Mothering, Masculinity, and Love: (Hetero)gender Identity Formation (Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences)

This book provides a unique in-depth interpretive analysis of relational intimacy between mothers and adult sons, and its effect on their identities.Combining autoethnography, mothers’ and men-children’s first-hand accounts, and cultural narratives, the book explores psycho-social normative processes involved in shaping (hetero)gender identities in the contemporary context of the UK.The author engages with a broad range of scholarly literature and her direct knowledge and experience as a (hetero)gendered mother of sons, grandmother of grandsons, and practising psychodynamic psychotherapist.Voices of grand/mothers and men-children are foregrounded, offering fresh perspectives on the centrality of emotions, familial power hierarchies, and the inter- and transgenerational effects of mothers’ and men-children’s relational intimacy that perpetuate hegemonic masculinities and femininities.Their stories reveal an ambiguous, ambivalent mutual ‘love’ affected by the wider network of family rela