Discourses of motherhood and women’s health: <i>Maternal Thinking</i> as feminist politics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using the debate surrounding the Canadian government’s 2008 Muskoka Initiative on Maternal, Newborn and Child Health as a central example, this article considers the construction of women and women’s health in global health policy. Specifically, it considers the contributions of Sara Ruddick’s philosophy to the task of unravelling the ethical and political meanings of ‘motherhood’, and the relationship between maternal thinking and feminist politics in global social policy. This article argues that while Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking has often been read as a normative ethics that asserts the moral authority of mothers’ voices and ways of being, it can also be read as a feminist political theory. In particular, Ruddick’s work provides feminists with a critical resource for considering the ways that masculinist power can drive a wedge between ‘mothers’ and ‘feminists’, thereby obscuring the need for feminism to consider all aspects of mothering as central to their political goals. Far from limiting our understandings of women and their roles in international politics, Ruddick’s work provides us with crucial insights into the discursive construction of women in global policy initiatives, as well as offering key starting points for strategies of resistance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.075 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".