Bio: Sylvie Côté is a first-year PhD student at York University in the Gender, Feminist, and Women’s Studies program. Her research explores cultural representations of drug users, as well as the ways in which rave-goers in Toronto understand their social identity in relation to their drug use. She’s a lead volunteer and peer with psyLush, a Toronto-based harm reduction organization in the rave community. Her project aims to identify how harm reduction efforts could be more effective when they take up an intersectional approach. Finally, Sylvie’s hobbies include flow dancing, painting, and hiking.
Abstract:
In Domenica Ruta’s “comedic” mother-daughter memoir, With or Without You (2013), she writes about her childhood growing up with her mother Kathi in the 1980s and ‘90s in Boston, MA. With or Without You is also an addictions and recovery memoir, highlighting Kathi’s complicated relationship to stimulants like cocaine and physician-prescribed opioids like OxyContin. The memoir follows Ruta into adulthood where she overcomes her own experience with addiction and eventually cuts off her mother completely. In this paper, I will use a matrifocal reading to center Kathi’s voice. As motherhood studies scholar Dr. Andrea O’Reilly explains, “a matrifocal reading attends to and accentuates the maternal thematic in any given text” (“Matricentric Feminism” 476-7). This frame of reference is important: reading a text with an eye for the mother’s perspective and through a matricentric feminist lens lens is necessary for this reading given the similarly controversial, stigmatizing, and marginalizing nature of drug use and addiction for women in the North American cultural imaginary. Ultimately, I argue that a child’s perspective of their mother is always flawed because they view their mothers through the oppressive lens of normative motherhood; even then, if Kathi were to meet the “ideal” one-dimensional, unrealistic, and impossible standards of normative motherhood or “intensive mothering,” Ruta’s memoir demonstrates that mothers will never be “good enough” and ultimately fall into negative stereotypes like the helicopter parent. Ruta cannot view Kathi with the complexity and humanity that her mother deserves, instead memorializing her mother as a dramatic joke. Specifically, I will consider the limits of the publishing industry for “monstrous” motherhood memoirs; examine Kathi’s upbringing through a bio-psycho-social lens to consider why she turns to substances; investigate how Ruta fails to see Kathi’s traumatic past as well as her “good” mothering practices; re-read Kathi’s “monstrous” mothering with compassion; and finally look at paths to recovery and redemption. My aim is to point to the ways in which monstrous interlocking systems of oppression like patriarchy, capitalism, and ableism work together to create this illusion of “good” and “monstrous” mothers, thereby ignoring the societal and structural changes needed to support all mothers. Disabled mothers, mothers with addictions, and mothers in recovery could offer valuable insight about motherhood to the healthcare system, legal system, and other parents.
A Matrifocal Reading: Monstrous Motherhood in Domenica Ruta’s Addiction Memoir With or Without You
- JourMS - 