"This volume helps to develop a more critical understanding of what it means to be an embodied woman, an embodied mother. The materiality of female experience, and its centrality to family and social life, remains too often viewed as a 'fringe' subject, the province of feminists, activists, hysterical women. For too long, women have been subject to 'expert' advice, guidance, censure and control. We are at risk of being commodified and diminished, having our bodily realities reduced to mechanistic functions and our lived experience disregarded. From art to medical surveillance, from genetics to radioactivity, goddess to breastfeeding, poetry to indigenous community, dance to body size; the critical eye of the academic and the lived experience of the mother bring into being in this work a body of understanding, of expression, of knowledge and the power and authority of the lived experience, through and about the embodied mother. This critical-creative work encompasses new insights, new research and redeveloped perspectives which combine the personal with the pervasive and point to new meaning-making in critical motherhood studies via the medium of the maternal body."-- |