Reflecting on 10 years of Maternal Studies

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, 2009

Ever since I became a mother, nearly twenty five years ago, I have known it was a transformative experience and that transformation has continued ever since, affecting who I am in every way. While my relationship with my daughter was and is central to this, I experience my 'maternal' identity as extending far wider, perhaps even into all my practices and all my relationships (for example, as a manager, friend, even as a daughter). And why would any facet of my life be insulated from this powerful transformative force? Understanding what had happened to change me continued to challenge and engage me as a feminist psychologist. My formation-as an adult woman and then as a mother-was shaped by early second wave feminism, within which motherhood was seen as a problem. The radical texts of de Beauvoir (1949), Firestone (1970) and Greer (1970) came from the position (crudely summarised) that being a mother was a fundamental part of women's subordination and failure to achieve equality on men's terms. Like many of my generation

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.

2001

In moving from concepts of motherhood and mothers to a theorisation of maternal subjectivity that emphasises unconscious intersubjectivity, this paper casts light on the following questions: ⇒ What is meant by maternal and who qualifies? ⇒ Do gender and sex of parents and carers make any systematic difference to an infant, child or adolescent's experience of parenting and their own capacity to care? ⇒ If it is agreed that a universal characteristic of the infant-mother relationship is a one-way, non-negotiable dependency, what are the implications for changes in the subjectivity of women who become mothers? ⇒ If it is necessary to uncouple the idea of maternal subjectivity from the figure of the mother, how do we understand the continuing relationship between these two? ⇒ How does the theorisation of infantile phantasy, and in particular the phantasy of maternal omnipotence, affect how we understand the effectivity of maternal, paternal and other-figure care? ⇒ Modifications to a Freudian Oedipal account of the father's role in boys' and girls' separation from the mother are necessitated by the theorisation in this paper. What are the implications for social policy in the context of changing family forms in which many boys and girls grow up without fathers present? In the context of changing family forms and reactive claims that 'families need fathers', it is of considerable relevance to inquire seriously into the gendered and moral nature of parenting and its consequences for children's wellbeing using the theoretical perspectives that critical psychology has been involved in developing. This paper is intended to contribute to such knowledge.

Studies in the Maternal

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2012

This book is a welcome and provocative contribution to feminist and psychoanalytical theories of motherhood and philosophical conceptions of subjectivity. There is little discussion of motherhood in psychoanalytic theory, where the main protagonist is the child and its difficult process of becoming a sexed speaking subject. With its presumption of universality, the philosophical conception of rational subjectivity not only marginalizes femininity but is in fact predicated upon the exclusion of body, affectivity, care, and relationality characteristic of maternal experience. Thus Stone rightly claims that the philosophical conception of subjectivity, action, and agency is at odds with motherhood, which, within these premises, would represent the loss of agency and the subsequent subservience of the self to the child's needs. Even in feminist theory there is a paucity of analyses of motherhood because of the lingering suspicions that even a critical focus on maternity might be complicit with the patriarchal heteronormative prescription in service of gender domination and at odds with the professional aspirations of women. As Stone puts it, Second Wave feminism is primarily a daughter's discourse. Thus, if motherhood represents a different kind of subjectivity, it is still an invisible subject, undertheorized and philosophically unaccounted for. Consequently, by providing a feminist articulation of maternal subjectivity, Stone's book represents an important intervention into all three of these disciplines: psychoanalysis, feminism, and philosophy.

Studies in the Maternal