Maternal Authority Regarding Early Adolescents’ Social Technology Use

Use of social technologies (e.g., cellular telephones, social networking sites) is highly prevalent among American adolescents, in some cases outpacing that of adults (Nielsen Company). Rapid cultural change such as that represented by technological advances comes with the potential to diminish elders’ authority over youth. We analyzed qualitative interviews with 20 African American and European American mother–early adolescent dyads to consider ways in which mothers would—or would not—exert authority over adolescents’ use of social technologies. Three distinct approaches emerged: abdication/loss of authority, conflicted authority, and retained authority. Mothers’ use of these different approaches varied based on factors that included mothers’ and adolescents’ expertise regarding the technology being used, mothers’ perceptions of risks associated with particular technologies, and mothers’ and adolescents’ beliefs and experiences with respect to social technology use

Mourning before death: mother-son relationships in Shakespeare's histories and tragedies

In Mourning Before Death, I discuss the representation of maternal mourning in King John, the Henry VI trilogy, Richard III, Titus Andronicus, and Coriolanus. Primarily, I explore Shakespeare's expansion of maternal roles from his source texts, especially their lamentations anticipating the death of sons in these plays. Shakespeare emphasises the grief experienced by mothers which is largely absent in the historical accounts on which the plays are based. My research addresses Phyllis Rackin's definition of females as 'anti-historians' and examines how mothers in mourning intrude into historical events and confront masculine authority.This study focuses principally on Shakespeare's representation of maternal authority in terms of mother-son relationships. The introduction identifies the importance of'women's time' and physical expressions of maternal distress and the dramatic conflicts these provoke. Chapter 2 examines how Constance's grief affects the reaction of the audience to the power struggle in King John. Chapter 3 is concerned with how Margaret's queenship in Henry VI disrupts the development of English kingship and endangers the existing Lancastrian rule. Chapter 4 discusses the psychological and physical meanings expressed through the use of the sitting posture, a gesture which embodies the mothers' pain. Chapter 5 discusses Shakespeare's exploration of political wildness and barbarism through his representation of Tamora's tragic passion. Chapter 6 discusses Volumnia's maternity and her appropriation of the Roman concept of honour. The conclusion considers the strength of maternal authority and female power in Shakespeare's representations of maternal mourning

Belligerent Mothers and the Power of Feminine Speech in _The Owl and the Nightingale_

The Middle English poem The Owl and the Nightingale famously records the dispute between a hostile Nightingale and a bellicose Owl. Within that dialogue the birds reproduce themselves in word and egg, in rhetoric and body. Their digressions on bodies and scatology and on childbearing and childrearing become fertilizer that expands maternal authority into public, intellectual discourse. In addition to calling forth their own communicative powers, both characters aggressively recount narratives best known from the work of Marie de France, a voice feminist scholars have successfully restored to the canon, to condemn their foe. In this light, I argue, The Owl and the Nightingale encourages feminist labor when it recounts a woman’s writing without acknowledging her authorship and material feminist analysis when it puts such an artful dispute in the voices of vividly embodied avian mothers

In the Name of the Mother: Sexual Difference and the Practice of 'Entrustment'

In this article, I discuss how by establishing a relationship between theories and practices, the Italian feminism of sexual difference poses both a radical challenge to feminism as the struggle for equality with men, and to the notion of politics understood as the struggle for power

American and Catholic: The premature synthesis of the San Francisco Irish

The tension between the terms American and Catholic,, is at least as old as the 1840s, when large numbers of Catholic immigrants arrived in the United States. The attempts of American Catholics through the succeeding 130 years to resolve that tension has spawned, in our day an increasingly sophisticated body of American Catholic history. But since the tension has been so pervasive, engaging theological, philosophical, political, and social issues, there seems to be little danger that we shall ever fully comprehend it (and thus put the historians concerned with it out of business!) One of the most important complicating factors is the fact that Catholic has never been a univocal term in American history. Although the public image of the American Catholic Church has been, until recently, that of a monolithic fortress, ruled by larger-than-life bishops and cardinals, historians are discovering that there has always been a constant series of struggles and rivalries behind the seemingly placid walls. The present essay is an attempt to investigate one type of those struggles, the unequal contest between two of the ethnic groups which make up American Catholicism. Its thesis is that the stimulation of ethnic hostility was an integral part of the effort of one American Catholic group to resolve the tension between the terms American and Catholic. The evidence for the essay comes from one city during one particular period of time: San Francisco during the Progressive Era. Neither the city nor the time was randomly chosen. San Francisco was selected because it was, from the eastern perspective which tends to dominate American historical writing, on the edge, remote, removed from the constant swirl of politics, ecclesiastical and national. But on a more mundane level, San Francisco was a typical American city. It had its rich, such as the railroad barons, as great a percentage of immigrants in its population as Chicago or Philadelphia, its political bosses like Chris Buckley or Abe Ruef, its scandals and its violence. By 1890 it was the eighth largest city in the country. Despite the claims of its more fervent boosters, past and present, it must be admitted that, besides its location, there was little to distinguish San Francisco from most other American cities at the turn of the century. Doubtless the evidence in this essay suffers from an excessively local focus; on the other hand, the American experience has been the sum of seemingly disparate local occurrences. A city removed yet representative: by looking at it, perhaps we can see through the national mirror a bit less darkly

Leveraging Maternal Rhetoric, Space, and Experience: La Leche League\u27s Emergence as a Counterpublic

For over six decades, the international, mother-to-mother breastfeeding support organization La Leche League (LLL) has been helping women breastfeed successfully. LLL was formed at a time when the dominant ideology of scientific motherhood framed mothers as obedient adherents to physicians’ strict guidelines, which encouraged bottle-feeding and discouraged close mother-child bonds. LLL has been credited with challenging scientific motherhood, transforming medical discourse and practices surrounding infant feeding, and prompting the medical professional to accept mothers’ active involvement in decision-making; yet, paradoxically, it has also constrained mothers by reducing women to their maternal biology, discouraging mothers from participating in the public sphere, and alienating economically challenged, working, minority, and lesbian mothers. While scholars have studied the paradoxical nature of the organization, there has been no in-depth study of the rhetorical strategies that LLL employed in order to gain a dispersed audience of dedicated supporters and affect significant change. This dissertation traces the early history of LLL, with a focus on the period between 1956 and 1963, to argue that LLL’s maternal rhetoric was the key to its development into a significant counterpublic that would transform the medical profession’s views on breastfeeding and the role of mothers. I argue that LLL subversively reclaimed the domestic space of the home to create a maternal space which would operate as a “parallel discursive arena” (Fraser 68) in which the organization would develop its counter discourse and its philosophy of natural motherhood. I suggest that LLL’s employment of maternal rhetoric to craft an organizational ethos framed mothers as the natural authorities on childcare and infant feeding. This maternal rhetoric led to its success in building a counterpublic made up of an army of breastfeeding mothers who were able to create their own maternal spaces that would allow them to effectively resist the status quo. Finally, I assert that in offering a rhetorical education to help mothers employ maternal rhetoric in their individual acts of resistance, LLL’s counterpublic underwent a project of collective ethos formation that would prompt the medical profession to reevaluate its understanding of infant feeding and its view of the role of mothers in decision making regarding healthcare. LLL thus increased mothers’ options, autonomy, and authority, outcomes which I contend are feminist in nature

The Work of Women: Middle Class Domesticity in Eighteenth Century British Literature

This paper was written in Eighteenth Century British Fiction (ENGL 333), taught b yDr. Betty Joseph.This essay considers how British literature in the eighteenth century participated in creating a singularly domestic image of women. Addressing gender roles, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, Mary Hays’s Emma Courtney, and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey form a literary progression with which to compare nonfiction historical sources. The critique suggests how the changing economic framework disenfranchised women as it enabled men to advance. It further identifies three aspects contributing to women’s confinement to the home: first, growing authority over domestic staff; second, responsibility over children’s education; and third, a supposed inability to engage with public, political thought. Furthermore, it recognizes how the domestic sphere simultaneously became a women’s source of authority while preventing her from engaging with the world at large. Within these topics, the essay considers how a growing feminist voice in British fiction toward the end of the eighteenth century allowed female authors to push against the devaluation of women.Rice History Departmen