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Given the social construction of Latina sexuality as a social problem in popular media-associated with high fertility and over-sexualization-Mexican-origin mothers use protective discourse to educate their daughters about their sexuality. Based on indepth interviews with 34 Mexican-origin women (17 mother-daughter dyads), this study finds that women employ two types of rhetoric in their sexual discourse: disembodied and objectified or embodied and subjective. In the disembodied and objectified view, mothers urge their daughters to remain virgins until marriage to protect their reputations and expect their daughters to have no interest in sexual pleasure prior to sexual initiation by a man. In the embodied and subjective view, mothers teach their daughters that sex is an expression of love and connectedness, which is only guaranteed in marriage. However, unlike the mothers with the disembodied/objectified perspective, these mothers hold unspoken views that their daughters' have the right to explore their bodies through masturbation. These findings suggest that Mexican-origin women's ideas about sexuality are dynamic and complex. Mothers' employ various rhetorical strategies to protect and prepare their daughters for their sexual lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, the rate of female incarceration has been growing faster than that of men. Along with this substantial growth has come an increase in the number of mothers who are incarcerated and therefore separated from their children. The consequences of this separation and the effects it has on reentry experiences for these mothers is the areas of investigation in this paper. Much of the prior work on reentry has focused on the experiences of male offenders. The parenting relationship is likely to have different meanings for mothers, however, and may therefore have unique impacts on the prosocial and antisocial behavior of these women after their release from incarceration. To examine these relationships, thirty-eight semi-structured baseline and follow-up interviews with recently incarcerated mothers in the Portland, OR metro area were conducted to obtain information regarding offenders' relationships with their children before and after incarceration, along with their pro- and anti-social behaviors in the period following their release from incarceration. This study speaks to emerging theoretical developments suggesting that incarceration and reentry experiences may be gendered processes, and suggests that future research consider the distinct consequences of incarceration and reentry on mothers with differing levels of contact with their children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Looking within Ontario, this research asks what a vaccine against a sexually transmitted infection tells us about gendered logics and practices of motherhood. How are mothers discursively implicated as actors responsible for their daughter's health and sexual health, and how do mothers take this responsibility on in their everyday lives? In Ontario, parents of 8th Grade girls must decide whether or not to vaccinate their daughters against the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) when schools ask for their consent to vaccinate their daughters - a decision that usually falls to mothers. Focusing on the HPV vaccine, I analyze how mothers narrate their decision to vaccinate their daughters to understand how they manage their responsibility as a mother in terms of caring for their teen daughters' current and future sexual health. I find that parents' narratives on the HPV vaccine decision reinforce gendered logics of maternal responsibility. I argue that the routinized way the vaccine decision enters into the everyday life of mothers situates the vaccine as their responsibility and reinforces the gendered division of labour and childcare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study applies Erving Goffman's theory of interaction to interracial adoptive families' interaction with the public. Particular attention is given to the violation of interaction rituals occurring when strangers stepped beyond the boundary of families' personal territory by asking intrusive and insensitive questions in public places. When confronted with these violations of interaction rituals, adoptive mothers typically replied in a civil way that helped educate the ceremonial offender and, in so doing, clarified the code of civility in the case of interaction with interracial adoptive families. I also explore how people's responses to the interracial adoptive family affect the child's sense of identity and the adoptive mother's parenting. My findings show that in the face of stigmatization of adoptive families in terms of the ideology of the "normal" family, adoptive mothers employ various strategies to teach their children that adoption is not a master status of their identities. My analysis is based on the interviews of 38 white adoptive mothers of children from Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women with HIV have increase longevity and the potential for decreasing mother to child transmission with the use of antiretroviral therapy. What has been the impact of HIV/AIDS and the medical advances on women's life experiences who are long-term survivors? In this study we investigate the reproductive, mothering and living experiences of HIV positive women ten years after their participation in a study of their reproductive decisions. The sample is women living with HIV (n=60) from Oakland, California (n=30) and Rochester, New York (n=30) who participated in the initial study (1995-2001). The inclusion criteria are women with HIV who are living, and are well enough to participate in a face-to-face interview. Of the original 60 women, 54 women are living. One and one half years into this 4-year study, we have completed interviews with 20 women from Rochester (n=13) and Oakland (n=7).An unexpected life with HIV challenges participants to live a viable life developing differently from their pre-diagnosed life. It involves a life of defining normalcy in everyday experiences, and building a legacy of a life worth living. Participants' issues and concerns of living with HIV/AIDS identify what kinds of cultural notions, and medical and social interventions support or undermine women's reproductive, mothering and long-term living with HIV/AIDS. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through focus groups with African-American and white mothers, this study explores the ways in which motherhood gives shape to the psychological well-being of women, specifically guilt and shame. Because research has demonstrated that guilt, especially if persistent, can result in a sense of ineffectiveness that impacts physical well-being, mental health, and the ability to be productive (Harper and Arias 2004), it is important to explore guilt and shame within the mothering role. However, few sociological studies have directly and systematically examined mothering, guilt and shame. Despite the scarcity of research considering this topic, the notion of "maternal guilt" in the media and in the everyday lives of women is inescapable (Seagram and Daniluk 2002). By allowing mothers to discuss their everyday experiences and conditions, it is possible to observe their enactment of mothering through consideration of their activities, roles and relations. In so doing, we find these mothers embedded in the ideological norms of motherhood, the gendered nature of parenting, and experiencing guilt and shame. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses Dorothy Smith's "institutional ethnography" framework to explore how welfare recipients attending university both resist and engage dominant discourses regarding paid work, unpaid work and welfare receipt. In-depth interviews of twenty-four welfare recipients reveal that these parents resist the "work plan" of welfare reform by attending university in the hope of attaining good jobs, not just any job. In some ways these student recipients draw from an intensive mothering ideology, but in other ways they challenge it. Most students envisioned structural changes in order to reconcile parenting, paid work, and schoolwork, but also avoided structural explanations when discussing the predicament of other welfare recipients. The conclusion explores why these student recipients are more likely than other welfare recipients to invoke structural viewpoints and suggests several possibilities for changing the university and welfare state to better meet student recipients' needs. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of American children being home schooled has risen dramatically in recent years, from 15,000 in 1970 to over one million students in 2003. Because conservative Christians and "alternative" or "New Age" parents dominate the home school population, academics have come to understand home schooling as driven by countercultural values, placing it within current discourses about culture wars and the polarization of America. However, this research shows that home schooling is a profoundly gendered phenomenon. Interviews with a non-random sample of 24 home schooling mothers and fathers showed that mothers overwhelmingly drive the decision to home school, often over their partner's resistance. Home schooling mothers have had damaging childhood school experiences, teaching them that schools jeopardize children's educational and emotional well-being. As followers of mainstream "intensive mothering ideology", these mothers are committed to protect their children from repeating this trauma. Women with countercultural ideologies (in particular, conservative Christian women) dominate the home school population because their ideology has legitimating discourses that can be used to rationalize the decision to home school in the face of mainstream disapproval, both for themselves, and in negotiations with their spouse. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American parents of children adopted from China frequently consume Chinese cultural objects for display in their homes. While they defend this consumption and display as an effort to validate their children's ethno-cultural origins, parents also reveal that it signifies and solidifies their own identifications with Chinese culture. As part of a larger research project examining China adoptive parents' evolving 'Chinese' identities, this paper asks: Which parents exhibit their family's 'Chineseness' in this way, and why? Through semi-structured in-depth interviews with ninety-one Americans in the China adoption process, I focus on the emergent and personal meanings that parents give to Chinese cultural objects; demonstrating how these meanings both structure parents' consumption and yield a display differential. In doing so, I reveal that White European-parents and mothers are most likely to engage in this consumption and display; thereby, amending the three types of ethno-cultural identity consumption represented in the literature. Specifically, I expose the central role of race in ethno-cultural identity consumption; specify that the collective category of reference for ethno-cultural identity consumption is not always an ethnic category; and illustrate the ways in which global ethno-cultural identity consumption both appeals to and satisfies distinctly local constructs. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The work of a "military wife" and mother during a time of war comes with a set of unacknowledged assumptions about the parenting division of labor between spouses. Despite the presence of women and single parents, the military continues to operate within a gendered model that presupposes a male breadwinner and female homemaker. The military assumes that a wife will support the soldier through replacing his domestic work when "duty calls" and he is sent away. In this personal narrative, I examine my own experiences of feminist mothering during my husband's wartime military mobilization. I argue that feminist mothering directly conflicts with the position of a "military wife." This essay considers the experience of living with such contradictions, the relationship between feminist mothering and anti-war activism, and the development of independence among military wives. As I questioned both the goals of the war and the assumed gender division of labor, the "military wife" role clearly contradicted my feminist approach to mothering. The implications for feminist parenting and fathering are also discussed. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I explore the relationships among maternal guilt and shame, contemporary notions of "good mothering," and labor force participation. Few studies have systematically researched the concept of "maternal guilt" though the notion of it permeates the everyday lives of women. By allowing mothers to give voice to these processes in focus groups, I investigated the meanings assigned to the ideological "good mother", as well as how the adherence to this model is related to the experiences of working mothers and stay-at-home mothers. My goal was to explore the experiences of mothering on the macro-social level (ideologies of motherhood), at the meso-level (communities), and at the micro-level (individual experiences and emotions). By assessing the perspective of a racially diverse group of mothers, I was able to explore the extent to which communities impact mothering experiences. While white mothers, including those who stayed home with their children, felt the need to separate themselves from the "typical 1950's" stay-at-home mom, African-American women expressed no such concern but rather spoke of the reduced sense of guilt that accompanied the stay-at-home status. These and other differences emerged demonstrating that, while all of the mothers in this sample adhered to the culturally prescribed "good mother" ideology, the ways in which this manifested in their lives looked different at different levels of mothering. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing out of the debate surrounding the efficacy of white adoptive parents to facilitate racial identity development in their Black children, international adoptive parents are encouraged by a myriad of sources to transmit ethnic and cultural information to adopted children about their birth nations. While the majority of international adoptees are children of color, increasing numbers are white children are being adopted from Russia. The present paper, based on in-depth interviews with 19 U.S. adoptive mothers, examines adoption from Russia and asks: how do women with children adopted from Russia respond to the call to "keep culture" for internationally adopted children? How does the fact that these women share whiteness with their children shape their experiences? Using a Weberian descriptive type analysis, my research reveals that women with children from Russian employ three approaches to ethnicity (Multicultural, Kincentric, and Ambivalent), which are distinctly shaped by privilege. My analysis of these three approaches reveals the hidden contours of racial privilege by showing how the full enjoyment and expression of white ethnicity within the family, which has been an assumed benefit of middle class whiteness, is contingent not only on looking white but on appearing to be biologically related to one's child. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the images of childhood held by mothers of babies and very young children. The Dionysian image of childhood is defined by an assumption that children enter the world with a bias towards evil as opposed to Apollonian infants who are angelic, innocent and untainted by the world which they have entered. In simple words, the Apollonian child is born with a bias towards good and the Dionysian is born with a bias towards evil. Most mothers opine that the move from Apollonian innocence to Dionysian self-indulgence is a developmental stage. It has been discovered that images of childhood are emergent and linked to stage of development which children are deemed to have reached at particular ages.

The article presents information on how depression is harmful for mothers. People expect new mothers to feel joyful all of the time, anything short of the complete happiness translates into a violation of the feeling rules. Post-partum depression and post-adoptive depression threaten to undermine the idea of natural motherhood. This version of motherhood in the contemporary U.S. is a gender performance inflected with race and class. In spite of feeling like failures, they managed to care for their children and used emotion management techniques to maintain their performance as mothers.

Based on a qualitative and ethnographic study, this paper compares mothers raising kids with social, emotional or behavioral disabilities by social class. These "invisible" disabilities (including depression, bipolar, and other mood disorders, ADHD, Aspergers, etc.) make up the largest share of childhood disabilities and pose significant challenges to parents and caregivers; yet this large number is often ignored, with images of wheelchairs or crutches still conjuring only the visibly disabled. While these "traditional" disabilities brought virtue to mothers and primary caregivers along with significant challenges -- social, emotional, and behavioral problems, with the controversies over their psychopharmaceutical treatment, bring stigma and isolation. In fact, such carework presents a case study of mother-blame and how it works in the current gender regime. Comparing by social class, this paper examines how suspect mothers negotiate for services on behalf of their children. I find that across social class, mothers battled for services from beleagured educational and medical systems. All mothers also acquired skills in what I term maternal vigilance. I also argue that, when possible, mothers use cultural capital displayed on the body, through physical attractiveness and thinness, to shore up their vulnerable maternal status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper starts from the theoretical position that social relations and material conditions, as well as ideas, construct gender. Recognizing that parenthood is likely at the heart of gender inequality in heterosexual families, I examine the parenting practices heterosexual couples develop in the early postpartum period. Specifically, I look at the extent to which women do ?intensive mothering? and how involved men are in baby care. The study that provides the basis of the paper involves in-depth interviews with 40 couples as they move from pregnancy through their first year of parenthood. I argue that social class, especially labor-market success or failure, affects the likelihood that women will do intensive mothering and the extent of men?s involvement in baby care. The impact of the labor market was felt by women in obvious and subtle ways. Among the latter were differences in women?s relationship to time ? whether they felt they owned time and could spend it (on baby care), or that they had to use it (more) productively. Men?s ?consent? to intensive mothering was more likely to come from men who were involved in baby care, and their involvement was limited by ?hidden injuries of class.? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scholars have highlighted the race and class bias embedded in media presentations of pregnant drug users and academics have begun to theorize possible reasons for this bias. However, most of this research has focused on only one substance thereby limiting the scope of the findings -- and most of the research has not been empirically driven. I build on this work by exploring The New York Times? presentations of three drugs (crack cocaine, alcohol and tobacco) used during pregnancy, all with medically proven deleterious effects on fetal development and infant health but with dramatically different rates of use by poor and minority women. Through this analysis I am able to show that discourse and images of pregnant drug-using women have little to do with drugs at all, but rather are an effective way to cast poor and minority woman as bad mothers and blame them for the ?crisis of the perfect family? that ensues when so many children are removed from these ?undeserving? mothers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we examined values which mothers implicitly or explicitly convey to their daughters in relation to the increasing impact of education on mothering in Japan. We conducted qualitative analyses on four sets of in-depth interviews with 16 mothers living in Osaka, Japan. From 116 mothers with preschool children initially interviewed, we selected 16 mothers, both high SES and low SES. We visited their house, and conducted four open-ended interviews. Analyzing the 16 mothersf discourses, we identified two ambivalent messages that those mothers posit for their daughters. One is a conventional message: that women should become the primary caretakers of their children. This message has been passed down from mothers to daughters through countless generations, and it is partly responsible for the unchanging motherhood role of women in Japan. The second message is an individualistic message: that their children should pursue their happiness and their own lives, a message which sometimes contradicts the conventional logic of the womanfs role. This individualistic message is a recent, almost radical, concept in middle class Japanese mothering. Such a message reflects a motherfs hope that society will change, and women will have more options open to them. We argued that the educational system positively reinforced the individualistic message conveyed to daughters as it widens the choices available to women. However, examinations of working mothers demonstrate that self-fulfillment is not so easy to pursue considering the social pressure stemming from being the primary caretaker of children in Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women?s identities as mothers and their practices of mothering are constructed through subjection, through their subordination as women as well as their often-subordinated positions within race and class relations. However, women often gain affirmation and strength through their identities as mothers. The same gender, race, and class relations that create mothers and motherhood through subordination also create the basis for mothers? agency. In the process of creating mothers, power relations also create women?s ability to act as mothers. Thus, the power that both subordinates and constructs mothers is transformed into mothers? power. When women?s actions and freedom are severely limited, as they are for women who are battered, the parts of their lives where they do have power become even more important to them. Based on in depth interviews with 17 mothers who have been battered I provide an analysis of the role of the meaning and practice of mothering in shaping the actions of women who are battered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminists argue that the dominant discourse of pregnancy shifted over the past thirty years: pregnant women are increasingly expected to subsume their needs to the fetus, making it more difficult for them to legitimize their suffering and act on their own behalf. This paper discusses the socially constructed process of normalization with respect to the pain and discomfort experienced by women during pregnancy. Using interview data from a longitudinal study on normality in pregnancy, I find most women interviewed normalized their symptoms—among them, nausea, back pain, breast tenderness, swelled ankles, and weight gain—in ways that fit this dominant discourse of pregnancy. However, a smaller group of women interviewed do not utilize this discourse to interpret their symptoms. Among these women, suffering was understood to exceed their understandings of the "normal pregnancy," resulting in their seeking out changes in practice to relieve them of their burden, most notably, seeking induction of labor as much as several weeks before their due date. Importantly, their strategy to circumvent normalization was often carried out through increased medicalization of their pregnancies, either through their efforts to use medical technology for their own purposes or through the unintended consequences of their efforts. In addition to highlighting the importance of the embodied nature of meaning-making processes, this study shows that, even in the absence of a societal discourse that can supply women with alternative meanings to expectant motherhood, women make sense of their experience of suffering without falling back on the dominant discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The high standards of mothering in today's society are well recognized in mothering research. Phrases such as "intensive mothering," "the new momism," and "mother blame" are utilized in the academic field to describe the phenomenon whereby mothers are expected to conform to a set of cultural standards. When they fail to meet these standards of "good mothering," they feel guilty, and blame themselves for their inadequacies, and for any psychological or social problems their children encounter. The prevalence of shame and guilt for mothers is well documented. However, there is a lack of data exploring the specific lived experiences of guilt for mothers. My work explores how social relationships and cultural influences impact the way a woman views herself as a mother. Though focus groups, I explore the extent to which social relationships and cultural influences impact how a woman views herself as a mother. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on a poster submission which is to be submitted in the periodical "Conference Papers--American Sociological Association." The poster will consist of the abstract plus five tables with summary statements for each table.