Thursday, February 26, 2015

mother mother mother mother mother ma ma ma ma ma ma ma ma mom mom mom mom mom mom mum mum mum mum Lois

Some moms are the "cool" moms. Some moms are the "wannabe cool" moms. Some moms aren't trying to be cool, but just are. Some moms are murderers. It varies from person to person; and as Nancy Chodorow emphasizes in "The Reproduction of Mothering", mothers and mothering change through time. My grandmother, Rita, has a different style of mothering in comparison to my mother. My mother will have a different style of mothering than I.  Yet these forms of mothering feed off of each other. I will mother the way I saw my mother mother me. A father will father the way he saw his father father him. Fathers be good to your daughters, as daughters will learn like you do. Girls become lovers, who turn into mothers. So mothers, be good to your daughters too.

However I feel that her description of the complex hierarchy and interactions of politics and gender are far too simplistic. Ultimately the things affecting these aspects of society are very complicated, with thousands of factors dating back to evolution and natural selection. Her analysis also only applies to heterosexuals. What about homosexuals? Bisexual? Trans? Queer? Do these gender stereotypes apply? While Chodorow lacks knowledge/emphasis on these different sexual orientations of humanity, her analysis does bring important points regarding the transformation between being mothered and mothering.



2 comments:

  1. Great point, Mills, about the limits of her analysis. She has also been critiqued for thinking about a particular white, Western heterosexual family as the ideal.

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  2. I was thinking the same thing when I read it, I actually thought about the show friends and the lesbian couple raise a kid in that show. I agree that her description is way to basic

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