Discourses of motherhood and women’s health: <i>Maternal Thinking</i> as feminist politics
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 it