Author: Jenny Björklund Publisher: Springer Nature ISBN: 3030728927 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 298
Book Description
This book questions why so many mothers leave their families in twenty-first-century Swedish literature, analyzing literary representations of maternal abandonment in relation to sociopolitical discourses. The volume draws on a queer-theoretical framework in order to highlight norm-critical dimensions, failure, and resistance in literature about motherhood. Jenny Björklund argues that novels about mothers who leave can be understood as ways to problematize and challenge Swedish-branded values like gender equality and a progressive family politics that promotes ideals of involved parenthood, the nuclear family, and pronatalism. The book also raises questions beyond the Swedish context about maternal ambivalence, family politics, and privilege and discusses how literature can work as resistance and provide alternatives to the current social order.
Author: Helena Wahlström Henriksson Publisher: Springer Nature ISBN: 3031172116 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 190
Book Description
This open access volume offers original essays on how motherhood and mothering are represented in contemporary fiction and life writing across several national contexts. Providing a broad range of perspectives in terms of geopolitical places, thematic concerns, and theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches, it demonstrates the significance of literary narratives for understanding and critiquing motherhood and mothering as social phenomena and subjective experiences. The chapters contextualize motherhood and mothering in terms of their particular national and cultural location and analyze narratives about mothers who are firmly placed in one national context, as well as those who are in “in-between” positions due to migrant experiences. The contributions foreground and link together the themes central to the volume: embodied experience and maternal embodiment; notions of what is “normal” or natural (or not) about motherhood; maternal health and illness; mother-daughter relations; maternality and memory; and the (im)possibilities of giving voice to the mother. They raise questions about how motherhood and mothering are marked by absence and/or presence, as well as by profound ambivalences.
Author: Klara Goedecke Publisher: Springer Nature ISBN: 3031117719 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 209
Book Description
This book discusses men’s friendships in relation to queer, discursive, and intersectional feminist theories. It analyses stories of intimacy, touch, hugs, and conversations, connecting these with current discussions within feminism and critical masculinity studies on “new” men, men’s political activism, and how friendships are lived and conceptualised in relation to heteronormative relationship ideals. Drawing on individual and dyadic interviews with middle-class Swedish men, all engaged in or sympathetic to feminist issues in some sense, this volume shows that Swedish gender equality ideologies as well as feminist, therapeutic, neo-liberal, and individualist discourses prevalent in the Western world structured the men’s friendships and their engagement with gender politics. Chapters cover friendship temporalities, gendered friendship ideals, friendship as men’s politics, and friendship as performed in interaction. Bridging the literatures of feminist research and friendship, the author points to tensions and contradictions in pro-feminist men’s political projects and in contemporary masculine positions.
Author: Thomas Dumm Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 067403113X Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 208
Book Description
“What does it mean to be lonely?” Thomas Dumm asks. His inquiry, documented in this book, takes us beyond social circumstances and into the deeper forces that shape our very existence as modern individuals. The modern individual, Dumm suggests, is fundamentally a lonely self. Through reflections on philosophy, political theory, literature, and tragic drama, he proceeds to illuminate a hidden dimension of the human condition. His book shows how loneliness shapes the contemporary division between public and private, our inability to live with each other honestly and in comity, the estranged forms that our intimate relationships assume, and the weakness of our common bonds. A reading of the relationship between Cordelia and her father in Shakespeare’s King Lear points to the most basic dynamic of modern loneliness—how it is a response to the problem of the “missing mother.” Dumm goes on to explore the most important dimensions of lonely experience—Being, Having, Loving, and Grieving. As the book unfolds, he juxtaposes new interpretations of iconic cultural texts—Moby-Dick, Death of a Salesman, the film Paris, Texas, Emerson’s “Experience,” to name a few—with his own experiences of loneliness, as a son, as a father, and as a grieving husband and widower. Written with deceptive simplicity, Loneliness as a Way of Life is something rare—an intellectual study that is passionately personal. It challenges us, not to overcome our loneliness, but to learn how to re-inhabit it in a better way. To fail to do so, this book reveals, will only intensify the power that it holds over us.
Author: Harry Willekens Publisher: Göttingen University Press ISBN: 3863954254 Category : Law in general. Comparative and uniform law. Jurisprudence Languages : en Pages : 182
Book Description
Who is a child’s legal mother? Must a child have exactly one mother, can it have two or three, or can it have two fathers, but no mother? Or has the concept of motherhood become obsolete and should we just talk of parenthood in a gender neutral way? Questions such as these would have appeared esoteric only a few decades ago, but as a result of new social developments (such as frequent family reconstitutions, gay and lesbian emancipation or surrogacy) and of technological innovations (such as egg and embryo donations) they have become issues in a vehement debate. The interdisciplinary contributions to this book focus on the legal definition of motherhood, on the way in which legal conceptions structure the social discourse on motherhood (and vice versa), and on the influence of legal rules on power relations between mothers, fathers, children and the state. Among the issues addressed are - the challenges to our understanding of the legal regulation of motherhood by developments in reproductive medicine; - the challenges to our understanding of the legal regulation of motherhood by parental constellations deviating from the mother-father-model (single motherhood by choice, same-gender parenthood, multiple parenthood); - the exercise of parental rights in case of parental separation and the impact of legal rules on the bargaining positions of mothers and fathers.
Author: Jenny Björklund Publisher: ISBN: 9781443885935 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
In the new millennium, categories of identity have become particularly destabilized with the emergence of a new generation of people in the Nordic region who demand more dynamic and fluid identities. New Dimensions of Diversity in Nordic Culture and Society reinvestigates the tired concept of â oediversityâ to make room for dynamic new realities, as well as the ample new questions to which they give rise. This volume assumes diversity to be a fundamental feature of Nordic modernity. Given that the Nordic countries consistently rank among the worldâ (TM)s wealthiest, most educated, and most egalitarian, these case studies provide important counter-narratives to prevailing local and global discourses of Nordic-ness. The contributors not only interrogate historical categories of diversity in a Nordic context, including gender, sex, class, ethnicity, and race; they also show how these categories intersect. They examine new forms of, and platforms for, diverse ideas and creative expression, including fluid masculinities, digital cultures, new media, and fashion. They question the terms on which the Nordic regionâ (TM)s indigenous peoples, the Sàmi and the Greenlandic Inuit, as well as stateless people such as the Kurds, are brought into Nordic discussions of diversity, citizenship, and agency, and analyze the implications of particular neo-nationalist and patriarchal discourses that have emerged since the turn of the century. The book draws from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and interdisciplinary fields, and will spark productive and critical conversations among all with an interest in the national and regional cultures, subcultures, and social dynamics that inform modern life in the Nordic region.
Author: J. Björklund Publisher: Springer ISBN: 1137364963 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 213
Book Description
Here, Björklund shows that Swedish literary discourses on lesbianism provocatively contrast with a widely accepted view that attitudes toward homosexuality have gradually become more tolerant. The lasting power of negative discourses upends the assumption that Sweden's progressive laws reflect progressive attitudes toward homosexuality.
Author: Berit Åström Publisher: Springer Nature ISBN: 3030713113 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 259
Book Description
This edited volume addresses how single mothers and fathers are represented in novels, self-help literature, daily newspapers, film and television, as well as within their own narratives in interviews on social media. With proportions varying between countries, the number of single parents has been increasing steadily since the 1970s in the Western world. Contributions to this volume analyse how various societies respond to these parents and family forms. Through a range of materials, methodologies and national perspectives, chapters make up three sections to cover single mothers, single fathers and solo mothers (single women who became parents through assisted reproductive technologies). The authors reveal that single parenthood is divided along the lines of gender and socioeconomic status, with age, sexuality and the reason for being a single parent coming into play. Chapter 11 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
Author: Jenny Björklund
Author: Helena Wahlström Henriksson
Author: Per Esben Svelstad
Author: Klara Goedecke
Author: Thomas Dumm
Author: Harry Willekens
Author: Jack Halberstam
Author: Jenny Björklund
Author: J. Björklund
Author: Berit Åström