A Renewed Ethic of Embodiment in the Community of Motherhood: On the Intersection of First-Time Maternity and Hermeneutics
Date
2023-05-25
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Abstract
What does it mean to be a “good” mother? This research focuses on the community of motherhood through the eyes of first-time (FT) mothers and is aimed at addressing the consequences, for newcomers to this community, of how we describe the goodness of a mother’s day-to-day labours. The main researched question is how might we understand embodied maternity and motherhood in a community whose members are always already measured and marked? To respond to this question, I used hermeneutic inquiry guided by Gadamer’s (1975/2004) philosophical hermeneutics. The pool of participants was comprised of 10 FT mothers, aged 29 to 43, who had joined the community of motherhood within the last 2 years. Participants engaged in audio-recorded interviews. Analysis of the data included reading transcripts and field notes, listening to recordings, journaling wonderings inspired by the interviews, reviewing drawings created by FT mothers, and consulting literature. Through this process, I distinguished tensions that are traditionally tough to traverse as a FT mother from which I created three interpretations that reveal how we might understand the notion of embodied maternity and motherhood. These interpretations included the ins and outs of muffled motherhood metrics, covering expectations for good mothers together with exceptions to expectations for good mothers; malleable mothering matters, covering good mothering doing(s) together with bad mothering doing(s); and manifested mothers’ manners, covering conventional mothering being(s) together with unconventional mothering being(s). Following a presentation of these interpretations, I discuss implications of the findings for theory, practice, and research.
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Keywords
first-time motherhood, good mother, dominant maternal discourse, alternative maternal discourse, embodiment, philosophical hermeneutics, counselling psychology, social construction, community
Citation
Samuels, S. E. (2023). A renewed ethic of embodiment in the community of motherhood: on the intersection of first-time maternity and hermeneutics (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.