Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
In this paper our aim is to critically evaluate motherhood, as a social production that is deeply imbricated with the ideologies of patriarchy, technology and capitalism. We ground our analysis in Henri Lefebvre's (1994) theory on the social production of space and Barbara Katz-Rothman's (2000) examination of motherhood as it is constituted through ideology. Further, we draw on Smith's (1997) observation that it is possible to examine the production of space and materialization of capitalism at different scales; in this paper we focus specifically on the scale of the body and of the house in order to consider the ways these spaces participate in the production of motherhood. We use popular culture as the site for our analysis. We draw on a number of films -- The Next Best Thing (2000), Gattaca (1997), The Stepford Wives (1975), The Way of the Gun (2000) and The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (1992) -- as well as the popular television series -- "Queer as Folk" (2000) -- as exemplars of depictions of motherhood as embodied experience and lived spaces that work to reproduce particular representations of motherhood in accordance with the aforementioned ideologies. Ultimately, our goal is not merely to explicate and critique but also to think through the possibilities that the theorists mentioned above offer in producing new representations and practices of motherhood. Before taking our analysis to specific spaces such as the body or the house, we need to lay out the theoretical frame our analysis.
Repository Citation
Conlon, Deirdre, and Marcus Carvalho. "Spaces of Motherhood." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 3, no. 1, 2003, pp. 1–21. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol3/iss1/2
Included in
Family, Life Course, and Society Commons, Film and Media Studies Commons, Women's Studies Commons