The aim of this paper is to study how Swedish Jewish women and non-men relate to widespread notions of Jewish motherhood and the trope of ”the Jewish mother”, through their own stories. The paper asks how they relate to notions of Jewish motherhood, how these notions function in the construction of their identities as Jewish and how it relates to processes of community and nationalism. The material that is analyzed is the narrative of fourteen Jewishidentified women/non-men gathered with a survey interview. It is analyzed through theories of the relation between motherhood and nationalism, the constitutive terms of a diaspora and an intersectional approach to racialized processes of gender and gendered processes of the constitution of race and ethnicity. The thesis concludes that through the informants’ stories the cultural symbol of ”motherhood” is dependent upon certain symbols in its own, such as food and religious practices, that relate to identity processes among the informants, and to processes of community and nationalism tied to motherhood. Jewish mothers, potential mothers and parents are effected by expectations of certain Jewish ways of performing motherhood in their identification as Jewish and in their sense of belonging to the Jewish community. They also relate these expectations to portrayals of Jewish mothers from popular culture as well as to the parenting and memories of their own mothers and ancestral women.
Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:sh-30429 |
Date | January 2016 |
Creators | Berg, Joella |
Publisher | Södertörns högskola, Institutionen för kultur och lärande |
Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
Language | Swedish |
Detected Language | English |
Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
Format | application/pdf |
Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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