eBook details
- Title: Motherhood and the Temporal Logic of the Modern.
- Author : Arena Journal
- Release Date : January 22, 2005
- Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 190 KB
Description
Time is one of the key flashpoints in contemporary debates about motherhood. Much of the discussion focuses on the lack of time and the time pressures that confront contemporary families. (1) Here, however, I am interested in drawing attention to the ways in which the cultural values and meanings of modern time have come to dominate a sense of self and identity and function to make motherhood and mothering problematic. Even if they are less often taken into account, the symbolic meanings and cultural values associated with modern time influence the ways motherhood is negotiated in contemporary culture as much as the very real practicalities of working conditions and social policies. Once understood as an empty, neutral category, recent scholarship has drawn attention to the variability of time and has begun to recognize that conceptions of time are integral to values, ideals, experience and identity. (2) Time, Rita Felski suggests, 'is not just a measurement but a metaphor, dense in cultural meanings'. (3) Typically, 'modernity' is used as a periodizing term to differentiate industrialized societies from traditional societies. But the term 'modern' also has a 'distinctive rhetorical power'. (4) Felski writes that: