Neurobiology of Motherhood: Maternal Subjectivities and Embodied Experiences

Linda Burnett's Thinking Through Motherhood explores the significance of women's embodied experiences of motherhood, challenging feminist theory's focus on social and discursive structuring. She draws on neurosciences, infant research, and psychoanalysis to offer a complex picture of maternal subjectivities, illuminating questions often disregarded and reframing feminist analyses. The book is essential reading for students and researchers in motherhood, women and gender studies, psychology, psychoanalysis, feminist studies, and sociology, as well as professional psychotherapists, counselors, psychologists, and psychiatrists working with mothers and families.

Format: Hardback
Length: 256 pages
Publication date: 01 January 2021
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Motherhood is a profound and transformative experience for many women, characterized by intense feelings of love, connection, and personal growth. The experiences of pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, and embodied care are central to the construction of their sense of self as mothers. However, feminist theory and scholarship have often focused on the social and discursive structuring of maternal experiences, with limited attention given to the effects of these embodied experiences on subjectivity. In her book Thinking Through Motherhood, Linda Burnett revisits the significance of women's embodied experiences of motherhood and argues that understanding maternal subjectivities is enhanced by these biological perspectives, which have too often been underplayed or dismissed. Burnett's interdisciplinary study draws on the neurosciences, infant research, psychoanalysis, and women's subjective accounts, providing a complex picture of maternal subjectivities that is congruent with the intense and powerful emotions and experiences described by many women. The inclusion of biological perspectives illuminates questions usually disregarded and has the potential to reframe feminist and other critical analyses of maternal subjectivities. Thinking Through Motherhood will be an important reading for students and researchers working in the field of motherhood studies.

Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781848724259