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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]

The present paperwork analyses motherhood as literary theme in Ioana Nicolaie's novel Cartea Reghinei (2019). The novel forms a trilogy together with Pelinul negru (2017) and Tot înainte (2021), but it also communicates on different levels with the author's other novels. The first part of the study focuses on the relationship between the narrative perspective and the authorial subjectivity, especially since the autobiographical vein of the novel is quite significant, while the main character is also built on this autobiographical foundation. The novel, however, makes possible several reading perspectives, and the experience of motherhood is particularized by the socio-political context. Therefore, the second part of the paper deals with this particularization, but demonstrates that the novel also emphasizes deeper meanings of motherhood as an essential experience. [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]

The desire for a child in men, even when it is claimed loud and clear, does not easily find its roots in the history and unconscious experience of the person who formulates it. Everything lies in the dissociation of the desire from the birth of a real baby, as well as from the desire for paternity, which is of transmission with the pride of lending itself to it. Is the destiny of the desire for a child in men, outside of any affective involvement in a life perspective, not also the product of a reminiscence of the theories that each person elaborates since childhood on the enigma of birth? [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]