Bibliographic record
Abstract
MOTHER MATTERS: Motherhood as Discourse and Practice Andrea O'Reilly, ed. Toronto: Association for Research on Mothering. 2004; 257pp. In the introduction to Mother Matters: Motherhood as Discourse and Practice, editor Andrea O'Reilly identifies two important and generally dissonant aspects of motherhood: the socially constructed discourse that determines what mothers should do, feel and be, and the realities that affect the practice and life experiences associated with motherhood. As she argues, the difference between what we, as mothers, ought to feel and how we actually feel powerfully determine how we think about motherhood, the experience of and the capacity of women to mother. It in the midst of this gap between discourse and practice that O'Reilly locates this book. Her purpose to construct an archeology of motherhood, to uncover from the complexity of discourse the substance and significance of motherhood (p. 12). That is, her aim to tell the experience of like it is (p. 12). The articles included in the collection are expressions of different locations within this gap between discourse and practice and reflect on the dissonance between what supposed to be and what it really is. The articles were all originally published in the Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering and deal with issues such as breast feeding and breast image, lesbian motherhood, illegitimate motherhood, black women as mothers, and work, step-mothering, grand-mothering, and the roots of black mother's history. The chapters are divided in a manner that reflect the discursive aspect of and the actual practice of mothering - the discourse/practice dichotomy that O'Reilly identifies. The first section deals with the different socially constructed that shape within a social environment. Relevant here the article by O'Reilly herself in which she deals with the discursive construction of birth as a medical event which, as she argues, impoverishes the experience of birth by emptying it of all other meaning (p. 30). As she contends, the discursive construction of birth as a medical hi-tech condition makes birth an event heavily determined by ideology. Such ideological construction, as Petra Buskens argues in her chapter on parenting, affects even subversive and practices that attempt to bring birth and back into a natural condition (p. 98). As she reflects, parenting a social invention that remains elusive for modern women (p. 99). Sheu Kendall and Keller Magenau in their chapter on lesbian and custody cases contribute to this analysis by identifying some of the hegemonic that constitute lesbian as a disease that affects not only the women involved in lesbian relationships, but specially the children growing up in those relationships. Such belief in the dysfunctional condition of lesbian results in legal practices that discriminate against lesbian mothers, denying them the right to raise and care for their children. In her article on illegitimate motherhood, Nicole Pietsch looks at illegitimate also as a discourse of deviancy. She contributes a racial analysis of that differently constructs women of colour as biologically deviant prompted to transgress rules of legitimate reproduction. As she argues, while white single viewed as an accidental and personal condition that can be cured and treated, black single mothers are seen as beyond redemption and cure due to an inherited drive to transgress sexual norms. What all the chapters in this section have in common that they concern themselves with what Gillian Ramson (p. 88) refers to as the discourses that organize how we think about and the social norms that regulate mothering activities. The second section of the book deals with the more experiential aspect of as we learn of the ways in which differently located mothers mother in relation to the master that ideologically shape motherhood. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".