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This report on the proceedings of the "Rank Horror" symposium, convened in May 2024 to reconsider Otto Rank's life, work, and enduring contributions to psychoanalytic theory and practice, includes a brief historical survey of Rank's relationship to Sigmund Freud and other original members of the International Psychoanalytic Association's Central Committee, and an account of the symposium's wider intellectual and political context. It outlines the reasons for returning to Rank now, and a summary of the papers presented. Particular focus is afforded to Rank's 1924 book, The Trauma of Birth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Karyn Kusama's Destroyer (2018) was reviewed as a neo-noir re-working and a star vehicle for Nicole Kidman. This article argues that it in fact offers a complex re-visioning of both the noir narrative to which reviewers compared it, and the 'woman's film' and its successor, the maternal revenge film. It examines the ways in which Kusama's film plays on cinematic genre codes and structures to suggest that they constitute a 'compulsion to repeat', in which femininity as performance is scripted, defined and positioned, and, where it threatens transgression, rendered abject as bodily excess. The film's flashback structure, it argues, first exposes the various scripts through which its protagonist Erin's younger self performs the roles she is given, and then stages the recovery of embodied memory, as generic codes and structures give way to the phenomenology of the process of remembering. Through its construction of a memory text in which time is fractured and/or slowed in moments of intensity, the film works against conventional accounts of subjectivity to suggest that Erin's recovery of memory is also a recovery of a specifically maternal body. It thus stages an attempt to retrieve, or construct, a subjectivity that is embodied, relational, and maternal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Birthing is a natural phenomenon. However, in the era of modernisation, it has dramatically changed and transformed into a technological affair. Some feminists claim that advances in medicine and assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) have opened up numerous opportunities and choices for women to free themselves from their destined role of maternity by separating sex from reproduction. But are these technological artefacts always there to emancipate women or just another way to keep them subordinated to serve social needs? Other feminists argue that technology is a controlling tool. It eliminates a woman's choice and uses her body as a baby-manufacturing machine to perpetuate pervasive social roles and responsibilities. Again, if technology is simply a patriarchal trap, then can technological exclusion be the key to all reproductive issues? It seems not! Technology is the inevitable new reality of the world influenced by socio-cultural practices, values, norms and belief system that has a strong impact on human existence. The present paper is an attempt to critically explore and evaluate the ethical challenges posed by technicization of motherhood from two opposite feminist perspectives. I argue that these ART-centred debates are significant but polarised and insufficient to resolve maternal problems. Thus, we need an egalitarian model of technology that saves women from the threat of technicization, and be able to provide a dignified use of it. The paper discusses the impact of technicization on maternal self in relation to ARTs and proposes suggestions to overcome this problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article analyzes my personal experience of having a maternal body through autoethnographic means. Being pregnant is a time of celebration, but moms experience private and public changes in their bodies. These public changes continue during the postpartum period. Ground in Foucault's panopticon, this paper explores how the maternal body undergoes self-surveillance as well as surveillance by the proverbial others. I provide vignettes and personal experiences to highlight the panopticon: moms self-surveil but moms are also being surveilled when in the public eye. I make the argument of how the maternal body is a site of surveillance often used to judge the goodness of the mother or the usefulness of the maternal body. I conclude with a suggestion of how the panopticon can be used to examine parenting practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Infant feeding in traditional (non-White societies) is imbued within beliefs surrounding the human body and food. This article, framed within the liminality theory, demonstrates perspectives of 38 Vietnamese and Myanmarese refugee mothers. Situated within the postmodern methodological framework, innovative methods of in-depth interviewing and drawing were used to gather participant's subjectivities. As birthing renders the new mother and infant weak, the findings mirror a "liminality to vitality" nurturing continuum, acknowledging the (a) essentialism of bodily breast milk, (b) rituals that strengthen mothers for lactation, (c) lactation-inducing food, and (d) culturally symbolic non-milk food that promote an independence for nourishment other than from the maternal body. Health care professionals are called to value the importance of bodily vitality in birthing and clinical maternal–child health/nutrition spheres so that culturally specific services and consultations are rendered. Our findings also offer a platform to developing models of care for families from Vietnamese and four ethnic Myanmarese communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how Alice Sebold and Elena Ferrante place the feminine—and indeed often the maternal—body at the very centre of their narratives. The body—as a locus that filters the broader tensions and conflicts experienced by their female protagonists—in fact emerges as a key site of 'contestation' in their works. Through a close analysis of a selection of ekphrastic images, and photographic metatexts in particular, the author draws attention to how the two authors employ textual negotiations of the feminine body to question and problematize normative conceptions of femininity and motherhood. Ultimately, the author suggests that they not only challenge but also shift the perspective of, or indeed refocalize the dominant visual narrative of, the maternal/feminine body and the long history of objectification of the latter. In so doing, the author situates the two writers at the forefront of rethinking contemporary constructs of maternity and femininity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mom-Lit, or Mommy Literature, can be seen as a form of challenging the feminine body’s ideals and motherhood ideology. The article studies how the feminine bodies are represented in three Mom Lit: Baby Proof by Emily Giffin, Shopaholic and Baby by Sophie Kinsella, and Confessions of A Bad Mother by Stephanie Calman. The way the women describe different bodily experiences prompts questions and challenges to the ideal feminine body and womanhood, which are associated with motherhood. Using the review of Motherhood Ideology and the concept of Silent Body, this article takes a closer look on how the women in Mom Lit think and talk about their bodies. The analysis shows that Mom Lit presents silent body to relate with the childfree choice and offers different maternal body experience that is in contrast with the feminine body ideals. In the end, it can be concluded that Mom Lit constructs a new site of women’s liberation by being receptive and communicative to the body.

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian contemporary female artist who is in exile by choice. Born in Qazvin, Iran, in 1957, the artist moved to the United States in 1974 in order to study arts. Due to the Islamic Revolution in 1979, she was prevented from going back to her country. In 1990, after almost 12 years, Neshat visited Iran for the first time after the revolution, which transformed her artistic life into a productive one, full of prizes. The aim of this article is to reflect on the impact of Neshat's homecoming experience in developing an authentic artistic identity. The emphasis of the paper will be on the artist's first cinematic film, Turbulent (1998), which will be discussed as a manifestation of the artist's working through the turbulent encounter with the changes in the motherland after a long separation due to the revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ariel Dorfman's La última canción de Manuel Sendero (The Last Song of Manuel Sendero) and Carlos Fuentes's Cristóbal Nonato (Christopher Unborn) explore conception, gestation, and birth as points of origin for humanity and citizenship alike by giving voice to life/lives that cannot speak for itself/themselves. Dorfman and Fuentes employ metafictional techniques and postmodern aesthetics, interrogate history in order to express their political commitments to rights, resistance, and revolution, and link textual production and human reproduction in order to posit national futures. Reading these works through a feminist lens, I weigh the poetic and philosophical implications of telling a story from the point of view of gametic, embryonic, or fetal, but decidedly male, narrators against the symbolic exclusion and silencing of mothers that bear them. When rendered a biopolitical frontier in symbolic or actual terms, the pregnant body poses particular philosophical quandaries that require further investigation. As such, this essay weaves together discourses on poetics, philosophy, and politics in order to uncover the perplexity that the pregnant mother, as figure for the nation, induces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examined the effects of feed restriction on calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, sodium and potassium metabolism in Oberhasli and Saanen goats during gestation. The 63 goats were distributed into groups that were divided into three levels of feed restriction (0%, 20% and 40% restriction) and slaughtered at different pregnancy stages (80, 110 and 140 days of gestation), in a randomised block design with a 2x3x3 factorial arrangement. The mineral balance was determined at ~80, 110 and 140 days of gestation. The serum levels of minerals and alkaline phosphatase activity were determined during pregnancy. Mineral retention in the maternal body, femur, empty uterus, mammary gland, fetus and fetal fluid was also determined during gestation. Bone mineral density was measured in the femur. Mixed models with days of gestation, levels of feed restriction, breed and their interactions as fixed effects and blocks as random effect were used for data analysis. In response to the reduction in feed intake, the maternal body uses its mineral reserves to maintain gestation. Physiological adjustments of the goats subjected to 20% feed restriction avoided a decrease in fetal mineral deposition. More severe feed restriction, however, compromised concentrations of phosphorus, sodium and potassium in the fetus, which were the main minerals used by the maternal body, whereas calcium and magnesium deposition in fetuses remained unaffected. At 40% feed restriction, the retention of all minerals in the body decreased, and the fetal dry mass was on average also less than those fetuses from goats without feed restriction. The fetal deposition of phosphorus, sodium and potassium was also lower during 40% restriction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Este ensayo explora el cuerpo materno en tanto símbolo que materializa las amenazas del autoritarismo. Dos textos disímiles, las memorias de Daniel Paul Schreber, que inspiraron algunos de los principales estudios sobre la paranoia, y la novela Los vigilantes de Diamela Eltit, construyen imágenes del cuerpo materno como respuestas paranoicas al advenimiento en un caso del fascismo y en el otro de un neoliberalismo que apenas enmascara el continuismo de un control dictatorial de los ciudadanos. La división del yo que para Julia Kristeva representa una parte fundamental de la experiencia materna se nos presenta en estos textos como el terreno apropiado para revelar y denunciar las perversiones de dos sociedades tentadas por el autoritarismo.The present article explores the maternal body as a symbol that materializes the threat of authoritarianism. Two very different texts, Daniel Paul Schreber memoir, which inspired some of the main studies on paranoia in the 20th century, and the novel The Custody of the Eyes by Diamela Eltit, present the maternal body as paranoid reactions to the advent of fascism, in the first case, and of a neoliberal regime that thinly veils the dictatorial control of the citizen, in the second one. The split of the ego that constitutes for Julia Kristeva a fundamental part of the maternal experience appears in these texts as the most appropriate medium to reveal and denounce the perversion of two societies under the influence of authoritarianism.

Ariel Dorfman’s La última canción de Manuel Sendero (The Last Song of Manuel Sendero) and Carlos Fuentes’s Cristóbal Nonato (Christopher Unborn) explore conception, gestation, and birth as points of origin for humanity and citizenship alike by giving voice to life/lives that cannot speak for itself/themselves. Dorfman and Fuentes employ metafictional techniques and postmodern aesthetics, interrogate history in order to express their political commitments to rights, resistance, and revolution, and link textual production and human reproduction in order to posit national futures. Reading these works through a feminist lens, I weigh the poetic and philosophical implications of telling a story from the point of view of gametic, embryonic, or fetal, but decidedly male, narrators against the symbolic exclusion and silencing of mothers that bear them. When rendered a biopolitical frontier in symbolic or actual terms, the pregnant body poses particular philosophical quandaries that require further investigation. As such, this essay weaves together discourses on poetics, philosophy, and politics in order to uncover the perplexity that the pregnant mother, as figure for the nation, induces.

Rosa Montero's novel La hija del caníbal (1997) presents the female body as a metaphor for a scarred, traumatized and amnesic Spanish culture that struggles to come to terms with its painful past and uncertain future. More specifically, Montero treats the maternal body not only as a locus of shame and suffering, marked by lack and repression, but also as a site of anxiety—even monstrosity—, ambivalence and innovation. Most explorations of La hija del caníbal astutely address the strained relationship that exists between the father and daughter referenced in the title. Nevertheless, this article examines the problematic nature of the mother-daughter relationship and its intersections with the traumatic memories and the scarred body of the protagonist. As we shall see, it is the mother's ageing body and fate that disturb the daughter, who in her middle age finds it difficult to distinguish her own aging physique, professional and sentimental blunders, and life-experiences from those of her progenitor. Ultimately, the protagonist's fear of the mother/maternal can be attributed to a traumatic memory that has scarred her indelibly in both a physical and emotional way. Through the writing of her own autobiographical/fictional account, the protagonist not only recuperates her own suppressed maternal identity and legacy, but also reconnects with the mother. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on autism and environmental risk factors has expanded substantially in recent years. My analysis draws attention to the regimes of perceptibility that shape how the environment is materialized in post-genomic science. I focus on how more complex narratives of autism’s causes and social anxieties surrounding child development have helped situate autism risk in women’s bodies before and during pregnancy. This has resulted in what I call the maternal body as environment in autism science. I show that this figure involves three characteristics: the molecularization of the environment, an individualization of risk, and the internalization of responsibility. I argue that these three features point to a new spatial and temporal politics of risk and responsibility that may heighten social and medical surveillance of women’s bodies and decisions, eclipsing larger questions about the uneven distribution of exposures in society and more holistic understandings of health that include neurodiversity. I conclude by considering what the maternal body as environment signals for women, social justice, and the politics of environmental health in the post-genomic era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that Andrea Arnold's cinematic treatment of the maternal body is transgressive and innovative. Through a close analysis of Arnold's first film Milk (1998) and using an example from Fish Tank (2009) I analyse Arnold's production of what I call a specifically maternal, embodied, sexualised viewing experience. I suggest that the viewer is addressed and positioned as always in a state of being-with the maternal sexual subject on a corporeal, intimate level. I develop a notion of 'maternal creaturely cinema' of which, I suggest, Arnold's work is exemplary, and discuss how this particular creaturely cinematic treatment of the maternal is inaugurated in Milk, as well as indicating how it can be traced through in the later Fish Tank. I argue that Arnold's maternal creaturely cinema, through a complex interaction between form and content, transmits to the viewer a mode of ethical relatedness, or hospitality towards the stranger/other, that is situated in a specifically maternal, sexual and corporeal experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses Object Relations theory to think about the dynarnics goveming the production of cultural identity in Irish Studies. Arguably wornen's writing is positioned within lrish studies in what Luce lrigaray terms "the place of the rnother". The rnother within the nuclear and patriarchal determined farnily is allocated the function of object through which the other rnernbers of the farnily derive their own identity. When a wornan writer inscribes her subjective presence then she disrupts the production of other's identity, and challenges the dynarnics of a farnily structure that need to rely on her absence frorn it. Such refusal to be sirnply an object is often rnet with resistance. This paper argues that Eavan Boland's collection The Lost Landalters Boland's object use within the cultural context of lrish studies, and it examines sorne of the criticisrn attaching to it accordingly.

Breastfeeding tends to elicit strong feelings in mothers as well as impassioned rhetoric in our cultural discourse. Psychoanalytic thinkers have focused extensively on the infant's experience at the breast. Surprisingly, much less theoretical attention has been given to the mother's experience of breastfeeding. I begin with my own experience of struggling with this early stage of motherhood and with understanding why this act seemed to hold such emotional power. By tracing the theme of breastfeeding in Toni Morrison's Beloved, I attempt to draw out ideas about the breastfeeding mother as a subject rather than an object. I argue that the novel's depiction of breastfeeding supports understanding the maternal body as a source of ambivalence and creativity for the mother as well as for the infant. Drawing mainly on the work of Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott and Julia Kristeva, I explore through literary readings how breastfeeding comes to stir up such passionate and often difficult feelings for mothers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the legacy of the Sirens in contemporary visual culture, considering the persistent theme of women who, like these mythical beings, would bewitch and then devour men. It considers the significant and highly visible problem of representations of femininity, focusing on how the connection between women and cannibalism reflects the common trope of the danger inherent within the female body. The various, and often interwoven, responses of allure, fear and revulsion provoked by such a display of female power emerge in the works that will be closely focused on here: John Longstaff's painting The Sirens (1891), the film Teeth (2007) by Lichtenstein, the Queens Of The Stone Age music video Sick, Sick, Sick (2007), and the characters Poison Ivy from DC comics (1966-) and Mileena from the video game franchise Mortal Kombat (1993-). Though other examples will be discussed, these texts are noteworthy not simply for the images that they offer but, perhaps more so, for their place within popular culture. Unlike the arguably limited reach of fine art, these texts are widely engaged with and so disseminate these ideas about women to a broad audience. The dangers inherent within the female body manifest in these media in numerous ways, envisioned variously - and often simultaneously - as abject, erotic, maternal, monstrous, natural and, ultimately, unknowable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminine writing and organizational aesthetics are brought together in this paper to sketch a different form of academic production in organizational research that involves arts-based methods ('feminine creation'). Feminine creation relates to écriture féminine (Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva) and also to peinture féminine (Nancy Spero) and modern choreography (Trisha Brown). Feminine creation responds to the feminist and the aesthetic critique of conventional academic writing and has the potential to challenge its masculine stereotypes of rationality, rigorous method and explicit knowledge production. The paper discusses the practices of poetic writing, painting and dance that are used to present academic research. It includes its own series of 'peinture feminine', some of which are contributions by the artist and organizational scholar Schrat. They illustrate my argument in a synedochic aesthetic format and encourage a different, aesthetic way of perceiving academic research and of re-imagining gendered bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A longitudinal perspective on motherhood that spans the experience of gestation, birthing, the care of young children, and the mother’s relation to her grown children makes way for a conception of the mother as essentially plural. It shall be argued in this paper that maternity is necessarily tied to surrogacy, that it is divided into a multiplicity of tasks inevitably parceled out to multiple agents. In this essay, the analysis of maternal surrogacy is focused on the phenomenon of mothering from a distance, a maternal practice engendered by the feminization and globalization of labor markets. By both affirming the value of maternal surrogates and questioning the limits of surrogacy, this analysis of motherhood challenges both the economic exploitation that engenders and sustains distant mothering and the gendered division of care labor that supports the global economy of care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much has been written about maternal grief in recent years. Very little of this work, however, has considered the embodied or corporeal nature of such grief. Using a critical autobiographical approach, this paper suggests the need to examine critically the bodily grief that ensues after a trauma that permanently changes the body for the worse, the endlessness of this kind of corporeal grief, and the struggle of living with it, in both conceptual and material ways. Weaving autoethnography with theory, it considers Hélène Cixous’ formulation of ‘stigmata’ in conjunction with insights drawn from the work of Julia Kristeva, Simone de Beauvoir, Adrienne Rich and others, and asserts that grief is not only located in the body, but also that it can be actively directed by the body. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, Alison Stone reconsiders mother-daughter relations in the context of Christine Battersby's work, in which she attempts to resituate the female subject position as norm. Following Battersby's lead, Stone attempts to resituate the daughter's subject position as norm rather than as pathological, by virtue of the daughter's incomplete separation from her mother. It is argued that Luce Irigaray, who is also concerned to revalue mother-daughter couples, imagines them as harmonious and unified. It is necessary, instead, to understand mother-daughter relations as taking place within a web of power relations and antagonisms. Stone suggests that Marguerite Duras's semi-autobiographical novel The Lover (1984) provides a model of this understanding. Both in its content and its formal construction, the novel expresses a process whereby the daughter differentiates herself from her mother while remaining connected to her. It is an ongoing, unresolved and conflictual process in which the daughter never escapes the context of maternal body relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the views of photographic maternal draw out in Roland Barthes' passages in the book "Camera Lucida." It explores how photography might be linked to the body of the mother and to the maternal function as it operates within the mind. It describes the structure of the reading process as it depicts it in the passages. Additionally, it describes the relationship between the maternal function and photography in some of Hélène Cixous's writings.

The academic study of the 'body' has come to occupy the foreground over the past two decades and the differential influences of physical and social worlds particularly upon body management practices have become fundamental to the 21st-century 'project' of the body. In this article we explore three generations of women's accounts of living in/with a pregnant and postnatal body which is now both visible and 'public' as women 'leave' the home for work. However this now takes place in the context of public surveillance (and self-surveillance) particularly about food/eating, 'health' and 'beauty'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Got Milk?' considers the author's own commitment to and experience of breastfeeding as a mother/intellectual, examining ways of theorizing embodiment and complex bio-social practices while also showing just how complicated living/embodying feminist STS theory can be. Many breastfeeding advocates are naive about nature, technology, and gender issues, and many feminist STS scholars focus on the pregnant body, rather than the lactating body, to discuss gender, technology, and embodiment. Pro-breastfeeding materials often represent breastfeeding as an organic practice free from the intervention of medical experts and technologies. The author's experiences of the physical difficulties of breastfeeding, the management of breastfeeding by medical experts, the lack of social support for the practice, and the lack of a non-essentialist feminist discourse about the importance of breastfeeding left her wondering on what grounds she could and should justify her commitment to breastfeed her children. Ultimately, recognizing that breastfeeding is an embodied practice that is not free from technological intervention or other social and political contexts can counteract the romanticized, essentialized representations of breastfeeding for a stronger, if more contingent, 'cyborg' breastfeeding advocacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the film "Curse of the Golden Flower," starring Jay Chow, Gong Li, and Chow Yun Fat.

On March 12, 2002, Andrea Yates was found guilty of murder for drowning her five children. Media reports of the Yates trial indicate that she was judged according to the idealization of mothers as self-sacrificial and nurturing. This article uses the theory of the sociology of the body to analyze Yates's crime in relation to mental illness, gender roles, and embodied motherhood. The authors present a brief history of the crime of filicide and discuss the social factors that contribute to maternal filicide and the mental insanity defense in relation to the Yates trial. The authors conclude that there are no easy answers to the maternal filicide conundrum but that it is certain the Yates trial will bring renewed attention to the embodiment of such women in defining the criminality of their actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]