. Georgian language makes this argument more tangible there are different words for „child“(bavshvi) and „own child“(shvili). Moreover, women engage in a surrogacy program precisely because they are mothers themselves and surrogacy seems to be the only solution to improve their “own children’s” material conditions. Thus, seeing surrogacy as a way of being a "proper” mother enables them to stay within the culturally accepted frame of motherhood.