“When My Mother Died, I Think a Part of Me Died:” Maternal Fusion and the Relationship between Incarcerated Men and Their Mothers

Abstract

Drawing on theoretical literature on the mothering discourse, I explore how incarcerated men give meaning to their relationships with their mothers. Using 24 in-depth interviews with incarcerated adult men, I argue that adherence to the mothering discourse results in sons holding their mothers’ maternal practices to impossibly high standards while simultaneously feeling obligated to reconcile with their mothers even when doing so is tremendously difficult. I also advance the concept of “maternal fusion”—the process through which the identities of mothers and their children are intertwined—to examine how incarcerated adult sons reproduce gendered mothering ideologies in their narratives of (a) negative early childhood and adolescent relationships with their mothers and (b) reconciliation as they reflect on their relationships with their mothers as adult sons.

The Last Lick: A Lived Experience of Non-incarcerated Partners

“…The non-incarcerated partners face financial hardship, social shame, and intense emotional consequences (Kotova, 2016); relationship dissolution (de Miguel-Calvo, 2021); unsatisfactory psychological wellbeing (Patterson et al, 2021); unexpected medical complications (Connors et al, 2020;DeHart et al, 2017); and deprivation of love, sexuality, and personal life as "invisible detainees" (Cyphert, 2017; de Miguel-Calvo, 2021). According to Jardine (2019), Kirk and Wakefield (2018), and Umamaheswar (2021a), incarceration places significant burdens on non-incarcerated partners. Carretero Deegan (2021), Siddall (2021), and Sykes (2021) also linked incarceration to financial, social, clinical, and mental health consequences for non-incarcerated partners.…”