An adequate analysis of experiences and situations specific to women, especially mothering, requires consideration of women's difference. A focus on women's difference, however, jeopardizes feminism's claims of women's equal individualist subjectivity, and risks recuperating the inequality and oppression of women, especially the view that all women should be mothers, want to be mothers, and are most happy being mothers. This book considers how thinkers including Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Nancy Choderow and Adrienne Rich struggle to negotiate this dilemma of difference in analyzing mothering, encompassing the paradoxes concerning embodiment, gender and representation they encounter. Patrice Di Quinzio shows that mothering has been and will continue to be an intractable problem for feminist theory itself, and suggests the political usefulness of an explicitly paradoxical politics of mothering.

About the Author

Patrice DiQuinzio is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of Women's Studies at Muhlenberg College. Her work on mothering and feminist theory has appeared n Hypatia and Women and Politics.

Reviews
"DiQuinzio presents a compelling case for a difference-based feminist approach to mothering capable of decentering unified and totalizing truth claims." -- Susan Driver, RFR/DRF, Winter-Spring 2001



Book Information
ISBN 9780415910231
Author Patrice DiQuinzio
Format Paperback
Page Count 296
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 550g