21st-Century Narratives of Maternal Ambivalence

Book excerpt: Motherhood has long been depicted in reductive or limited terms. At once valorized and configured as the ultimate end-goal for socially condoned femininity, maternity is also highly mediated and scrutinized. This has resulted in a representational tradition that persists in imagining maternal subjects in rigid binary terms, pitting good mothers against bad. Largely in response to this repressive schema, recent years have marked the emergence of a diverse range of visual and literary texts about motherhood. While such texts vary in style, genre and form, this book argues that they are unified in their efforts to publicize embodied maternal experience and foreground maternal ambivalence, a concept that is best understood as a mother’s capacity to simultaneously love and hate her child. Although maternal ambivalence has become an increasingly popular topic of study with maternal scholars, its articulation within contemporary representations and narratives has yet to be adequately theorized and addressed, and this book aims to fill this gap.