JaneMaree Maher

Framing the mother: childhood obesity, maternal responsibility and care

Currently in developed nations, childhood obesity is generating widespread concern and prompting social and institutional responses. Obesity is constructed as a broad public health crisis, but individuals are constructed as responsible for their own bodies and body sizes within this crisis. We are particularly interested in two aspects that focus on women as central to this phenomenon; the first is the imputation of maternal responsibility for the weight of children and the second is the role that specific fears about flesh and womens bodies play in how childhood obesity is represented. We analyse media representations of childhood obesity in Australia and draw out the discourses of maternal responsibility and the intertwining of mothers and childrens bodies. We frame the childhood obesity crisis within a broader discussion of women, care and responsibility, suggesting that childhood obesity offers another embodied location to reinforce and extend womens roles and responsibilities as mothers, in response to changing patterns of work and care.

To be or not to be a mother? Women negotiating cultural representations of mothering

This article is based on a recently completed study of fertility decision-making in Victoria, Australia. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 100 women, it explores how dominant discourses of mothering influence women in their life decisions about children. While much research indicates that all women negotiate dominant ideals of good mothering, our findings suggest that such stereotypes need to be further broken down, since women with and without children respond to different aspects of such ideals. For women who have children, images of the ‘good mother’ are less prevalent than pragmatic concerns about how to manage mothering. Women without children, in contrast, understand mothering as all-encompassing and potentially overwhelming. These findings suggest that Australian women share ideals and assumptions about mothering with their counterparts in the United Kingdom and the United States, but they also point to an increasing gap between how mothering is viewed and how it is practised.

The “New Man” is in the House: Young Men, Social Change, and Housework:

Many scholars and journalists argue that housework is slowly being transformed in the late-modern era, with men doing more housework, women doing less, and outside help being utilized more often. Much of this optimism is held out for the younger age groups, especially members of “Generation X” (those born between 1965 and 1979). Drawing on findings from interviews with 22 middle-class Generation X men, this article examines the meaning and value of housework for these men and the extent to which it conforms to “optimistic accounts” of change (McMahon, 1999). Contrary to popular images of the “New Man” and the “New Woman,” a picture of continuity rather than change emerges overall. Generation X men are largely disinterested in the identity and housework possibilities that flow from discourses of equity and fairness, content to be domestic “helpers.” The mens comfort with their current arrangement is identified as a major impediment in achieving equality. The only area when mens practices might be changing in any meaningful way is with respect to fathering.

Between provisioning and consuming?: Children, mothers and ‘childhood obesity’

Abstract Contemporary Western societies focus considerable policy and media attention on the ‘epidemic of childhood obesity’. In this paper we examine the mobilisation of notions of responsibility and consumption in these discussions, and consider the implications they have for women as mothers. In particular, we are interested to explore the potential conflicts mothers face as care providers and nurturers when responsible care is framed as withholding or managing the food consumption of children. We argue that the competing discursive frameworks around mothers’ food provision invite further theorisation that explicitly addresses nourishment and consumption as elements of maternal practice and care. We draw on the work of Neysmith and Reitsma-Street (2005) regarding ‘provisioning’ to undertake a critical examination of the discourses in the ‘childhood obesity’ epidemic, with particular attention to Australian media and policy discussions. According to Neysmith and Reitsma-Street, mothers are central to social ‘provisioning’, that is, the labour that secures the necessities of life. This provisioning framework captures paid market work and unpaid caring labour, policy settings and social locations, allowing for a rich conceptualisation of the conditions mothers negotiate as they provide for their children. Taking up the possibilities of this framework, we argue that, insofar as health risks and responsibilities are largely individualised, mothering is framed as primarily about giving, and childhood obesity is considered a disease of affluence and over-consumption, imperatives for maternal provisioning and nurture are potentially in conflict with critiques of consumption and excess.

Freeing Time? The ‘Family Time Economies’ of Nurses

This study uses the ‘family time economies’ concept for a nuanced investigation of family work-care experiences in 20 Australian nursing families. The family time economy captures information on the management and coordination of work and care responsibilities in families. Our study investigates how nurses were utilizing nursing flexibility to support time for caring for their families. We report on couple interview research which offered important insights into how shift work and family time are described and negotiated between partners caring for children. The study shows that the complex work schedules generated by shift work are reflected in domestic life, as nurses and their partners use available employment flexibility to ensure they have time for family care. The ‘taylorized’ allotment of time within the family competed with the desire to make, and preserve, free and unstructured family time, reflecting the incursion of, and resistance to, industrial temporalities in the familial sphere.

A mother by trade: Australian women reflecting mothering as activity, not identity

In Engendering Motherhood , McMahon argues that contemporary motherhood is ‘contested terrain’. McMahon suggests that as contemporary Western societies have focused on selfrealisation as the means to adulthood, the relationship between motherhood and adult femininity has been unsettled. This, in turn, has led to difficulty in thinking about motherhood. Angela Hattery suggests that this formulation of motherhood as a site of conflict in contemporary societies has tended to underpin many of the accounts of motherhood generated in scholarly and popular domains. Lisa Brooks’ review in 1996 of 12 feminist investigations of motherhood, entitled ‘Love, Toil and Trouble: Motherhood and Feminist Politics’, points to the difficulties faced by feminist scholars seeking simultaneously to challenge oppressive structures of mothering, recognise women’s work as mothers and rethink the activities of mothering. The ‘contested’ terrain of mothering is my focus in this article, as I draw here on data from two different research projects in which I have been involved. I suggest that contestation and role conflict, while prominent in the theoretical literature, are not so prominent in women’s accounts of their own mothering work. Anita Garey has suggested that mothering activity often gets neglected because motherhood is defined as a state of being, but these women describe their mothering as ‘doing’ not ‘being’. Rather than identity-based assertions about being mothers and what that entailed, women described the work that they did as mothers. It is of particular importance to locate this analysis in its social and historical context. The research projects on which I am drawing took place between December 2000 and October 2003, which marked a period in Australian society where discussions of motherhood were prominent for a number of reasons. Policy initiatives such as paid maternity leave, located in a discourse of falling birth rates, focused public attention on mothering and on feminism’s relationship to mothers. Articles with titles like ‘Mothering: Feminism’s Unfinished Business’; ‘The Feminists Kept Mum on the Real Story of Motherhood’; and ‘Feminism: the Evil Hand behind the Mummy’s Curse’ predominated in major daily newspapers. Debates occurred between ‘mothers’ and ‘non-mothers’ in the opinion columns. This discussion seemed to reflect substantial unease about the changing role of mothers in Australian society. Women’s workforce participation and desire for other activities in conjunction with, or perhaps instead of, mothering suggested that Australian Feminist Studies, Vol. 20, No. 46, March 2005

Gender, Space, and Discourse across Borders: Talking Gender in Cyberspace

The possibility of online student collaboration over cyberspace for two groups of students in Australia and Singapore was conceived by JaneMaree Maherat Monash University in Australia in 2005 after hearing a paper given by a colleague that detailed the experience of a threeway cross-country dialogue using flexible learning technologies (see Pickering et al. 2004). A recent visit to the National University of Singapore had elicited the information that a gender studies minor had just been established; on the basis of these two factors, Maher approached NUS gender studies colleagues, and Chng Huang Hoon followed up with enthusiasm. An email correspondence ensued, which established our mutual interests as feminist pedagogues in gender, space, and teaching, and we decided to generate a cross-national collaboration within the

Accumulating care Mothers beyond the conflicting temporalities of caring and work

Women who mother and undertake paid work are often represented as moving between separate spheres of caring and paid labour whilst facing intractable temporal conflicts. Despite this conflict, often represented as a ‘care time deficit’, mothers in western societies have continued their movement into the paid workforce. I examine the different temporal modes of paid work and caring labour that women undertake and argue that there are temporal commonalities as well as conflicts in paid work and care. I propose that women’s diverse labours across these spheres are directed towards accumulating care, and suggest women may be generating a new temporal framework for work and care beyond conflicting schedules. I argue that women’s practices do occur across complex and potentially conflictive temporalities but are unified by a focus on the accumulation of care. Recognizing women’s capacity to draw together and synthesize work across diverse temporal orders may allow for greater understanding of how women create and use time to give care.

Social class, anxieties and mothers' foodwork.

In the context of concerns about childhood obesity, mothers are placed at the forefront of responsibility for shaping the eating behaviour and consequently the health of their young children. This is evident in a multitude of diverse sites such as government reports, health promotion materials, reality TV shows and the advice of childcare nurses and preschools. These sites produce a range of resources available to mothers to draw on to constitute themselves as mothers in terms of caring for their childrens health. Drawing on a qualitative study of mothers recruited through three Australian preschool centres, this article examines how the working-class and middle-class mothers of preschool-aged children engage with knowledge about motherhood, children and health and how those engagements impact on their mothering, their foodwork and their children. We argue that, unlike the working-class mothers pathologised in some literature on obesity, these working-class mothers demonstrated a no-nonsense (but still responsibilised) approach to feeding their children. The middle-class mothers, on the other hand, were more likely to engage in practices of self-surveillance and to demonstrate considerable anxieties about the appropriateness of their practices for their childrens current and future health.

Vanity: 21st century selves.

It has become something of a cliche that Western culture is obsessed with celebrity, glamour, and the opportunities ordinary people are now given (reality television, social networking sites, blogging) to become famous. These new engagements between fame and obscurity have been accompanied by energetic debates about the self, image and vanity. Similar debates are also underway in a domain apparently quite different from this digital realm – the corporeal domain of health, fitness, beauty and anti-ageing. Vanity, it seems, can account for both our least and most bodily modes of making the self. Despite these growing areas of debate, little or no sociological or cultural studies research on vanity has been conducted to date. This book sets out to remedy this. Exploring a range of sites of social and cultural production – from Helen Mirrens red bikini to The Biggest Loser reality weight loss show, from suffragists to Viagra, from anti-ageing medicine to Facebook – the book takes an engaging, sophisticated and wide-ranging look at new ideas and practices of vanity. How are contemporary subjects to cope with concurrent pressures both towards self-absorption and away from it? Taking an explicitly gendered approach to these questions, Vanity: 21st Century Selves conducts a broad analysis of a key concept shaping contemporary Western societies and their ways of understanding the self.