Artikel
The hand that rocks the cradle : maternity, agency and community in women's writing in German of the 1970s and 1980s
Verfasst von:
Jeremiah, Emily
in:
German life and letters
Oxford [u.a.]:
2002
,
75 - 90 S.
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| Einrichtung: | Ariadne | Wien |
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| Verfasst von: | Jeremiah, Emily |
| In: | German life and letters |
| Jahr: | 2002 |
| Sprache: | Englisch |
| Beschreibung: | |
| this article puts forth the idea of "maternal performativity" as a way of going beyond pre-existing feminist conceptions of maternal agency. "Agency" is important because, as numerous feminists have pointed out, the mother in Western culture has traditionally been conceived as passive and mute. I argue that challenging the tradtional public/private divide is vital to the project of developing and enacting this mernal performativity, as the novels in question demonstrate. where this opposition is left unquestioned, the texts suggest, mothers are marginal to the point of abjection. I look firstly at three texts in which mothers are depicted as utterly abject (Elsner, Pedretti, Beutler), then at two in which the idea of maternal agency is approached but ultimately jettisoned in favour of a resined kind of essentialism (Struck and Frischmuth), and finally at one in which the mother is active and performative, but is still shown as hampered by tradtional structures (Schroeder). the novels, and my article, thus performatively reveal the need for a maternal performativity ot be acknowledged and practised | |
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