A Thread, a Maternal Thread

Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research …, 2006

identzfying within it a sh ftfiom essentialism to poststructuralism, expressed as a change in terminologvfiom "motherhood" to "mothering." It draws on the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Adrienne Rich, Sara Ruddick, and Judith Butler, amongothers. FollowingButler, itofers the notion ofinaternalperformativity' as potentially inspiring. To understand mothering as performative is to conceive of it as an active practice-a notion that is already progressive, given the traditional Western understanding of the mother as passive--that may also be subversive. Maternalperformativity also challenges the idea of the mother as origin. However, the notion does have its problems, not least because it fails to acknowledge the relational, ethical aspect of mothering behaviours. I argue, then, for aperformative maternal ethics, characterized by relationality and bodiliness. A key site fir its performance would be literature; reading and writing may produce new identzjications with others and may therefore be viewed as "maternal," ethicalactivities. The article ends by calling for further explorations of the link between mothering and artistic practice.

Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement , 2019

In their dominant, institutionalized iterations within the field of women and gender studies, as well as in much feminist theory, the concepts of female empowerment, self-direction, and gender equality are still largely based on Western neoliberal views of individualism, self, and agency. Notwithstanding important theoretical interventions from the field of motherhood studies and a recent strand of feminist theory and philosophy promoting a relational understanding of identity, self and agency, full equality in mainstream feminism still “requires that women be liberated from the consequences of their bodies, namely the ability to bear children” (Fox-Genovese 21). The aim of this article is to contribute to work seeking to deconstruct forms of essentialism embedded in women and gender studies and feminist theory by bringing together feminist critiques of Western conceptions of self and identity and the theory of the maternal articulated in motherhood studies. My hope is to make apparent the distance between the body in its reproductive function (pregnancy and birth) on the one hand, and the performativity embedded in the maternal role, on the other. By discussing maternal work as separate from pregnancy and birth, I wish to highlight the socially constructed nature of expectations and ideas associated with maternity and reveal that the often neglected agency involved in taking on and performing the role of mother.

Hypatia, 2010

Over the past few years, considerable progress has been made in the field of feminist theorizing on the maternal, evidenced in the three books reviewed here. These books illustrate the extraordinary breadth of perspective, disciplinary approach, methodological engagement, and style of writing currently used by researchers keen to examine the uneasy relations between feminism and mothering. Although these books are different in many ways, they also have a great deal in common. All of the authors address feminism and the maternal, but they also address subjectivity, relationality, reciprocity, resistance, ethics, and otherness. In this review, I offer some brief thoughts on each book, followed by a discussion of some of the main themes that run across them. First is Lisa Baraitser's Maternal Encounters. Baraitser is a lecturer in psychosocial studies at Birkbeck, University of London. In Maternal Encounters, she draws on contemporary philosophies of feminist ethics, psychoanalysis, and social theory in order to argue that the maternal subject functions as an emblematic and enigmatic formation of subjectivity. The mother is ''called into being'' through a relationship with another that she comes to name and claim as her child. Baraitser explains: I want to return to the mother-child relationship itself to probe the complexity of a specifically maternal ethics. To do so requires understanding maternal ethics as less to do with an unstinting commitment or caring attentiveness towards an other, and more to do with the way otherness is always at work, structuring, infecting and prompting human subjectivity. (28)

Studies in the Maternal, 2020

Hypatia, 2024

“What might motherhood and Europe have to do with one another?” is a question posed by Lisa Baraitser in the Foreword to the collection, Motherhood in Literature and Culture: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Europe. The question is certainly pertinent at a time when the very concept of Europe as a geopolitical space and an imaginary construct is being interrogated and critiqued from both within and without the carefully policed borders of the European Union project. It is also pertinent given the increased amount of scholarship on the maternal produced by scholars occupying various transnational locations and positionalities, working to deconstruct unitary and essentialist ideas about mothers and motherhood. The possibility of identifying a specifically European maternal theoretical and lived space thus invites us to carefully theorize the diversity of European contexts, a diversity that is often occluded or elided by easy references to Eurocentric bias in feminist research, as well as the dis/continuities between European-based and Anglo-American feminist scholarship on the maternal. And yet, precisely because the work of mothering always unfolds within specific micro and macro geographic, social, cultural, and ideological spaces, the question merits closer attention. In this essay I consider the cluster of three books delineating the contours of an Italian, as well as a more broadly conceptualized European, philosophy of the maternal in light of these evolving academic and experiential realities.

Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, 2019

Studies in the Maternal

Soft Power

Another Mother. Diotima and the Symbolic Order of Italian Feminist, edited by Cesare Casalino and Andrea Righi, is dedicated to Gender Studies. As is well known, Gender Studies revolutionized the culture and the way of thinking and structuring society, offering new theoretical tools to decode the current world, and new categories to read the distinction between man and woman: starting from a representation of gender as a cultural construction, in opposition with the traditional biological distinctions between male and female. Indeed, those studies led in the eighties to a strong emancipation turn. Starting from the critics to biological determinism, in relation to social expectations, roles and cultural models, Gender Studies aimed to reformulate gender and sexual-orientation-based identities. In a second time this goal was perceived through the deconstruction of a binary vision, homosexuality / heterosexuality, highlighting its performative aspect. As shown by Luisa Muraro, the performative structures the relationship between mother and child. It is an exchange of teaching and learning, a pedagogical "give-and-take" which defines and establishes language. With the words of Muraro (2006): "We learn to speak from the mother, and this statement defines both who the mother is and what language is. " Undoubtedly, feminism has often been on the fringes of general philosophical and juridical reflection, since it is a complex and heterogeneous movement that aims to eliminate any patriarchal order; it evidently brings actions and political claims aimed at tarnishing the neutral and objectifying image which very often follows legal subjectivity. A subjectivity inevitably crossed by an ontological difference of the woman, which coincides in the patriarchy with the very negation of its identity: a subjectivity to be built through the recognition of sexual difference as a productive structural asymmetry, from an autonomous and independent symbolic matrix. In this sense, the