Mothers by Jacqueline Rose
Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty is guided by a simple argument: that motherhood is the place in our culture where we lodge - or rather bury - the reality of our own conflicts, of psychic life, and what it means to be fully human. Mothers are the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings, for everything that is wrong with the world, which becomes their task (unrealizable, of course) to repair. To the familiar claim that too much is asked of mothers - a long-standing feminist plaint - Rose adds a further dimension. She questions what we are doing when we ask mothers to carry the burden of everything that is hardest to contemplate about our society and ourselves. By making mothers the objects of licensed cruelty, we blind ourselves to the world's iniquities and shut down the portals of the heart. To demonstrate this vicious paradox at work, Rose explores a range of material: investigative writing and policies on motherhood, including newspaper reports, policy documents, and law; drama, novels, poetry, and life stories past and present; social history, psychoanalysis, and feminism. An incisive, rousing call to action, Mothers unveils the crucial idea that unless we recognise what role we are asking mothers to perform in the world, and for the world, we will continue to tear both the world and mothers to pieces.
Jacqueline Rose is an internationally renowned feminist literary and cultural critic. She is the co-director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, co-founder of Independent Jewish Voices and a fellow of the British Academy. Rose is a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books and the Guardian, among many other publications. She is the author of Sexuality in the Field of Vision and The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. Her most recent book is Women in Dark Times.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780571331437 |
| ISBN 10 | 0571331432 |
| Title | Mothers |
| Author | Jacqueline Rose |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Publisher | Faber & Faber |
| Year published | 2018-04-19 |
| Number of pages | 256 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |