Maternal Geographies: Mothering In and Out of Place

By Jennufer L. Johnson

This collection broaches the intersections of critical motherhood studies and feminist geography. Contributors demonstrate that an important dimension of the social construction of motherhood is how mothering happens in space and place, leading to the articulation of diverse maternal geographies. Through 16 concise chapters divided into three thematic sections, the contributors provide an account of motherhood and mothering as spatial practices that are embedded in relations of power across time and place. While some contributors explore how dominant discourses of motherhood seek to keep mothers in their place, others take up the notion of maternal geographies as productive in their own right and follow their subjects as they create a new sense of place. Collectively, the authors demonstrate that mothers are produced and regulated as subjects in relation to space and place, and also that practices of mothering produce spatial relationships.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Demeter Press
• Release date: May 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781772582383

Book preview

Geographies

Maternal Geographies

Mothering In and Out of Place

edited by Jennifer L. Johnson & Krista Johnston

Maternal Geographies

Mothering In and Out of Place

Edited by Jennifer L. Johnson and Krista Johnston

Copyright © 2019 Demeter Press

Individual copyright to their work is retained by the authors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Front cover image: Maternity Leaves: Nine Paces © Lizzie Philps, 2014 (lizziephilps.com)

Front cover artwork: Michelle Pirovich

Typesetting: Michelle Pirovich

eBook: tikaebooks.com

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Maternal geographies : mothering in and out of place

Edited by Jennifer L. Johnson and Krista Johnston.

Names: Johnson, Jennifer L. (Jennifer Lesley), 1976- editor. | Johnston, Krista, 1977- editor.

Description: Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: Canadiana 20190083948 | ISBN 9781772582000 (softcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Motherhood—Social aspects. | LCSH: Mothers— Social conditions. | LCSH: Feminist geography.

Classification: LCC HQ759 .M38 2019 | DDC 306.874/3—dc23

We acknowledge and wish to express our gratitude to the numerous people who have read and commented on the chapters in this collection. We are especially grateful to the anonymous peer reviewers who provided detailed critiques with helpful suggestions for improvements. The omissions remain our own. Thank you also to Caitlin McAuliffe and Kana Tagawa for research assistance and to the Laurentian University Research Fund.

Contents

Chapter One

Maternal Geographies: Mothering In and Out of Place

Jennifer L. Johnson and Krista Johnston

Part I

A Woman’s Place: Making Maternal Spaces

Chapter Two

Constructing Home through Mothering: A Case Study of Early Samoan Wives in Japan

Minako Kuramitsu

Chapter Three

May: Mothering in Space and Place, Painting and Poem

Wanda Campbell

Chapter Four

Mothering, Geography, and Spaces of Play

Laurel O’Gorman

Chapter Five

Spatial Practices of Care, Knowledge, and Becoming among Mothers of Children with Autism

Karen Falconer Al-Hindi

Chapter Six

A Global Positioning System: On Finding Myself as a Mother in the Romantic Landscape

Elizabeth Philps

Part II:

In and Out of Place: Pregnancy, Mothering, Research, and the Workplace

Chapter Seven

Good Mothers? Geographies of Sexualized Labour and Mothering in the Strip Trades in Northern Ontario

Tracy Gregory and Jennifer L. Johnson

Chapter Eight

PLACEnta: Finding Our Way Home

Jules Arita Koostachin

Chapter Nine

Pregnancy, Gender, and Career Progression: The Visible Mother in the Workplace

Danielle Drozdzewski and Natascha Klocker

Chapter Ten

Belly, Baby, Boundaries: The Effect of Pregnancy on Research Relationships

Shana Calixte

Chapter Eleven

Fields of Care: Autoethnography of the Politics of Pregnancy and Foodwork in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Emma Sharp

Part III:

Spatial Practices and the Regulation of Motherhood

Chapter Twelve

Engineering the Good Mother: A Case Study of Opportunity NYC

Carolyn Fraker

Chapter Thirteen

Mothers Up-Close in Argentine Cinema

Nadia Der-Ohannesian

Chapter Fourteen

Geographies of Care and Peripheral Citizenship among Mothers of the Brazilian Bolsa Família Program

Nathalie Reis Itaboraí

Chapter Fifteen

Parce que sans ça tu les oublies, les chansons: Mothering between Solidarity and Difference through Francophone Places and Networks in Kingston, Ontario

Laurence Simard-Gagnon

Chapter Sixteen

LGBT Families and Motherless Children: Tracking Heteronormative Resistances in Canada, Australia, and Ireland

Catherine Nash, Andrew Gorman-Murray, and Kath Browne

Notes on Contributors

Chapter 1

Maternal Geographies: Mothering In and Out of Place

Jennifer L. Johnson and Krista Johnston

The purpose of this collection is to attend to the spatial practices of mothering. Our aim is to explore how ideas about motherhood, and mothers themselves, are produced through the spaces they occupy and how these spaces are animated through the act of caring for children. We enter this conversation at the intersection of feminist geography and critical motherhood studies—two fields that continue to attract many voices into a critical interdisciplinary dialogue about motherhood. In what follows, we build on these conversations and invite the reader to think about how motherhood produces and is produced through space and place. We present our thinking about what we refer to as maternal geographies and introduce the reader to geographies of mothers, motherhood, and mothering as explored by the contributors to this collection.

This collection brings together critical studies of motherhood across the fields of feminist geography, women’s and gender studies, sexuality studies, sociology, anthropology, fine arts, poetry, and film; the contributions of these interdisciplinary scholars reference the geo-graphical contexts of Aotearoa/New Zealand, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, the Eastern Caribbean, Great Britain, Japan and Samoa, and the United States. Our aim is to bring the reader into conversation with feminist research on mothering that accounts for the production of motherhood as a spatial practice embedded in, and productive of, spatial relations of power (Hardy and Wiedmer). There are several important areas where research on motherhood and space already thrive—such as in studies of unpaid motherwork (Johnstone and Todd; Dillaway and Pare), transnational migration (Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila; Raghuram; Parreñas; Horton; Tyldum), pregnancy (Longhurst and Johnston), breastfeeding (Boyer, Of Care and Commodities; Groleau et al.), hospital birth spaces (Fannin; Hardy and Wiedmer), and the ways in which affect overlays geographies of motherhood as an institution and mothering as a socially constructed practice (Robinson). In the literature on gender and paid work, there is also a specialist focus on how mothers interact with spaces of paid work (Dillaway and Paré; Hardy and Wiedmer). Despite these important contributions, we have observed that the robust literatures in feminist geography and motherhood studies appear to have developed separately from one another, even though many of the central problems handled through critical studies of motherhood are inherently spatial ones and the very scholars who animate these fields may straddle both worlds in their personal and professional lives (Kate Boyer’s recent book Spaces and Politics of Motherhood stands as a notable exception to this trend of bifurcation). We approach this collection as an opportunity to draw upon the extensive transnational network of scholars associated with critical motherhood studies and those in feminist geography. In doing so, we anticipate that the chapters in this collection demonstrate not only how mothers are produced and regulated as subjects in relation to space and place but also how practices of mothering produce a range of unique spatial relationships.

The theoretical orientations and genealogies referenced in this collection have in common a drive to disentangle motherhood from biological essentialism. Is a mother always a woman? Is every woman potentially a mother? How does one’s location in places such as the home and other sites of care work force the identification of mother and woman together? These questions cannot be ignored in an era when there seems no end to the use of sexism, class, and racism as a way of extracting free and devalued labour from poor, working class, and women of colour in the Global North and Global South. Sexism, as a complex and intersecting form of oppression, is still used as a way of punishing and limiting both human expression and the ability to build community. Disentangling acts of caring from the heteronormative white feminine subject has proven to be a difficult task. The idea of a nurturing and giving adult (or youth) who cares for others is not one we want to degrade because these are qualities too easily cast aside precisely because they have been historically associated with women. But when imposed, the identity of mother carries a lot of baggage with it. Indeed, as a number of contributors to this collection investigate, the figure of the mother continues to be a powerful tool for advancing many projects. For instance, attacks on mothering practices, particularly those which may encode resilience and contin-uity, have been hallmarks of colonialism, imperialism, and the transnational networks of inequality that continue to striate the world. Narrow conceptualizations of a singular mother as white, cisgender, able bodied, heterosexual, and middle class continue to circulate, which validate the dominant power relations that perpetuate interlocking forms of oppression. Yet in the contributions to this collection, we see the possibility of diagnosing and rejecting such dominant represent-ations and of delinking mothering practices from binary ideas about gender rooted in biological essentialism and heteronormativity. Although motherhood is deeply connected to embodied relationships between parent and caregiver, these relationships may exceed and extend normative ideas about how families (and mothers) are made and what kinds of insurgent relationships and communities may be imagined through the opening up of ideas about motherhood beyond simplistic ideas about the normative body. There is much to be learned from queer and transgender parenting practices, from those who parent grandchildren and extended family, who parent and mother children other than our own or in tandem with multiple adults, who care and nurture adults instead of children, and who transgress religious and cultural norms associated with maternal womanliness. As a number of scholars have demonstrated here and in other sources, mothering is also a crucial aspect of antiracist and anticolonial constructions of family and community (hooks; Hill Collins; Lavell-Harvard and Anderson; Lavell-Harvard and Corbiere Lavell).

We define maternal geographies as those creative pathways most often travelled by people who think of themselves as mothers and who, in the act of caring for others, demonstrate awareness of how their paid and unpaid work happens in space. In our attention to the spatialization of mothering, [t]he underlying premise is that space is never a homogenous, neutral and a-priori entity that precedes subjects but emerges as the outcome of an ongoing production process which involves actors and material components (Baydar and Ivegen 699). We do not see these pathways or spaces of motherhood as inherently oppressive (Marotta) but as necessarily filled with information about the social relations of power through which they are constituted. Mothering in specific sites—such as grocery stores, airports, public washrooms, law courts, daycares, prisons, emergency rooms, homes, playgrounds, online spaces, and in visual cultures of all descriptions—are all subject to material and discursive constructions of motherhood with their own histories. The pathways that mothers create as they navigate these spaces can invite scrutiny, can be acts of rebellion, and can also be creative and sustaining acts that draw communities together.

In this collection, readers will find that maternal geographies include the mappings of individualized subjects called mothers as well as the imposition or elevation of institutions of motherhood in particular places. Contributors also discuss in some detail the location of everyday work associated with mothering and how to go about researching these topics. Maternal geographies are necessarily intersectional (Valentine) if only because the range of activism mothers have undertaken frequently challenges colonial, capitalist, and imperialist institutions. Intersectionality, as a concept, is embraced by many critical race and feminist geographers as an inherently spatial concept (Mollett and Faria) and so is readily taken up by many who want to understand how racialized and sexualized historical oppress-ions inform research about mothering and motherhood. By extension, maternal geographies are relational (Dixon and Jones) in that mothers usually act in tandem with at least one other subject such as a child. Maternal geographies are transformative through the direct activism of mothers to reclaim spaces denied to them (McKittrick) as evidenced in the deliberate intergenerational sharing of their strategies for changing cityscapes and landscape with family and new activists (Isoke). In this volume, contributors trace the maternal figure through time and place and think about the spatial relations of motherhood at multiple scales, including the home, the workplace, the family, the body, the nation, the community, the playground, the research site, and the academy.

Many pathways that knit together a maternal geography are completely unremarkable except to the people who experience them. It is a longstanding idea that one day a city, a region, or an individual home space could be reorganized by people who mother and that these accomplishments could also be more widely recognized (Rendell). Feminist architects and urban planners have certainly attempted the planning of entire cities from the perspectives of marginalized subjects, but it is important to understand that mothers frequently transform very small and unassuming spaces into pragmatically meaningful sites with no external recognition at all. For example, a nook can become a place in which to shelter one’s dependents from the elements, and even the space between the body of someone who mothers and that of a child gains significance based on an imposed or assumed responsibility of care (Rendell). Lizzie Philps, the artist and contributor whose work Nine Paces appears on the cover of this book, invites us to consider the image of a baby left in a stroller inside an empty garage in an urban laneway. Although the mother-photographer was, in fact, close by, just nine paces away, this image suggests that just a few feet of space can mean the difference between ‘ahh, look—a mother taking a photo of her baby’ and ‘what the hell is she doing?’ (Philps). The composition of this photograph incites a range of potential concerns and further questions about the relationship between the child, the implied figure of the mother, the viewer, and the connections among them through space and place. How does one’s spatial proximity to children test the definition of who mothers and who can be named a mother? And, in reference to Philps’ explanation in her chapter in this collection, how is this proximity to children as definitive of motherhood stitched into and written onto various landscapes. What do we learn about the tenuous connections between mothers and children when they are placed in one locale versus another? It may be that these relationships are sustained by personal effort as much as by tradition, culture, and the expectations of others. Returning to the cover image, we are also prompted to ask: are there mothers who would prefer to move more than nine paces away in the hopes that someone else will take over? And in a Western capitalist economy, how does the stroller actually stand in for presence of the mother as a culturally specific thing that symbolizes care? Who would like to be able to mother but for any number of reasons is prevented from closing the distance between themselves and a baby?

Motherhood is frequently mobilized through essentialist ideas about who is a good or natural parent when it serves institutions other than mothers, which renders the spaces mothers occupy invisible if they do not serve the purpose of another. We understand and agree with scholars of motherhood who argue that being a mother is at once a subject position and an institution requiring construction, and in order to see the components of these constructions, mothers need to be visible. What spaces do mothers occupy with their children or because of their children? In our own lives, we note that mothering is largely associated with a constrained set of spaces: the home (and perhaps especially the kitchen), the playground, the community centre, and the primary school. These spatializations are concurrently shaped by geographical contexts, class, and ability, as well as through racial-ization and dominant expectations about gender and sexuality. In short, expectations of what it means to mother, and particularly to be a good mother, are mapped onto multiple scales simultaneously, but there is a tendency to focus on spaces of domesticity precisely because these spaces have often been hidden from view or over-scrutinized.

Feminist scholars have long problematized the ready associations between femininity, mothering, and domesticity. They note that these relations are frequently mapped onto the symbolic and physical construct of the home. The study of home within feminist geography and related fields has expanded through the field of population geography as well as in studies of the impacts of migration (Contreras and Griffith; Underhill-Sem; Liamputtong; Gedalof; Bonizzoni; Gilmartin and Migge; Moorhouse and Cunningham; Dragojlovic); historical studies of the production of home in colonial and imperial sites (McClintock; Kenny; Mills); qualitative research that cuts across axes of gender, class, racial, and sexual identity (Nast; Sigad and Eisikovits; Marquardt and Schreiber; Gorman-Murray; Dominguez and Watkins; Skelton); and rich introspective interdisciplinary humanities studies of identity and the relationship to place (Dillaway and Paré; Aitken; Gatrell). As illustrated by this robust body of literature, feminist geographers have been particularly concerned with the ways that ideas about home construct gendered spaces and, likewise, with how ideas about gender, specifically about gendered roles, including mothering, are mapped onto the physical spaces associated with home (Domosh; Massey; McDowell et al.). As Mona Domosh suggests, the home is rich territory indeed for understanding the social and the spatial (281). Mothering is bound up with conceptions of home, whether or not the practices of mothering take place exclusively within the space of the household.

Much feminist literature has focused on powerful conceptions of home that have served to limit women’s social and physical mobility (Friedan; Oakley; Firestone), but critical race feminists have also argued that in contexts of racism and white supremacy, the home may provide an important refuge, a site for survival, and a place for the valuing of culture and family life (hooks; Hill Collins; Isoke). Indeed, the home is not a homogenous space, nor does it exist in isolation from complex societal relations, including racism, colonialism, and white supremacy. The question of how mothers do the hard work of producing and reproducing what hooks terms homeplaces in locales that may be hostile, unwelcoming, or dismissive of their existence is often silenced and devalued as the stuff of mundane everyday life. The chapters in this collection address this gap, demonstrating the creativity at play in the making of home, and showcasing different ways of making spaces for mothering.

The collection is organized into three main sections. Part I examines the creative spatial practices mothers undertake when limits are imposed on where and how mothering happens. The contributors explore how acts of mothering make spaces for children in meaningful and culturally specific sites of parenting. Part II turns to themes of paid work, pregnancy, and what happens when mothers produce knowledge about mothering through research and cultural production. The chapters collectively take note of when mothers are out of place and document their strategies for navigating their dislocation. Part III details various attempts to regulate mothering, including through discourse, policy, and visual culture. Each of the chapters in this section also documents strategies employed to negotiate, subvert, and, at times, reject these attempts at keeping mothers in place. Combined, the chapters in this collection illustrate the importance of motherhood and mothering as spatial practices engaged with systems and structures of power and with the potential to subvert narrow, normative roles and expectations and to imagine motherhood in multiple spaces and places.

Part I. A Woman’s Place: Making Maternal Spaces

The site of the home has received intense scrutiny from feminist geographers and scholars of motherhood alike, and it is to this space that we turn our attention in the first part of this book. Orna Blumen, Tovi Fenster, and Chen Misgav draw out the connections between body, home, and domesticity, noting that bodies are intimate homes (6), and in this section, scholars engage particularly with the concept of home and the various forms of caring and provisioning work associated with this space. All of the chapters in this section draw on the embodied experience of home in relationship to making space for children.

In Chapter 2, Minako Kuramitsu turns readers’ attention to the construction of Japanese homeplaces for migrant mothers from Samoa. Kuramitsu demonstrates that Samoan mothers raising families in Japan reform the space of the home through the essential support of extended family in Samoa as well as through culturally specific ideas about the interconnectedness of domestic spaces to other parts of one’s village or community. The home in this sense is both a creative assertion of identity within the bounded semi-private space of the household and also a site for community building and the maintenance of crucial transnational connections. In Chapter 3, Wanda Campbell responds to Alex Colville’s painting May with an ekphrastic poem exploring the spaces and places of motherhood and evoking a sense of the expansiveness of motherhood across time and place. Campbell raises questions about how the work of mothering is imagined when it is layered onto colonial and industrial landscape, and how Colville’s muse, a mother, provides new interpretations of his oeuvre.

Mothers’ production of spaces that are nurturing of children is also evident in Chapter 4, in which Laurel O’Gorman draws from ethnographic research with single mothers living in urban and rural sites and examines how mothering is shaped by (and, in turn, how it shapes) children’s spaces of play. Bound up with ideas about safety, about appropriate spaces for play, and about expectations of mothers and motherhood, this chapter illustrates the specific constraints and challenges