Bøger udgivet af Demeter Press

Dr. Andrea O' Reilly is internationally recognized as the founder of Motherhood Studies (2006) and its subfield Maternal Theory (2007), and creator of the concept of Matricentric Feminism, a feminism for and about mothers (2016) and Matricritics, a literary theory and practice for a reading of mother-focused texts (2021). With this collection O' Reilly continues the conversation on the meaning and nature of motherhood initiated by Adrienne Rich in Of Woman Born close to fifty years ago. In In (M)other Words, O' Reilly shares 25 of her chapters and articles published between 2009-2024 to examine the oppressive and empowering dimensions of mothering and to explore motherhood as institution, experience, subjectivity, and empowerment. The collection considers the central themes and theories of motherhood studies including normative motherhood, feminist mothering, maternal regret, matricentric pedagogy, young mothers, academic motherhood, matricentric feminism, matricritics, motherhood and feminism, the motherhood memoir, the twenty-first-century motherhood movement, mothers and daughters, mothers and sons, pandemic mothering, and the motherline.

Written by a Queer woman of North African and Middle Eastern descent, Human(e) takes a radically non-pathology-based approach to grief and loss. In this intimate and reflective auto-ethnographic book, Bensoussan asserts that grief is a biological imperative; a life-sustaining necessity that is vital to our survival. Human(e) explores how our species has been living with, and metabolizing loss, well before there were licensed professionals and accredited institutions. Bensoussan examines the inadequacy of the idea that grief is normal, as grief goes well beyond the Western-colonial binary of normal and abnormal. Grief is human, and to grieve is to be human. Rachelle seamlessly and beautifully weaves together her vast professional expertise on grief with her own personal lived experiences of loss. Human(e) is a must read for anyone learning to live without.

Audrey Meyerwitz wants to fall in love and have a family. But for this queer 30-something insomniac who's struggled with Generalized Anxiety Disorder since childhood, it's a goal that's far from simple. When best friend Jessica, a recovering alcoholic, helps introvert Audrey with a profile on SheLovesHer, Audrey takes that scary first step toward her lifelong dream. Through online dating, immigrating to Canada, and having a baby with Down Syndrome, she struggles and grows. But when Audrey unearths a secret about her mother, everything about her identity as a mother, a daughter, and a person with mental illness ruptures. How do we create closeness from roots of deep alienation? With humor, honesty, and complexity, Audrey learns that healthy love means accepting gains and losses, taking off the blinders of fantasy, and embracing the messiness that defines human families.

Give and Take: Motherhood and Creative Practice explores the diverse ways contemporary artists navigate the unique tensions of motherhood in all its varied stages. Becoming a mother is a life-changing event that can give mothers greater perspective, drive, and inspiration for making art. But motherhood also takes time and energy from pursuing creative work. This fundamental challenge, this give and take, is explored through this book as it forefronts the art and lives of dancers, playwrights, musicians, visual artists, and creative writers. The book contains thirty-three first person narratives from practicing artists along with written analyses that place these artists' essays within the broader context of arts writing and scholarship about motherhood. The concluding section of the book includes overarching thoughts about how artist mothers can move forward despite structural inequality and cultural bias and includes a resource guide for practical support.

Care(ful) Relationships between Mothers and the Caregivers They Hire offers an interdisciplinary and international approach to the complex issues of carework, primarily focusing on childcare. The diverse collection of authors center their examinations of care by interrogating how class, race, and gender interplay to create inequity and potential. The work shared in Care(ful) Relationships draws from various disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, media studies, literary and dramatic analysis, history, and women's studies while also addressing carework as it is depicted in ages past and contemporary culture. The collection not only seeks to challenge misconceptions and inequity but also examine how the unique personal relationships that form in the labor of care can yield prosocial change.

Plant Your Feet Firmly in Mid-Air addresses how to develop the skills needed in the modern organization, to build and re-build trust, to develop an effective leadership style for the new era, to overcome resistance to change, and to employ new ways of thinking. This is not a book about management theory; rather, it is a book that offers real solutions to the very real problems that managers, executives, and entrepreneurs, face on a daily basis. The author identifies and explains personal mastery skills to guide you through current turbulent changes toward productive outcomes. The principles and practices outlined in this book can make you a better manager of behavioral change than you are today.

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the global world but impacted women with children and careers disproportionately. The social, familial, and professional strains of this crisis birthed with it the opportunity to reflect on the values, expectations, lifestyle, and priorities that have defined motherhood. This book uplifts the shared consciousness of motherhood; the common veil that transcends time, region, and boundary. Part contemporary anthology, part historical narrative, and fully nestled in the tenets of psychological science, this book spotlights the awakenings of 33 mothers of varied ages, ethnicities, family compositions, and professional backgrounds in the United States as they renegotiated motherhood and career. Each reflection offers a window into the heart of a career mother, capturing the kaleidoscope of her struggles, vulnerabilities, and hopes, while empowering her insights. The reflections are bound together by themes that cut across lived maternal experiences, bringing to light a powerful creed for a life re-imagined? one that propels mothers forward in all of their roles.

When her daughter died in November, 2013, she was a parent in search of consolation and looking for similarities to her situation. She began to read the obituary column of her local newspaper and although the author of A Death in the Family: Stories Obits Tell read extensively about death of an adult child, she found obituaries the most comforting and kept returning to them. Day after day, she became obsessed and discovered that obituaries were a specific genre in themselves. This book, written within the tradition of social history, follows a decade of obituaries from the point of view of one author and notices the gradual changes in content, context, and style. In clear and precise writing, Donna McCart Sharkey explores and finds the extraordinary within the captivating life stories ? the brief biographies and at times, autobiographies ? of the newly dead.

Mother Load is a collection of memoir, inner monologue, poetry, and short story which let readers in on some of the realities of mothering from the 1940s to the early 2000' s. This kaleidoscope of courageous, sometimes raw, sometimes loving, narratives bring to the surface the tensions that haunt mothering relationships across generations. The pieces paint pictures of mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters, daughters, and friends. Grief, anger, and loss are here as well as insights, perspective, and gratitude. Moreover, the silence in these relationships has been highlighted: what was assumed, what was unquestioned or undiscussable, what was too shameful or painful to be put into words. The women whose work is collected here differ from one another in a myriad of ways: family history and geographical location, class and racial identity, and education. But the unity among them lies in their commitment to reflection and to the desire to go closer to their own histories and those of their families, and to express the truths of their lives and their experiences. In telling these stories lies hope for better.

Donna McCart Sharkey and Arleen Pare , sisters and writers, have co-edited an anthology Don' t Tell: Family Secrets, about what may be hidden in families. For each individual, even in the same family, what is secret and what is not, may be different. In Don' t Tell: Family Secrets, fifty-nine writers tell their stories in either prose or poetry, of their own family secrets. So often, mothers bear the burden, stand over time as the keepers of these secrets, trying to keep families intact. Spanning continents, cultures, wars, belief systems, and the private lives of families, the secrets in this book range from over one hundred years ago to the present and include stories – some serious, others quirky, some resolved, and still others that remain a mystery.

This book brings critical, scholarly attention to the systematic positioning and subjective experiences of mothers involved in child protection processes in "e; risk"e; -based child protection systems (Parton, Thorpe and Wattam; Connolley; Swift and Callahan). While mothers are typically the primary focus of child protection prevention and investigations (Azzopardi et al.; Fallon et al.; Swift and Callahan), their gendered experiences, challenges and triumphs are seldom given space in the academic literature, practice and/or public spaces to be seen or heard. Chapters in this volume build on existing literature to illustrate the structural positioning and/or lived experiences of mothers who come into contact with child protection for a variety of reasons: substance (ab)use, positive HIV status, child injury, fetal alcohol syndrome, colonial assessment methodologies, young age, incarceration, childbirth, and intimate partner violence. This book offers three unique contributions to existing literature on mothering in child protection. First, it creates space for mothers involved in child protection to have their voices heard. Second, it acknowledges the centrality of mothers' subjective experience in keeping children safe. Finally, it challenges dominant, often dehumanizing narratives of mothers in involved in child protection through providing a more nuanced understanding of their lives. Ultimately this anthology calls for a fundamental rethinking of how mothers involved in child protection proceedings are conceptualized in child protection research, policy and practice. It is recommended that mothers voices must be central to humanely reforming child protection systems.

This interdisciplinary anthology explores a wide range of intersecting issues contributing to and arising from gun violence. Millions of people are hurt and killed by gun violence globally, and the traumatic realities of these events are navigated by individuals and communities widely. In this context, gun violence fundamentally threatens social functioning in significant ways, and profoundly test the resilience of families. The resulting transformations carry social, political, legal and economic implications for mothering, family dynamics, and community engagement. This collaborative volume brings together diverse perspectives intended to deconstruct perceptions, realities, risks and impacts of gun violence, as seen by researchers, educators, community advocates, public health/health care experts, criminologists, social workers, field-based practitioners, and victims/survivors of gun violence. The distinct and broad range of contributions in this volume critically unpacks representations, stress and trauma, resilience, advocacy/activism, policymaking, family functioning, social justice and equity, governmentality and the criminal justice system, public health/health care, and community programs/interventions. Ultimately, the work is a unique contribution to the literature in which there is a lack of wide academic consideration of gun violence and a demonstrably unsatisfactory political response stretching back decades.

This graphic memoir looks at intergenerational experiences of domestic and gender-based violence through a maternal gaze. The book's 13 chapters document a mother's attempts to reconcile violent incidents through visual representation, psychically reordering them in the context of her changing temporal body. The unexpected return of trauma memories captured in mixed media reveals an intricate balance between remembering and forgetting. Snippets of memory collide on the page, illustrating in bold graphics and fragmented text how maternal bodies react to claim or reject the stories memory brings. At question is how violence interacts with mental health, addiction, disability, gender, and language, and where or if accountability for transgressions exists except in the author's mind. While pushing the boundaries of ethical storytelling, this research-creation text explores trauma memory in a textured overlay of images and text. The textured hand-made paper cradles a constant search for identity, opening up the body surgically and metaphorically while pieces are changed, damaged, and removed. Violent acts entrenched in the social fabrics of domestic life disrupt mothering practices rendered in circular frames to symbolize mothers? resilience and their life-giving wombs.

"During the pandemic, the focus has been on how education and social interaction with peers were integral to children's functioning. However, very little regard was given to another very important question- how do our children feel about the pandemic and how do they process this experience? Why is it assumed that cognitive functioning and social interaction are the most significant areas of child development? What emotional factors are at play? Are the children alright? How are their families coping and does this have an impact on the children? What I hope to achieve by compiling this edited collection is to bring awareness to the child's perspective, within the family unit, in addition to addressing other contributing factors that had an impact on their coping mechanisms. This collection will hopefully inform whether the choices, that were made and should be made related to children, have been sound ones and perhaps should be re-examined as a result of this book's findings, conclusions and speculations."--

A central aim of motherhood studies is to examine and theorize normative motherhood. Where does it come from? What are its defining features and demands? How does it work as a regulatory discourse and practice across differences of age, class, race, ability, sexuality, and region? What is the impact of normative motherhood on women's lives? What does an intersectional analysis of normative motherhood reveal? How is normative motherhood reflected and enacted in public policy, workplace practices, family arrangements and so on? How is normative motherhood represented and resisted in literature, art, photography, and film? How do or may women resist normative motherhood? This collection explores these questions of normative motherhood under three interrelated topics: Regulations, Representations, and Reclamations.

The 2nd edition includes a new preface that considers how matricentric feminism in positioning mothering as a verb affords a gender-neutral understanding of motherwork and allows for an appreciation of how motherwork is deeply gendered and how this may be challenged and changed through empowered mothering The book argues that the category of mother is distinct from the category of woman, and that many of the problems mothers face are specific to women's role and identity as mothers. Indeed, mothers are oppressed under patriarchy as women and as mothers. Consequently, mothers need a feminism of their own, one that positions mothers' concerns as the starting point for a theory and politic of empowerment. O'Reilly terms this new mode of feminism matricentic feminism and the book explores how it is represented and experienced in theory, activism, and practice.

"An Artist and a Mother is a book of visual artworks and essays that speak to the diverse ways artists balance creative life with the demands of mothering. It includes thirty seven essays describing the work of thirty-nine international artists and an art collective, as well as a resource guide with books, journals, magazines, organizations, and other resources. This book seeks to highlight the growing body of artist mothers who are making visually and conceptually interesting artwork not just despite their status as mothers, but often because of the inspiration and challenges that come with motherhood."--

together we climb the mountain because I climb this mountain for you together we wade through the river together we shelter in the trees gathered with my support crew or standing solo exuding the theatrics of the stage or in the quiet Zen of retreat I unravel myself open myself surrender myself to this bold and broad and astonishing experience that will release you my child into the world and will forge my will my heart my being into the wild depths of motherhood Held in the story of Persephone, we start where all women now begin their birth journey-with Zeus, in the structure of patriarchy. Then we move beyond, through the supportive hold of mother Demeter, then further into ourselves until we find the unique wonder of woman, through courage, strength, and surrender, to the breath and calm and ecstasy she can hold. Written from the embodied experience of home birth mother and GP obstetrician, offering pregnant women and birth attendants insights into the hospital system, and the beauty that can be found in natural birthing.

This Life I've Bled is the painfully honest true story of small town girl's symbolically bloody, stigmatized life relating her experiences with alcoholism, drug addiction, religion, mental health issues, bisexuality, abortion, divorce, and the accidental loss of all three of her children, two of whom died ten days apart in 2015. As depressing as that sounds, the story is infused with humour as quirky as the author herself and is intended as a hopeful handbook on how to survive a life on planet earth.

The author anticipated building an ordinary family. And that's what happened. But mental illness and grief also happened, undermining the security of home and changing the familial experience from ordinary to extraordinary. A hard story to live, a hard story to read, this book describes the day-to-day life in a family navigating their increasingly fraught lives. A must read for any family who has experienced this and a must read for anyone wanting to know about this.

Moving Meals and Migrating Mothers: Culinary cultures, diasporic dishes and familial foodways explores the complex interplay between the important global issues of food, families and migration. We have an introduction and twelve additional chapters which we have organised into three parts: Part I Moving Meals, Markets and Migrant Mothers