Broodmales - Softcover

Dawson, Warren

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0882143409 ISBN 13: 9780882143408

Publisher: Spring Publications, 1998

In the folk customs of couvade—"brooding" or "hatching"—practiced around the world, a man takes on the specific sexual and emotional events of a woman's body so that her experience becomes his. He becomes pregnant, writhes in labor, nurses the child, suffers postpartum fatigue—in short, is a male mother.

Nor Hall's "Men in Childbirth" introduces Dawson. She frames his explorations with data about social anthropologists at the turn of the century and then looks inward at the experiences grounding the customs of couvade they labeled bizarre. Dreams, bodily sensations, and "pathological" cases affirm the continuing practice of couvade today.

Dawson's ethnological classic collects material painstakingly complied from accounts of explorers and informants from the 1700's to the 1900's. Men lying in hammocks sprinkled with cayenne pepper, isolated in dark huts, running around the hearth with a baby strapped to the chest, building twing bridges for infant souls.

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About the Author:

Eleanor L. Hall (b.1947). Hall is a Jungian psychotherapist and widely read author of archetypal studies particularly on gender issues and cultural mythology. Residing in the Twin Cities for thirty-nine years, she has practiced archetypal psychology since 1972 while maintaining a career as a mythopoetic writer, independent lecturer, workshop leader, consultant, and theatre artist. Her work in recent years as a research dramaturg for Archipelago and content developer for new plays evolved out of participation in Pantheatre's Myth & Theatre Festivals. Hall is a volunteer case consultant for the Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis, a Pacifica Graduate Institute adjunct faculty and thesis advisor, an advisor for the Ashlar Institute on trauma issues, an advisor for Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture, an advisor for Pantheatre, a member of the Walker Arts Center Producers' Council and friend of Rain Taxi Review of books. In 2011 she was a featured guest at These Women!, a conference in Santa Barbara at the Institute for Cultural Change that was named after her book titled Those Women (1988) republished as Dreaming in Red (2005).

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