The Neurology of Motherhood: Maternal Subjectivities and Embodied Experiences (Women and Psychology)

In motherhood, many women experience feelings of great intensity, a strong and passionate bond with their child, and a sense of personal transformation.For these women the experiences of pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding and embodied care are felt as central to the construction of their sense of self as a mother.By and large, however, feminist theory and scholarship has placed more emphasis on the social and discursive structuring of maternal experiences, and given limited attention to the effects of these embodied experiences on subjectivity.Within this literature, the material maternal body has a minimal presence. In Thinking Through Motherhood, Linda Burnett revisits the significance of women’s embodied experiences of motherhood and suggests that the understanding of maternal subjectivities is enhanced by these biological perspectives, whose salience has too often been underplayed or dismissed.In investigating how maternal subjectivities are constructed in the embodied mother-child re