The word “mother” traditionally meant a woman who bears and nurtures a child. In recent decades, changes in social norms and public policy as well as advances in reproductive technologies and the development of markets for procreation and care have radically expanded definitions of motherhood. But while maternity has become a matter of choice for more women, the freedom to make reproductive decisions is unevenly distributed. Restrictive policies, socioeconomic disadvantages, cultural mores, and discrimination force some women into motherhood and prevent others from caring for their children. Reassembling Motherhood brings together contributors from across the disciplines to consider the transformation of motherhood as both an identity and a role. It examines how the processes of bearing and rearing a child are being restructured as reproductive labor and care work change around the globe. The authors examine issues such as artificial reproductive technologies, surrogacy, fetal ultrasounds, adoption, nonparental care, and the legal status of kinship, showing how complex chains of procreation and childcare have simultaneously generated greater liberty and new forms of constraint. Emphasizing the tension between the liberalization of procreation and care on the one hand, and the limits to their democratization due to race, class, and global inequality on the other, the book highlights debates that have emerged as these multifaceted changes have led to both the fragmentation and reassembling of motherhood.

In 1978 the world’s first “test-tube baby” was born from in vitro fertilization (IVF), effectively ushering in a paradigm shift for infertility treatment that relied on partially disembodied human reproduction. Beyond IVF, the ability to extract, fertilize, and store reproductive cells outside of the human body has created new opportunities for family building, but also prompted new conflicts about rights to and control over reproductive cells. In collaborative forms of reproduction that build on IVF technologies, such as egg and embryo donation and gestational surrogacy, multiple women may variously contribute to conception, gestation/birth, and the legal and social responsibilities for rearing a child, creating intentionally fragmented maternities. Undoing Motherhood examines the implications of such fragmented maternities in the post-IVF reproductive era for generating maternity uncertainty—an increasing cultural ambiguity about what does and should constitute maternity. Undoing Motherhood explores this uncertainty in the social worlds of reproductive medicine and law.

This book offers a re/assemblage of what is, can be and should be known about teenage pregnancy and parenting in the twenty-first century. It examines the narratives of young men and women in the USA, the UK, Aotearoa New Zealand and Ireland, all sites of elevated concern around what is often articulated as the 'problem' of teenage parenting.

The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Economics presents a comprehensive overview of the contributions of feminist economics to the discipline of economics and beyond. Each chapter situates the topic within the history of the field, reflects upon current debates, and looks forward to identify cutting-edge research. Consistent with feminist economics’ goal of strong objectivity, this Handbook compiles contributions from different traditions in feminist economics (including but not limited to Marxian political economy, institutionalist economics, ecological economics and neoclassical economics) and from different disciplines (such as economics, philosophy and political science). The Handbook delineates the social provisioning methodology and highlights its insights for the development of feminist economics. The contributors are a diverse mix of established and rising scholars of feminist economics from around the globe who skilfully frame the current state and future direction of feminist economic scholarship. This carefully crafted volume will be an essential resource for researchers and instructors of feminist economics.

"Originally published in 2017 by Scribe Publications, Australia"--Ttitle page verso.

"Essentially a Mother argues that the law of pregnancy and motherhood has been overrun by sexist ideology. As Jennifer Hendricks documents, courts have shockingly held over the past half century that a pregnant woman's nine months of gestation hardly count in her claim to parent the child she bears, and that a man's brief moment of ejaculation matters more than a woman's labor. Armed with such dubious arguments, courts have stripped women of the right to an abortion, treated surrogate mothers as mere vessels with no moral rights to their offspring, and handed biological fathers-even those who became fathers through rape-automatic rights over women and their children. The law of pregnancy is now infected with a misogyny that has brought tragedy to innumerable women and even to many men who don't meet the traditional definition of a father. In this incisive and groundbreaking book, Hendricks argues that feminists must work to overthrow this skewed value system that subordinates women, devalues caregiving, and strips many of us of one of our most fundamental rights: the right to parent"--

This book studies the ways in which the assessment of being or not being ‘respectable’ has been applied to women in the UK in the past one hundred and fifty years. Mary Evans shows how the term ‘respectable’ has changed and how, most importantly, the basis of the ways in which the respectability of women has been judged has shifted from a location in women’s personal, domestic and sexual behaviour to that of how women engage in contemporary forms of citizenship, not the least of which is paid work. This shift has important social and political implications that have seldom been explored: amongst these are the growing marginalisation of the validation of the traditional care work of women, the assumption that paid work is implicitly and inevitably empowering and the complex ways in which respectability and conformity to highly sexualised conventions about female appearance have been normalised. Making Respectable Women makes use of archive material to show how the changing definition of a moral and social concept can have an impact on both the behaviour and the choices of individuals and the operations of institutional power. It will be of interest to students and scholars across the humanities and social sciences.

Hegel is making a comeback. After the decline of the Marxist Hegelianism that dominated the twentieth century, leading thinkers are rediscovering Hegel’s thought as a resource for contemporary politics. What does a notoriously difficult nineteenth-century German philosopher have to offer the present? How should we understand Hegel, and what does understanding Hegel teach us about confronting our most urgent challenges? In this book, Todd McGowan offers us a Hegel for the twenty-first century. Simultaneously an introduction to Hegel and a fundamental reimagining of Hegel’s project, Emancipation After Hegel presents a radical Hegel who speaks to a world overwhelmed by right-wing populism, authoritarianism, neoliberalism, and economic inequalities. McGowan argues that the revolutionary core of Hegel’s thought is contradiction. He reveals that contradiction is inexorable and that we must attempt to sustain it rather than overcoming it or dismissing it as a logical failure. McGowan contends that Hegel’s notion of contradiction, when applied to contemporary problems, challenges any assertion of unitary identity as every identity is in tension with itself and dependent on others. An accessible and compelling reinterpretation of an often-misunderstood thinker, this book shows us a way forward to a new politics of emancipation as we reconcile ourselves to the inevitability of contradiction and find solidarity in not belonging.

Pregnancy is so thoroughly entangled with birth and babies in the popular imagination that a pregnancy which ends in miscarriage consistently appears as a failure or a waste of time – indeed, as not proper to pregnancy at all. But in this compelling book, Victoria Browne argues that reflection on miscarriage actually deepens and expands our understanding of pregnancy, forcing us to consider what pregnancy can amount to besides the production of a child. By exploring common themes within personal accounts of miscarriage-including feelings of failure, self-blame and being 'stuck in limbo'-Pregnancy Without Birth critically interrogates teleological discourses and disciplinary ideologies that elevate birth as pregnancy's 'natural' and 'normal' endpoint. As well as politicizing miscarriage as a feminist issue, the book articulates an alternative intercorporeal philosophy of pregnancy which embraces variation, invites us to sit with ambiguity, contingency and suspension, and enables us to see subjective agency in all pregnancies, even as they are shaped by biological, political and social forces beyond our personal control. What emerges is a relational feminist politics of full-spectrum solidarity, social justice and care (rather than individualized choice and responsibility), which breaks down presumed oppositions between pregnancy, miscarriage, abortion, stillbirth and live birth, and liberates pregnancy from reproductive futurism.

How do migrant women living in illegality build intimate relationships? How do they experience, resist or take advantage of the tight link between intimacy and migration status created by the German migration legislation? Drawing on rich biographical accounts and ethnographic methods, the book offers an insightful and sensitive look at a mostly unknown aspect of life in illegality. Adopting a critical feminist perspective, Flaminia Bartolini shows how intimacy should be understood in its intrinsic power dimension and looks critically at the German migration regime and on its effects on migrants' lives.