Bibliographic record
Abstract
With the surge of first-wave feminism in the late 1800s, increasing demands for women’s autonomy and agency coincided with challenges to patriarchal motherhood. Such a charged climate generated a rise in matrifocal literatures. Matrifocal literatures are written and narrated by mothers in the first-person or limited third-person voice, rendering maternal identity and experience from subjective perspectives. Further, they (re)value the significance and meaning of maternal figures in cultural, social, and national arenas, and often contest or negotiate traditional ideologies of the “good” mother as self-sacrificing, nurturing, and sexless with her antithesis, the “bad” mother. These narratives perform what Susan Maushart calls the act of “unmasking” motherhood to reveal truths about maternity heretofore silenced or repressed. In this chapter, I survey maternal literatures in historical, critical, and theoretical terms, and then provide examples of matrifocal fiction, life writing, and poetry written in English from and within American, British, African, and Caribbean Canadian contexts. I conclude with references to the matrifocal genres of “mommy lit,” for its increasing cultural and commercial currency, and “nanny lit,” which is directing our attention towards the role of caretakers in the raising of children and expanding definitions of what we mean by “mother” and “mothering.”
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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 | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".