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.     

Postmaternal,Postwork and the Maternal Death Drive

ABSTRACT

The term ‘postmaternal’ has recently emerged as a way to articulate the effects of neoliberalism on the public devaluing of caring labour [Stephens, Julie. 2011. Confronting Postmaternal Thinking: Feminism, Memory, and Care. New York: Columbia University Press]. This term suggests a valorisation of values associated with care and mothering that have traditionally been gendered and rely on a heterosexist matrix for their intelligibility. Marxist feminist writers during the 1970s struggled with the question of the particular form of care that reproduction entails, and this feminist archive has been recently extended to a discussion of ‘post-work’ [Weeks, Kathi. 2011. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham: Duke], in which calls for the valuing of unpaid work as a viable form of labour have been reanimated. In this article I examine the relation between these two analytic categories – ‘postmaternal’ and ‘postwork’. Both categories require that we re-think some of the most trenchant issues in feminist thought – the sexual division of labour, the place of ‘reproduction’ in psychic and social life, and the possibilities for a new feminist commons.     

Postmaternal Times and Radical Feminist Thinking

ABSTRACT

Linking the postmaternal to postfeminism as products of late twentieth-century neoliberal capitalism, postmaternal thinking is defined in this article by its historical time period, from the early 1980s onwards, and by its legacy of radical feminist thinking which was critical in messing up traditional understandings of maternity. This is demonstrated through research and resources related to the women’s peace movement, with specific reference to the women-only peace camps at Greenham Common (U.K.) and Pine Gap (Australia). The intellectual legacies of these complex and compelling debates around the social practices of maternity, the politics of family, collective domesticity and activism are often occluded in social memory, as Stephens argues in Confronting Postmaternal Thinking (2011). This paper extends Stephens’ working definition of postmaternity to argue for an interconnected structural social analysis of postmaternal times, and contests modernist categories of knowing to consider postmaternity as postmodernist in its multiple and shifting array of politics. In this way postmaternity becomes a time in which maternity is open to redefinition through a proliferation of meaning and possibilities, and this is demonstrated by concluding in the form of a manifesto.     

Pat Cadigan's <Emphasis Type="Italic">Synners</Emphasis>: Refiguring Nature,Science and Technology

This article analyses an anti-essentialist SF novel, focusing on the extent to which A anti-foundationalism enables a more accurate as well as a more productive representation of postmodernity. My argument stresses the ways in which Pat Cadigan's novel Synners, mostly because of its remarkable narrative form, challenges some of the most dangerous norms and normativity of American thought and culture. I argue, that, in order to understand this complex novel correctly, we must approach technoscience and transnational capitalism as separate, interacting discourses and material practices. The representations of technoscience, in the novel, are definitely not ‘figures’ for late capitalism: they are representations of a discourse which interacts with capitalism in the fictional world as in the real world.Contrary to what has been suggested by a number of critics writing about Foucault, use of this notion of discourse does not preclude use of notions of agency. As the queer theorists who have drawn on Foucault's work show, agency can be theorized in terms compatible with the notions of discourses, material practices and technologies. My discussion of Synners thus focuses on questions of agency, showing how Cadigan uses a deconstruction of Judeo-Christian religious tropes to argue for a responsible, and knowledgable, ‘incurably informed’ approach to technology.     

从劳动派遣三方关系看雇主的责任分配

劳动派遣制度自在我国出现以后迅速发展,与此相对应的是法律理论和立法的空白,随着《劳动合同法》和《侵权责任法》的出台,使劳动派遣在我国有法可依,但由于发展时间短,许多地方有待完善。只要理清劳动派遣中用人单位、用工单位和劳动者三方关系,相关的责任分配则一目了然。     

以职工视角推进企业民主管理发展

加强以职代会为基本形式的民主管理制度,保障职工参与管理与监督的民主权利,是贯彻落实党中央和北京市工会十三大会议精神要求,全面促进职工民主参与,寻求"促进企业发展,维护职工权益"让二者互为促进、融合共生的方法和机制,从而探索、构建"职工代表参与"和"职工自主参与"相结合的两条路径。     

论课程的综合化

高校课程综合化的哲学基础是系统整体论 ,其直接原因则是学科的分化。学科的分化 ,深化了人类对自然界具体领域的认识 ,但同时它反映到高等学校的课程里 ,导致了科目增多 ,课程与社会要求的分离和课程与学习者的分离。这种弊端呼唤新的课程理念的建立 ,而课程综合化则应运而生     

扩大工会组织覆盖面增强工会组织凝聚力

西城区各级工会组织深入学习贯彻党的十八届三中、四中全会、中国工会十六大和北京市工会十三大会议精神,认真落实市总工会基层组织建设工作目标任务,按照"1+9"文件要求,着力推动建会、建家工作统筹发展,加强了基层工会组织和职工之家规范化建设工作,进一步扩大了工会组织覆盖面,增强了工会组织的凝聚力。     

论新时期工人阶级的先进性

新形势下 ,必须从工人阶级自身的特殊性、工人阶级的历史作用、工人阶级队伍构成的变化、工人阶级自身的发展等方面正确认识和判断工人阶级的先进性 ,始终坚持党的工人阶级先锋队性质 ,巩固党的阶级基础。     

加入WTO与我国党、政和工会关系的调整

随着中国加入WTO ,党、政和工会的关系必然要面临适当调整。其中 ,党和工会的关系 ,在继续保持其工人阶级先锋队和本阶级大多数普通群众之间的关系的这一核心内容的基础上 ,必然增加的一项内容就是 :唯一的执政党和某一社会阶层的具体利益代表的关系 ;而政府和工会的关系也在继续保持工人阶级群众与自己政权的相互关系的基础上 ,更经常地表现为政府和它管辖下的社会政治团体的关系。党、政和工会的互动模式也将分别发生相应的变化     

Intimacy and the life cycle in the marital relationships of the Scottish elite during the long eighteenth century

Traditionally marriage has been treated as one step in the life cycle, between youth and old age, singleness and widowhood. Yet an approach to the life cycle that treats marriage as a single step in a person's life is overly simplistic. During the eighteenth century many marriages were of considerable longevity during which time couples aged together and power dynamics within the home were frequently renegotiated to reflect changing circumstances. This study explores how intimacy developed and changed over the life cycle of marriage and what this meant for power, through a study of the correspondence of two elite Scottish couples.