Disability and Mothering: Liminal Spaces of Embodied Knowledge

Part Three: Narrativity and Meaning-Making: Rewriting Stories of Mothering and Disability

P a r t T h r e e Narrativity and Meaning-Making Rewriting Stories of Mothering and Disability Whereas the essays in the previous section disassembled or countered many of the restrictive cultural scripts of parenting and disability, the essays of part 3 seek to recast stories of mothering and disability. These authors encourage readers to consider how narrative itself constitutes values and ways of understanding and living in the world that have real, material consequences. The authors express the belief that narrative also offers spaces for the rewriting of stories, the crafting of new versions of living, leading to social and cultural change. In this effort, creativity can be a way to exercise agency and demonstrates what feminist disability theorist Tanya Titchkosky (2007) has described as the power arising from acting “in that liminal space between subject and group, between the power that forms the subject and the subject’s own power” (21). In “Mothers as Storytellers,” Linnéa E. Franits explores how “mothers construct narratives of disability and how disability can construct narratives of motherhood within relationships, be they maternal or not.” Using an ethnographic approach, Franits examines a culture of “life-writing” as mediated by the author’s experiences as well as cultural expectations, revealing the element of interdependence at the center of life-writing, of disability, and of mothering. Rachel Robertson’s “Sharing Stories: Motherhood, Autism, and Culture” describes her son, his diagnosis, and their relationship as chronicled within diverse contexts and frameworks. Weaving together narrative and critical analysis, Robertson 128 • Narrativity and Meaning-Making brings together medical discourse, disability studies theory, scenes from her son at school, personal journal entries, cultural expectations, and a series of short stories authored by her son. In doing so, she not only reveals the misunderstandings and gaps between these various discursive communities but also offers the multigenre, multivoiced text as a way to increased social awareness and inclusion. In a personal and embodied account of breastfeeding and recovery, “Nurturing the Nurturer: Reflections on an Experience of Breastfeeding, Disability, and Physical Trauma,” Heather Kuttai offers readers a series of diarylike entries detailing the related experiences of pregnancy and childbirth amid her multiple, invasive back surgeries. Kuttai’s narrative of pain and healing centers on the value and agency that a disabled mother gains through breastfeeding her child. The final chapter in this section, “Vulnerable Subjects: Motherhood and Disability in Nancy Mairs and Cherríe Moraga ,” presents alternatives to the “self-reliant subject” in narratives about disability and mothering. Examining works by Mairs and Moraga, Suzanne Bost reveals a series of cultural beliefs and their limitations in our corporeal ideals and encourages us to imagine “other” viable ways of being. ...