Multiple Stories: Alternate Constructions of M/othering in the Context of Family Violence

• In Event: M/othering a Bodied Curriculum: Emplacement, Desire, and Affect

Abstract

The ruptured stories of women and children affected by family violence are absent from educational discourse. Family violence is tolerated in the ways in which it is overlooked, so the silence of women and children affected by violence in the home is reinforced by the silence on the topic in education and society at large. This silence-violence is a concern not just for individual families; it extends to the arrangement of power and authority in schools and society. Family violence has a context, and can be understood as within and relating to social experience. In this presentation I engage with my childhood experience of family violence to explore alternative forms of relation, perception, and expression in m/othering. Bringing stories like mine into the discourse, I invite the merging and blurring of public and domestic, of fact and fiction, and of the ethical responsibilities of m/othering and teaching other peoples’ children.

Domestic or family violence can be described as one partner’s attempt to take control over the other, which serves as a context for physical and/or sexual violence. This coercive control extends to emotional and economic abuse, isolation, blame, and intimidation. Where children are involved, they too, are drawn into this web of abuse as a means of control, with the perpetrating partner threatening to hurt them or take them away (Johnson, 2007). Children experience a sense of dislocation arising from this violence in the home. bell hooks (2007) describes this: “the world one has most intimately known, in which one felt relatively safe and secure, has collapsed” (p. 270). Safety and trust are broken, and so too, is the intimacy and nurturance between mother and child. These circumstances also rupture outsider assumptions about mother-child love: what kind of mother would allow her children to live with ongoing, enduring psychological and/or physical pain? From a normalized perspective, we assume love is good, but the contingent of this assumption implies that love can be suspect, too.

Drawing upon narrative reflections of my past and present experience (Aoki, 2003; Pinar, 1994), I take up a critical analysis of normative conceptions of intimacy and nurturance between mother and child. Exceeding the two, the intimate mother-child dyad, I engage with the idea of multiple stories to explore what happens when m/othering is not just a relationship between two, when the intimacy between mother and child is ruptured, dislocated, and divided by violence and control perpetrated in the home. Exploring affinities within my narrative reflections, I discuss issues including mother-daughter relations, identity construction, and preserving integrity of self in the context of family violence.

Multiple stories speaks to the relational implications of m/othering in the context of family violence, and to a more ethical reading and production of m/othered encounters with children experiencing this form of crisis. Multiple stories also expands the sphere of influence upon children’s lives, making space for other caring adults to m/other a child.

Author

• Saskia Stille, University of Toronto - OISE