Impossible Motherhood: Reconciling Cultural Ideals with Maternal Reality

• In Event: "There Comes A Time…": Analyses of Cultural Approaches Towards Three Stages of the Female Body

Abstract

The policing of female sexuality is pervasive in American culture, the only acceptable forms are those that lead to procreation. Yet once pregnant female sexuality is again repressed and a language of disability is introduced. This rhetoric remains throughout pregnancy and continues after birth. The female body is seen as a sex object, then a “vessel,” then a postpartum struggle; all notions that deny female agency and power. I argue that motherhood is a time of intense transformation for a woman and that we must transgress beyond repressive controlling images of pregnancy and motherhood, and instead embrace their sexuality.

Presenter

• Mary Reid Bogue, Florida Atlantic University