A “Choreography of Becoming”: Fathering, Embodied Care, and New Materialisms (2013) (original) (raw)
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The Fluidity of Becoming. The Maternal Body in Feminist Views of Care, Worship and Theology
Care Ethics, Religion, and Spiritual Traditions, 2022
In this chapter care ethicist Inge van Nistelrooij argues for a new turn in care ethics. After the ‘political turn’ of the 1990s, when the majority of care ethicists abandoned the focus on mothering practices in which the works of Gilligan, Noddings, and Ruddick were rooted, Van Nistelrooij argues for a renewed and distinct attention to the subject of maternity. She argues that the experience of maternity – i.e., pregnancy, labor, lactation – is of a particular kind that makes mothers (be they female, male, non-binary, trans- or intersex, or other) still vulnerable to oppression, exploitation, and violence. Then, taking two artworks by Louise Bourgeois as heuristic guides, Van Nistelrooij explores the works of Ruddick (1989), Rich (1986), and Keller (2003) to give a new impetus to thinking about the mother’s body in care, worship, and theology. Surprisingly, religion has not only been detrimental to women’s and mothers’ experiences, but religious representations and (remnants of) texts can also help reinvigorate the meaning of our coming into life through somebody else’s body and of the experience of giving life. Particularly, the elements of fluidity and becoming help explore maternity as politically and morally relevant today and avoid the pitfalls of the pioneering care ethics’ works on maternity. Ultimately, Van Nistelrooij concludes by suggesting a reformulation of Fisher and Tronto’s famous definition of care, one that accounts for maternity in a new way. By including processes of becoming, caring can be viewed as less anthropocentric and less agentic. As such, it can avoid essentializing, naturalizing, or containing maternity to one gender, the private setting, and can gain renewed moral and political relevance.
‘Estrogen-filled worlds’: fathers as primary caregivers and embodiment (2006)
The Sociological Review, 2006
Within the wide body of scholarship on gender work and caring, sub-strands of research have grown tremendously in the past decade, including largely separate studies on fatherhood and embodiment. Drawing on a qualitative research project with Canadian fathers who self-identify as primary caregivers of their children, this article focuses on recovering largely invisible links between theoretical and empirical understandings of fatherhood, caring and embodiment. The article builds on the work of key sociologists of the body as well as the work of Goffman and Merleau-Ponty. Specifically, Merleau-Ponty's concept of 'body subjects' and Goffman's work on the 'moral' quality of bodily movements through public spaces are utilized as lenses for understanding fathers' narratives of caring, particularly how men speak about their movements with children through what several fathers refer to as "estrogen-filled" worlds. As caring for others involves forming social networks and relations, embodiment can matter in the spaces between men, between male and female caregivers, and between men and the children of others. This article argues that through the changing stages of caring for children, male embodiment constantly shifts in the weight of its salience in the identities and practices of fathers and caregiving.
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Journal of Family Studies, 2015
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In this paper we argue that the non-human plays a vital role within networks of care. We do this through a consideration of the forms of work done by baby things in the giving and receiving of young-child care. We extend existing understandings of human-nonhuman relations by arguing that beyond the work of warming babies' bodies and providing comfort, baby things function within care assemblages as both a means and a metric of parental care. Within the consumption literature, the work of home provisioning (typically undertaken by mothers) has been cast as an expression of love for others. We build on this by exploring the forms of participation and " caring capacities " of matter itself – objects such as blankets, soft-toys and pacifiers-in the caring-for of babies and young children. We attend to the flows and stoppages of baby things across networks of early childhood caregiving to consider what these patterns of movement suggest about how such artefacts participate within relations of care, and how they are used as a means to reflect on the care practices of others. Analysis is based on 30 interviews with mothers and ethnographic and survey work at 14 children's clothing exchanges in different parts of England and Scotland. Drawing on scholarship from the New Materialism as well as Mary Douglas's conceptual work on dirt and cleanliness, 1 we advance conceptual work within and beyond Cultural Geography by arguing that analytical attention to the role of the more than human leads to richer and more nuanced understandings of how care relations work.