Mother Lode: Memories of My Mother Outlaw(s)

Authors

  • Linn Baran

Abstract

This personal essay is a most special tribute to the author’s own mother Bernadette Sheila Ledgard Baran (1930-2015) and includes a re-visioning of her own feminist research and several papers that she has presented at conferences over the past decade inspired by the stories based in her own motherline. As a life writing “love letter” for a mother and daughter’s mutual project of bearing witness to Adrienne Rich’s continuing vision for “mother outlaws” to embody a more empowered mothering within the institution of motherhood, this essay equally acknowledges the challenges of reclaiming the possibilities for such a feminist mothering of resistance when a legacy of potentially misunderstood “outlaw mothering” is present within one’s own maternal past.

Author Biography

Linn Baran

Baran is a graduate of York University with degrees in English Literature and Women’s Studies. Her maternal activism, frontline work, and community research continues to support the empowerment and social inclusion of diverse mothers with young children in service provisions and family supports. Her chapter entitled “Mother Outlaws: Building Communities of Empowered Feminist Mothers in the Motherhood” is included in the collection The 21st Century Motherhood Movement (Demeter Press, 2011). She is co-editor of the forthcoming Demeter Press collection entitled Monstrous Mothers: Troubling Tropes.

Journal of the Motherhood Initiative Vol 9, No 1 (2018) featuring artwork by Rachel Epp Buller titled "Arbor 19."

How to Cite

Baran, L. (2018). Mother Lode: Memories of My Mother Outlaw(s). Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement, 9(1). Retrieved from https://jarm3.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/jarm/article/view/40486

Issue

Journal of the Motherhood Initiative Vol 9, No 1 (2018)

Section

Contents

License

All intellectual property in relation to material included on this site belongs to the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (MIRCI). All material on this site is protected by Canadian and international copyright and other intellectual property laws. Users may not do anything which interferes with or breaches those laws or the intellectual property rights in the material. All materials on the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (MIRCI) are copyrighted and all rights are reserved. Any reproduction, modification, publication, transmission, transfer, sale, distribution, display or exploitation of the information, in any form or by any means, or its storage in a retrieval system, whether in whole or in part, without the express written permission of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (MIRCI) is prohibited. Please contact us for permission to reproduce any of our materials. This site may include third party content which is subject to that third party's terms and conditions of use.