Maternal Autobiography as a Site of Feminist Negotiation and Resistance

Abstract

How can I use my writing to tackle my conflicting experiences as a writer, a mother, a feminist activist in Israeli academia? How can words combine the routine exhausting work and pleasures of motherhood; my struggles against injustice done to the Arab minority in my country, torn by unrelenting conflict; and the need to turn my back on all these obligations and efforts to write? As the normative expectation of mothers is to identify with the maternal role, activism which involves resistance and thus social and political hazards may be considered a threat to maternal work. But whereas one could argue that activism is, in fact, a social and communal extension of motherhood, writing is over and over again perceived as a neglect of maternal duties. In this article, I introduce feminist autobiography as a literary form which has enabled me as mother-writer-activist to create a space where social, cultural, political, and psychological conflicts and contradictions can intermingle, creating an alternative maternal subjectivity and voice.

Mothers and researchers in the making: Negotiating ‘new’ motherhood within the ‘new’ academia

“…Motherhood in the academy has been researched to some extent (e.g. Raddon, 2002; Ward and Wolf-Wendel, 2012; Wolf-Wendel and Ward, 2006), and academic careers are inevitably gendered (Hager, 2015; Johansson and Śliwa, 2013). Parenthood is commonly said to negatively affect women’s, but not men’s, academic careers (see Ward and Wolf-Wendel, 2012).…”

How do you manage? An auto-ethnographic inquiry into contemporary maternal labor

“…The subjective experience of motherhood has gained increasing visibility in feminist writing since the 1970s mainly with Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born (Rich, 1976) and Ann Oakley's From Here to Maternity (Oakley, 2018(Oakley, [1979), and also through literary forms such as memoirs, autobiographies and novels (Skott-Myhre et al, 2012;Polkey, 1999;Quiney, 2007). Confessional writing and the use of autoethnographic methodology or first-person accounts have become prevalent in the academic field (Hager, 2015), especially during the COVID-19 pandemic (Rania et al, 2022;Azim and Salem, 2022;Schriever, 2021). Still, "(W)e know more about the air we breathe, the seas we travel, than about the nature and meaning of motherhood."…”

Gender, authentic leadership and identity: analysis of women leaders’ autobiographies

“…While autobiographies have been used successfully to unpack understandings and representations of leadership (Parameshwar, 2006;Shamir et al, 2005), gendered analyses remain limited despite evidence from other disciplines that the autobiography represents an opportunity to understand the lives of women (Hager, 2015). As Hogan (2008) has argued, autobiographies of women, particularly those whose intention is to challenge patriarchal gender relations, are useful for understanding how the personal is political for women leaders.…”