Keynote lecture, Prof Robyn Longhurst: Changing Spaces of mothering: 'hot mamas', YouTube births and maternal men

This keynote lecture is hosted by the CCIG Bodies Programme and the OpenSpace Research Centre

We are delighted that Robyn Longhurst, Professor of Geography at University of Waikato, New Zealand is coming to the Open University for a two day visit, 9-10 February 2011. During the visit she will be giving a guest lecture, undertaking a session with postgraduates in the Faculty and taking part in an interview to be uploaded onto the CCIG and OpenSpace Websites.

Changing Spaces of mothering: 'hot mamas', YouTube births and maternal men

Abstract

In the early 1990s the western media started to publish photographs and stories that depict pregnant women and new mothers (especially celebrities) as ‘sexy’. Tristan Taormino, in her regular column in New York’s The Village Voice, describes these women as ‘hot mamas’. In the mid-2000s women began sharing their birthing experiences with millions of international viewers using ‘YouTube’ (online video). Searching ‘YouTube’ for ‘birth’ results in approximately half a million ‘hits’. In 2008 the media reported the story of a 34 year old transgender man in Oregon, United States – who kept his female reproductive organs – who was pregnant with a baby girl. Beatie and his wife Nancy had wanted to have a child but Nancy could not conceive. This presentation aims to unravel some of the diversity and complexity of the embodied experiences of maternity and illustrate that maternal bodies are constructed through different social and cultural entanglements and through different spaces and places.

Biography

Robyn Longhurst is Professor of Geography at University of Waikato. She is an editor of Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography and Chair of the International Geographical Union Commission on Gender and Geography. She teaches feminist, social, and cultural geography. Robyn has published on issues relating to pregnancy, mothering, ‘fat’ bodies, ‘visceral geographies’, masculinities, and the politics of knowledge. She is author of Bodies: Exploring Fluid Boundaries (2001), Maternities: Gender, Bodies and Spaces (2008) and co-author of Pleasure Zones: Bodies, Cities, Spaces (2001) and Space, Place, and Sex: Geographies of Sexualities (2010).

For more details, please contact Raia Prokhovnik,  r.prokhovnik@open.co.uk, or Steve Pile, s.j.pile@open.ac.uk