title: Nurturing ideology: Representations of motherhood in contemporary Australian adolescent fiction
Creators: name: Beere, Diana
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2000
Subjects: subject: Motherhood
subject: Adolescent fiction
subject: Critical literacy
subject: Australian fiction
subject: Children's literature
subject: Fiction
subject: Novel

description: This study analyses the ways in which motherhood is represented in a corpus of contemporary, critically acclaimed Australian adolescent fiction. The 18 texts in the research corpus were those short-listed by the Children's Book Council of Australia for its annual Book of the Year: Older Readers award in the years 1992 to 1994 inclusive. The publicity, prestige and power attached to these awards means that short-listed books, taken to be 'good' books for children and adolescents, are often used as educational resources in Australian schools, particularly to support teaching and learning activities in literacy and English education. Recognising adolescent fiction as a potentially significant site of contestation over the social justice ideals that inform Australia's national curriculum documents, the study sought to document the ways in which these texts are implicated in the production and reproduction of ideologies of motherhood. The study was informed by the understanding that meanings are not inherent to texts, but are constructed by readers as they adopt particular subject positions in relation to texts and enter into what, in effect, are social relationships with them. From this perspective, the analysis required attention not only to textual features of the research corpus, but also to the various other resources on which readers might reasonably draw to construct meanings. This meant attending to intertextuality, that is, the relationships between the fictional narratives on which the study focused and other cultural texts, including the visual and spoken texts of everyday life, and to the ways in which readers are encouraged or required to draw on these intertexts as meaning-making resources. The study recognised that readers' primary mean-making resources are common-sense ideologies, understood as the widely shared and taken-for-granted understandings about the social world that inform much of the everyday social action and interaction among members of a society. The study was also underpinned by an understanding of motherhood as a social construct rather than an essentially biologically determined state, and therefore as having meanings that are subject to contestation and revision. To establish the range of contemporary understandings about motherhood on which readers might draw to make sense of textual representations of motherhood, the study drew on the findings of recent research into the discursive construction of motherhood, with particular attention to what currently prevails as common sense. These common-sense understandings about motherhood, together with the alternative discourses on which readers might draw to construct meaning, subsequently informed the analyses of the research corpus. Given the size of the corpus, only six of the texts were selected for close attention. The analyses of these texts were supplemented with less detailed analyses of the remainder of the corpus, focusing on the themes that emerged most powerfully from the first six analyses. While some attention was given to the linguistic features of the texts, the analytical process focused most closely on their narrative features and the ways in which particular narrative strategies work to limit the range of possible meanings that readers can construct by rendering some meanings more 'obvious' than others. Particular attention was given to the focalising strategies through which fictional narratives exert much of their power to persuade readers to adopt certain subject positions rather than others, and hence to construct meaning in certain ways, with consequences in terms of the production and reproduction of ideologies. The analyses revealed that prevailing common-sense ideologies of motherhood are not significantly challenged by the ways in which motherhood is represented in the research corpus. While there are points in some of the narratives that might serve as platforms from which to construct alternative understandings about motherhood, particularly for those readers who are equipped with critical reading strategies, the narratives never actively and unequivocally encourage readers to challenge common-sense understandings. Rather, their major contribution to contemporary ideological struggles over the meaning of motherhood is directed towards ensuring continued widespread acceptance of the discursively constructed 'truths' that work to legitimate a social order in which the lives of girls and women are regulated on the basis of their categorisation as potential or actual mothers. The study concluded that the texts in the research corpus are actively engaged in undermining contemporary social struggles for social justice and equity. The study's findings have a number of significant implications for theory development, policy, practice and future research, both within and beyond the field of education, and these are discussed in the final chapter. In particular, the findings are relevant to literacy education, where they highlight the need for educators to develop and implement critical literacy pedagogies that draw students' attention to the textual workings of ideology. The findings suggest that what students need, arguably more than they need 'good' literature, are meta-level reading skills and strategies with which they can resist being manipulated by texts, whether they are fictional narratives of the kind analysed for this study or the various other written, spoken and visual texts that are typically encountered in everyday social life.