Maud Perrier

Middle-class Mothers’ Moralities and ‘Concerted Cultivation’: Class Others, Ambivalence and Excess

Drawing on a small qualitative study of mothers in the UK, this article argues that although concerted cultivation and intensive parenting are legitimated as ‘good’ parenting, these discourses have uneven effects on middle-class mothers’ moral identities. My contention is that by focusing too much on processes of capital accumulation and transmission, studies of parenting risk simplifying the contradictory effects of these discourses on middle-class parents’ subjectivities. I argue that accounting for how power is enacted on as well as by middle-class mothers provides some resources for an account of contemporary parenting that better reflects the complexity and diversity of middle-class mothers’ experiences, including their ambivalence about concerted cultivation and their fears about the excesses of the middle-class emphasis on education.

Uneven Relationalities, Collective Biography and Sisterly Affect in Neoliberal Universities

This article deploys a collective biographical methodology as a political and epistemological intervention in order to explore the emotional and affective politics of academic work for women in neoliberal universities. The managerial practices of contemporary universities tend to elevate disembodied reason over emotion; to repress, commodify, or co-opt emotional and affective labor; to increase individualization and competition among academic workers; and to disregard the relational work that the article suggests is essential for well-being at work. The apparent marginalization of feminist and feminine ways of being, thinking, and feeling in academia is examined through close readings of three narrative vignettes, which are based on memories of the everyday academic spaces of meetings, workshops, and mentoring. These stories explore moments of the breaking of ties among women and between men and women, as well as document how feminist relationalities can bind and exclude. The article suggests that academic ties are both part of the problem and the solution to countering neoliberal policies, and that academic relationships, especially with other women, are often experienced as unrealized spaces of hope. Building on feminist scholarship about race and diversity, the article reflects on how relational practices like collective biography create both inclusions and exclusions. Nevertheless, it suggests that the methodology of collective biography might engender more sustainable and ethical ways of being in academic workplaces because it provides the resources to begin to create a new collective imaginary of academia.

Refiguring the Postmaternal

In Confronting Postmaternal Thinking: Feminism, Memory, Care (2011) Julie Stephens identifies a significant cultural anxiety about care-giving, nurturing and human dependency she calls ‘postmaternal’ thinking, based on analysis of offline and online cultural texts and oral histories about maternal experiences. Stephens argues that maternal forms of care have been rejected in the public sphere and marginalised to the private domain through an elaborate process of cultural forgetting, in turn contributing to the current dominance of what Stephens terms a degendered form of feminism. Stephens argues that an alternative politic where human dependency and vulnerability – rather than market performance – are imagined as the primary connection between people has been forgotten. This is manifest in the realm of social policy through the reduction and in some cases elimination of social supports for women as mothers. In the cultural sphere, Stephens cites the anxieties over motherhood and mothering articulated in the genres of popular and advice literature aimed at professional women, and in the conflicted memoirs of young women recounting their experiences as children of feminist mothers. The postmaternal thus describes for Stephens the contemporary condition of forgetting, obscuring, or rendering culturally illegible the maternal in both social policy and histories of feminism, whereby women’s claims as mothers are no longer seen as political. Stephens situates her diagnosis of the postmaternalism of contemporary social policies in Europe, Australia and North America as one of the defining characteristics of neoliberal policy-making. In this sense, Stephens’ book makes an important contribution to theorising neoliberalism as a cultural and political formation. The forgetting of the vulnerability, intimacy, emotion and affective labour entailed by mothering is an important yet undertheorised dimension of how neoliberal policies transform social responsibilities for dependent others into ‘burdens’ to be borne by individuals. Stephens’ critique of this forgetting of maternal thinking, and her return to theorists of care such as Sara Ruddick for inspiration, extends to the telling and retelling of histories of feminist politics in relation to experiences of mothering. The aim of this special issue, Refiguring the Postmaternal, is to explore the concept of the ‘postmaternal’ as a critique of and response to changing cultural, political and economic conditions for mothering and motherhood (Kawash 2011; Giles 2014; Wilson and Yochim 2015). Our initial interest in bringing together critical reflections on Stephens’ book emerged from our inquiry into alternative models of feminine and feminist relationalities and the ways that metaphors of maternity and sorority have tended to dominate feminist

Belly Casts and Placenta Pills: Refiguring Postmaternal Entrepreneurialism

ABSTRACT This article takes at its starting point the idea that maternalism and entrepreneurialism are necessarily antithetical as Julie Stephens argues in Confronting Postmaternal Thinking: Feminism, Memory, and Care [2012. New York: Columbia University Press]. Building on scholarship which shows how motherhood has become commercialised and commodified in contemporary culture, we extend this field by investigating how mothers who are providers of services to other mothers and pregnant women are negotiating neoliberalism and entrepreneurialism. Through an empirical investigation of birth and parenting entrepreneurs – including hypnobirthing classes and placenta pill businesses – in Bristol, UK we argue that our self-employed participants were building community and care economies within neoliberal modes of self-production, thus suggesting a more complex and ambivalent relationship between entrepreneurialism and postmaternalism. We suggest that the experiences of women entrepreneurs or ‘mumpreneurs’ offer insights into how the spaces of work might be, counter to Stephens’ characterisation, places of negotiation and struggle for the politics of feminism, rather than sites of ‘anti-maternalism’ or the ‘forgetting’ of maternalism. Moreover, our participants’ accounts were strongly shaped by feminist ethics of care thus challenging the representation of such services as therapeutic postfeminist technologies of self-work.

‘Birth work’ accompaniment and PhD supervision: an alternative feminist pedagogy for the neoliberal university

ABSTRACT In this paper, we discuss how ‘with-woman’ midwifery and doula care provide resources for rethinking the theory and practice of academic supervision from a feminist perspective. We identify how the tradition of accompaniment in both birth work and academia is under threat given the economic reforms facing public sector education and health care. Despite these pressures, we suggest that the practice of focusing on the pregnant woman as an ‘expert’ on her pregnancy rather than on the foetus or the delivery – that is, the ‘product’ of her pregnancy – would help transform how we theorise and practise academic supervision. The aim of the supervisory relation would mean supporting the student’s direct relation to the intellectual, embodied and emotional process of completing the PhD. Such an approach suggests ways in which the pedagogical practices of contemporary midwifery and doula care can inform academic supervision in the neoliberal university.

An archival feminist pedagogy: unlearning and objects as affective knowledge companions

Abstract This paper is based on workshops conducted with students at Bristol University with some of the materials from the Feminist Archive South. We explore how the sensory wonder of the archives enriched and reshaped the practice of feminist pedagogy especially with regard to the interface between ontology and epistemology. We argue that the feminist archive is an important resource which incites us to shift our focus on the process of knowledge production as stories encountered in the archive can challenge the authority and coherence of dominant feminist stories. This can produce feelings of disorientation which act as important moments through which different kinds of feminist knowledge can emerge. Our approach places feelings at the centre of encounters with knowledge because of the mutual entanglement of thinking and feeling rendered salient in the feminist archive. Finally, these processes facilitate different kinds of student–teacher collaboration, with students positioned as co-researchers working to document and interpret the feelings, knowledge and transformations that emerge from the encounter-with the feminist archive. The objects we encountered worked as knowledge companions to stimulate collaborative (un)learning and to produce unique forms of affective knowledge.