I am an Honorary Professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences, College of Arts and Education, Victoria University. My research is situated in the field of contemporary social theory. It is informed by an interest in feminism, transnational social movements and the politics of memory and forgetting. I have had an ongoing interest in the political and social dimensions of mothering and maternalist activism. My recent work is shaped by a feminist ethics of care framework and the intersection between feminism and psychoanalysis. I am currently practising psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in Melbourne.
Australian Mothering: Historical and Sociological Perspectives, 2020
This collection defines the field of maternal studies in Australia for the first time. Leading mo... more This collection defines the field of maternal studies in Australia for the first time. Leading motherhood researchers explore how mothering has evolved across Australian history as well as the joys and challenges of being a mother today. The contributors cover pregnancy, birth, relationships, childcare, domestic violence, time use, work, welfare, policy and psychology, from a diverse range of maternal perspectives. Utilising a matricentric feminist framework, Australian Mothering foregrounds the experiences, emotions and perspectives of mothers to better understand how Australian motherhood has developed historically and contemporaneously. Drawing upon their combined sociological and historical expertise, Bueskens and Pascoe Leahy have carefully curated a collection that presents compelling research on past and present perspectives on maternity in Australia, which will be relevant to researchers, advocates and policy makers interested in the changing role of mothers in Australian society.
There is a deep cultural anxiety around public expressions of maternalism and the application... more There is a deep cultural anxiety around public expressions of maternalism and the application of maternal values to society as a whole. Julie Stephens examines why postmaternal thinking has become so influential in recent decades and why there has been a growing unease with maternal forms of subjectivity and maternalist perspectives. In moving beyond policy definitions, which emphasize the priority given to women's claims as employees over their political claims as mothers, Stephens details an elaborate process of cultural forgetting that has accompanied this repudiation of the maternal.
Reclaiming an alternative feminist position through an investigation of oral history, life narratives, Web blogs, and other rich and varied sources, Stephens confronts the core claims of postmaternal thought and challenges dominant representations of feminism as having forgotten motherhood. Deploying the interpretive framework of memory studies, she examines the political structures of forgetting surrounding the maternal and the weakening of nurture and care in the public domain. She views the promotion of an illusory, self-sufficient individualism as a form of social unmothering that is profoundly connected to this ethos. In rejecting both traditional maternalism and the new postmaternalism, Stephens challenges prevailing paradigms and makes way for an alternative feminist maternalism centering on a politics of care.
Abstract: An examination of how the realities of motherhood have influenced feminist thought is p... more Abstract: An examination of how the realities of motherhood have influenced feminist thought is presented. There has been an active forgetting of the nurturing mother in feminist recall, which is a profound cultural significance and this is due to the complex political stakes and ...
Our understanding of maternalism tends to be dominated by feminist challenges to the maternal rol... more Our understanding of maternalism tends to be dominated by feminist challenges to the maternal role and the rejection of discourses linking women to children. Consequently, public ideals and ethics associated with maternal care have become increasingly privatised, individualised and questioned. This chapter will contrast two more recent manifestations of maternalism: the public role of the concerned ‘moral mother’ of the 2017 ‘No’ campaign for marriage equality and the civic activism of mothers and grandmothers for refugees in the ‘Bring Them Here’ campaign. It will propose a different way through the impasse between feminism and maternalism. It will argue that the culturally laden, paradoxical and contradictory associations around the maternal are precisely what gives maternalism its force and underline its political relevance for the twenty-first century.
The ‘blaming the sixties industry’ that emerged in the United States from the late eighties has i... more The ‘blaming the sixties industry’ that emerged in the United States from the late eighties has its own distinctive counterpart in France. The events of May-June 1968, where nine million people stopped working and brought France to a complete standstill for five to six weeks, has inspired a voluminous literature. By the end of 1968, in France alone, no fewer than 52 books and countless journal articles about the May events were in circulation. Each decade the anniversary of ’68 is marked, the ‘delirious commemorative logic’ (Starr 1995) of current publishing strategy ensures this literature continues to proliferate. Yet, according to Kristin Ross, as the upheaval of this period is remembered, so Left political culture is recast, reconfigured, or obscured.
This chapter traces the emergence and contemporary relevance of the idea of the postmaternal and ... more This chapter traces the emergence and contemporary relevance of the idea of the postmaternal and underlines its importance as a conceptual tool for feminist scholars in motherhood studies. It outlines the features of what I have theorized as “postmaternal thinking,” and its relationship to the elaborate processes of cultural forgetting that configure the way feminism is both remembered and contested today. The concept of postmaternalism as a dominant cultural formation relies on the forgetting of certain histories of feminist activism and thought, in particular the critical, radical maternalisms of the past. A productive way of holding in tension the conceptual, historical and political link between women and the maternal, alongside feminist critiques of this relationship will be proposed through a re-reading of Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking. Finally, this chapter examines some of the significant scholarly contributions that have been made a decade after the publication of my book Confronting Postmaternal Thinking: Feminism, Memory and Care in 2011. These more recent interventions suggest alternative postmaternalisms and take the theory in surprising new directions.
Like Arena, the sociology of social movements is fifty years old. As in social movement theory, t... more Like Arena, the sociology of social movements is fifty years old. As in social movement theory, the nature, structure, contexts, theoretical conflicts and consequences of social movement activity have been debated continuously in and by Arena. It would be difficult to do justice to the scope and intensity of Arena's intellectual engagement with social movements and the questions provoked by both new and old forms of collective action. Any investigation, by definition, would be partial and highly selective. One could choose the nuclear-disarmament movement, the feminist movement, Indigenous activism, the politics of the green movement or any example of the various nationalist struggles with social movement aims - such as those in East Timor, West Papua and New Caledonia - that Arena has covered or uncovered, often having been at the forefront of debate over the last decades. This essay moves in a slightly different direction. In order to examine key aspects of Arena's impact ...
Commentary of the following: Paul Hoggett and Simon Thompson (eds) Politics and the Emotions: The... more Commentary of the following: Paul Hoggett and Simon Thompson (eds) Politics and the Emotions: The Affective Turn in Contemporary Political Studies, New York, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012 (192 pp). ISBN 9781441119261. Nicolas Demertzis (ed) Emotions in Politics: The Affect Dimension in Political Tension, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013 (336 pp). ISBN 9781137025654. Martha C. Nussbaum Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013 (457 pp). ISBN 9780674724655.
ABSTRACT This article provides a considered response to all the contributions in this special iss... more ABSTRACT This article provides a considered response to all the contributions in this special issue on ‘Refiguring the Postmaternal’. It reflects on the new possibilities of postmaternalism as advanced and extended by each contributing author. It also attempts to reassert the idea of the postmaternal as a cultural anxiety about care and dependency and the need for ‘maternal thinking’. These are reinforced as important interpretive frames, while at the same time as paying particular attention to the limitations of these conceptions. Some of the recent literature on maternalism is discussed and this in turn raises questions about the widespread feminist discomfort around maternalism and its many historical and contemporary associations. A notion of the maternal as limit is introduced as a possible rich area for further investigation. The article ends with some policy examples of what a re-maternalised public sphere might look like. It calls for a cultural remembering of maternalist activism, alongside striving to develop alternative feminist visions for these postmaternal times.
Australian Mothering: Historical and Sociological Perspectives, 2020
This collection defines the field of maternal studies in Australia for the first time. Leading mo... more This collection defines the field of maternal studies in Australia for the first time. Leading motherhood researchers explore how mothering has evolved across Australian history as well as the joys and challenges of being a mother today. The contributors cover pregnancy, birth, relationships, childcare, domestic violence, time use, work, welfare, policy and psychology, from a diverse range of maternal perspectives. Utilising a matricentric feminist framework, Australian Mothering foregrounds the experiences, emotions and perspectives of mothers to better understand how Australian motherhood has developed historically and contemporaneously. Drawing upon their combined sociological and historical expertise, Bueskens and Pascoe Leahy have carefully curated a collection that presents compelling research on past and present perspectives on maternity in Australia, which will be relevant to researchers, advocates and policy makers interested in the changing role of mothers in Australian society.
There is a deep cultural anxiety around public expressions of maternalism and the application... more There is a deep cultural anxiety around public expressions of maternalism and the application of maternal values to society as a whole. Julie Stephens examines why postmaternal thinking has become so influential in recent decades and why there has been a growing unease with maternal forms of subjectivity and maternalist perspectives. In moving beyond policy definitions, which emphasize the priority given to women's claims as employees over their political claims as mothers, Stephens details an elaborate process of cultural forgetting that has accompanied this repudiation of the maternal.
Reclaiming an alternative feminist position through an investigation of oral history, life narratives, Web blogs, and other rich and varied sources, Stephens confronts the core claims of postmaternal thought and challenges dominant representations of feminism as having forgotten motherhood. Deploying the interpretive framework of memory studies, she examines the political structures of forgetting surrounding the maternal and the weakening of nurture and care in the public domain. She views the promotion of an illusory, self-sufficient individualism as a form of social unmothering that is profoundly connected to this ethos. In rejecting both traditional maternalism and the new postmaternalism, Stephens challenges prevailing paradigms and makes way for an alternative feminist maternalism centering on a politics of care.
Abstract: An examination of how the realities of motherhood have influenced feminist thought is p... more Abstract: An examination of how the realities of motherhood have influenced feminist thought is presented. There has been an active forgetting of the nurturing mother in feminist recall, which is a profound cultural significance and this is due to the complex political stakes and ...
Our understanding of maternalism tends to be dominated by feminist challenges to the maternal rol... more Our understanding of maternalism tends to be dominated by feminist challenges to the maternal role and the rejection of discourses linking women to children. Consequently, public ideals and ethics associated with maternal care have become increasingly privatised, individualised and questioned. This chapter will contrast two more recent manifestations of maternalism: the public role of the concerned ‘moral mother’ of the 2017 ‘No’ campaign for marriage equality and the civic activism of mothers and grandmothers for refugees in the ‘Bring Them Here’ campaign. It will propose a different way through the impasse between feminism and maternalism. It will argue that the culturally laden, paradoxical and contradictory associations around the maternal are precisely what gives maternalism its force and underline its political relevance for the twenty-first century.
The ‘blaming the sixties industry’ that emerged in the United States from the late eighties has i... more The ‘blaming the sixties industry’ that emerged in the United States from the late eighties has its own distinctive counterpart in France. The events of May-June 1968, where nine million people stopped working and brought France to a complete standstill for five to six weeks, has inspired a voluminous literature. By the end of 1968, in France alone, no fewer than 52 books and countless journal articles about the May events were in circulation. Each decade the anniversary of ’68 is marked, the ‘delirious commemorative logic’ (Starr 1995) of current publishing strategy ensures this literature continues to proliferate. Yet, according to Kristin Ross, as the upheaval of this period is remembered, so Left political culture is recast, reconfigured, or obscured.
This chapter traces the emergence and contemporary relevance of the idea of the postmaternal and ... more This chapter traces the emergence and contemporary relevance of the idea of the postmaternal and underlines its importance as a conceptual tool for feminist scholars in motherhood studies. It outlines the features of what I have theorized as “postmaternal thinking,” and its relationship to the elaborate processes of cultural forgetting that configure the way feminism is both remembered and contested today. The concept of postmaternalism as a dominant cultural formation relies on the forgetting of certain histories of feminist activism and thought, in particular the critical, radical maternalisms of the past. A productive way of holding in tension the conceptual, historical and political link between women and the maternal, alongside feminist critiques of this relationship will be proposed through a re-reading of Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking. Finally, this chapter examines some of the significant scholarly contributions that have been made a decade after the publication of my book Confronting Postmaternal Thinking: Feminism, Memory and Care in 2011. These more recent interventions suggest alternative postmaternalisms and take the theory in surprising new directions.
Like Arena, the sociology of social movements is fifty years old. As in social movement theory, t... more Like Arena, the sociology of social movements is fifty years old. As in social movement theory, the nature, structure, contexts, theoretical conflicts and consequences of social movement activity have been debated continuously in and by Arena. It would be difficult to do justice to the scope and intensity of Arena's intellectual engagement with social movements and the questions provoked by both new and old forms of collective action. Any investigation, by definition, would be partial and highly selective. One could choose the nuclear-disarmament movement, the feminist movement, Indigenous activism, the politics of the green movement or any example of the various nationalist struggles with social movement aims - such as those in East Timor, West Papua and New Caledonia - that Arena has covered or uncovered, often having been at the forefront of debate over the last decades. This essay moves in a slightly different direction. In order to examine key aspects of Arena's impact ...
Commentary of the following: Paul Hoggett and Simon Thompson (eds) Politics and the Emotions: The... more Commentary of the following: Paul Hoggett and Simon Thompson (eds) Politics and the Emotions: The Affective Turn in Contemporary Political Studies, New York, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012 (192 pp). ISBN 9781441119261. Nicolas Demertzis (ed) Emotions in Politics: The Affect Dimension in Political Tension, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013 (336 pp). ISBN 9781137025654. Martha C. Nussbaum Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013 (457 pp). ISBN 9780674724655.
ABSTRACT This article provides a considered response to all the contributions in this special iss... more ABSTRACT This article provides a considered response to all the contributions in this special issue on ‘Refiguring the Postmaternal’. It reflects on the new possibilities of postmaternalism as advanced and extended by each contributing author. It also attempts to reassert the idea of the postmaternal as a cultural anxiety about care and dependency and the need for ‘maternal thinking’. These are reinforced as important interpretive frames, while at the same time as paying particular attention to the limitations of these conceptions. Some of the recent literature on maternalism is discussed and this in turn raises questions about the widespread feminist discomfort around maternalism and its many historical and contemporary associations. A notion of the maternal as limit is introduced as a possible rich area for further investigation. The article ends with some policy examples of what a re-maternalised public sphere might look like. It calls for a cultural remembering of maternalist activism, alongside striving to develop alternative feminist visions for these postmaternal times.
A Review Essay of Leslie Kern's book, Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World (Verso, 2... more A Review Essay of Leslie Kern's book, Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World (Verso, 2020)
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Books by Julie Stephens
Reclaiming an alternative feminist position through an investigation of oral history, life narratives, Web blogs, and other rich and varied sources, Stephens confronts the core claims of postmaternal thought and challenges dominant representations of feminism as having forgotten motherhood. Deploying the interpretive framework of memory studies, she examines the political structures of forgetting surrounding the maternal and the weakening of nurture and care in the public domain. She views the promotion of an illusory, self-sufficient individualism as a form of social unmothering that is profoundly connected to this ethos. In rejecting both traditional maternalism and the new postmaternalism, Stephens challenges prevailing paradigms and makes way for an alternative feminist maternalism centering on a politics of care.
Doi: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/confronting-postmaternal-thinking/9780231149211
Publication Date: 2011
Papers by Julie Stephens
Reclaiming an alternative feminist position through an investigation of oral history, life narratives, Web blogs, and other rich and varied sources, Stephens confronts the core claims of postmaternal thought and challenges dominant representations of feminism as having forgotten motherhood. Deploying the interpretive framework of memory studies, she examines the political structures of forgetting surrounding the maternal and the weakening of nurture and care in the public domain. She views the promotion of an illusory, self-sufficient individualism as a form of social unmothering that is profoundly connected to this ethos. In rejecting both traditional maternalism and the new postmaternalism, Stephens challenges prevailing paradigms and makes way for an alternative feminist maternalism centering on a politics of care.
Doi: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/confronting-postmaternal-thinking/9780231149211
Publication Date: 2011