Contested Motherhood in Autobiographical Writing: Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This chapter examines contemporary autobiographical narratives which explore the notion of motherhood as the central issue in women’s lives. These narratives have been important in offering alternative discourses and thereby broadening the concept of motherhood. This chapter discusses them in the light of motherhood studies and theories about matrilineal narratives in contemporary literature. Works by two highly acclaimed Canadian writers are at the center of our study: Rachel Cusk’sA Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother(first published in 2001; 2008) and Sheila Heti’sMotherhood(2018). Both volumes convey an ambivalence toward motherhood and lean on emotions as well as intellectual argument. Theoretically, the point of departure is Toril Moi’s discussion about contemporary life writing as an “exercise of attention,” and furthermore the feminist examination of the definition of motherhood and mothering in a social context, from Adrienne Rich (1976) to Tina Miller (2005). The texts discussed in this chapter contest different “cultural scripts” (Miller)—discourses that affect societal and subjective views on motherhood and gender.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".