Refiguring the Postmaternal

Feminist Responses to the Forgetting of Motherhood

Maria Fannin, Maud Perrier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780815392057
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351200097
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the concept of the 'postmaternal' as a response to changing cultural, political and economic conditions for motherhood and responds to Julie Stephens' contention that gender-neutral feminism has led to a forgetting of the maternal within feminist memory. In Confronting Postmaternal Thinking: Feminism, Memory, Care (2011) Stephens identifies a significant cultural anxiety about care-giving, nurturing and human dependency she calls 'postmaternal' thinking. Stephens argues that maternal forms of care have been rejected in the public sphere and marginalised to the private domain through an elaborate process of cultural forgetting, in turn contributing to the current dominance of a degendered form of feminism.

This book argues that refiguring postmaternalism requires opening up the maternal beyond the category of mothers and the nuclear family. The chapters in this edited volume contribute to the field of maternal studies by investigating the connections between maternalism, feminism and neoliberalism through diverse feminist theories, cases and methodologies. We challenge Stephens' diagnosis of the 'forgetting' of certain forms of maternal practices from feminism's history by highlighting the ongoing contested place of the maternal in feminist scholarship and activism for the last five decades. We argue that the memorializing of the maternal in feminist scholarship needs to reflect its diverse legacies in the analyses of black feminism, socialist feminism and ecofeminism in order to destabilise the association of the maternal with neoliberalism and the depoliticization of feminism. This book was originally published as a special issue of Australian Feminist Studies.

Postmaternal, Postwork and the Maternal Death Drive

Lisa Baraitser

ABSTRACT

The term ‘postmaternal’ has recently emerged as a way to articulate the effects of neoliberalism on the public devaluing of caring labour [Stephens, Julie. 2011. Confronting Postmaternal Thinking: Feminism, Memory, and Care. New York: Columbia University Press]. This term suggests a valorisation of values associated with care and mothering that have traditionally been gendered and rely on a heterosexist matrix for their intelligibility. Marxist feminist writers during the 1970s struggled with the question of the particular form of care that reproduction entails, and this feminist archive has been recently extended to a discussion of ‘post-work’ [Weeks, Kathi. 2011. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham: Duke], in which calls for the valuing of unpaid work as a viable form of labour have been reanimated. In this article I examine the relation between these two analytic categories – ‘postmaternal’ and ‘postwork’. Both categories require that we re-think some of the most trenchant issues in feminist thought – the sexual division of labour, the place of ‘reproduction’ in psychic and social life, and the possibilities for a new feminist commons.

Introduction

Over the last few years I have written a series of ‘maternal anecdotes’, short, not-quite-stories about odd and resistant experiences prompted by motherhood, which I have ‘overmined’, we could say, for theoretical insights, by paying a huge amount of attention to what were otherwise rather mundane incidents in the everyday life of a particular mother (Baraitser 2009a, 2009b, 2011, 2013, 2014). This overmining was a strategic practice, an attempt to generate theory out of an autoethnography that took my own experience of the dislodgements and estrangements of motherhood as a starting point for an investigation into what we might really mean by a ‘maternal subject’. I wanted to see what kind of theory could be generated out of a deliberate and profound attention paid to the maternal-ordinary. I was aiming at an intervention into an entrenched set of debates and questions in feminist, psychoanalytic and queer theory concerning the figure of the mother in both social and psychic life; whether ‘the mother’ constituted an analytic category in the way that ‘woman’ once did; how to conceptualise the putative, if now precarious relations between femininity and maternity;¹ and what happens to the category of the maternal, and experiences of motherhood, when theories are underpinned by an implicit repudiation of reproduction, care, vulnerability and dependency (see, in particular, Edelman 2004). I did not, however, want to substitute this repudiation with a version of maternalism – an assertion, as Julie Stephens puts in Confronting Postmaternal Thinking (2011) of the public and social importance of motherhood, and the nurture and care of children as a model for the public good. Instead I worked away at a theory of maternal ethics that could step aside from figurations of maternal care as either vital necessity, or a form of female masochism, by trying to account for what I called ‘maternal alterity’ (Baraitser 2009a). My interest was in whether maternal encounters (encounters between those who identify as ‘mothers’, and those whom we come to name and claim as our ‘children’) could hold open the potential for a radical form of ethics running counter to capitalist modes of productivity, temporality and exchange, without this form of ethics necessarily re-suturing femininity to an ethic of care. I drew not only on Levinas’ trenchant account of the subjective productiveness of an encounter with otherness (1998), but on Badiou’s account of love that ‘treats’ the condition that there are two radically ‘disjunct’ positions of experience that cannot know one another (2000), as well as a long history of feminist metaphysics that has argued in different ways for the ‘not-one’.² I was concerned with thinking maternal ethics as an encounter a mother may have with an irreducible otherness in the figure of the child, who remains resistant to the effects of that encounter, and therefore may call forth what we could then, with more surety, name as a ‘maternal subject’. Maternal alterity also meant listening out for the ‘call’ of many other ‘others’, signalling both the multiple histories of collective practices of childcare, and in a more materialist vein, our relations with non-human others involved in the complex processes of maternal labour. This concerned paying attention to the ethicality of ‘stuff’, as in Heidegger’s (1962) notion of ‘Zeug’; ‘things’ and their thingness, as Bennett (2010) would have it, ‘tool-beings’, to use Harman’s (2007, 171–205) evocative Heideggerian term, and the inanimate ‘dumb’ materiality that Lacan (1992) links with the Real of the maternal body, but is, of course, far from dumb. So I wrote about the ethics of encounters between mothers and baby clothes, blankets, quilts, bottles, teats, milk powder, sterilisers, breast pumps, feeding spoons and bowls, juice bottles and bibs, pacifiers, mobiles, rattles, nappies, wipes, changing mats, creams, powders, cribs, cots, baskets, baby monitors, prams, buggies, carry cots, slings, back packs, car seats and, as O’Rourke (2011) has put it ‘so ever infinitely on’.

While I was doing this work, something strange happened; something I should, of course, have foreseen, should have been mindful of right from the start. My children … grew up. My oldest child is now seventeen, and looking out into the world, his back to the small group of us who have born, carried, cajoled, taught, and supported him, still occasionally inclined towards us when he needs to be, and recently turning in an ironic way when he leaves the house, to wave, a half-jokey reminder that one day soon, when I’m not looking, he will just turn the corner at the end of the street, and simply walk away. I neither dread nor savour it. He will continue to be someone I think of as ‘my child’ after he is gone, as I will continue to inhabit lives other than the one named ‘mother’, just as I will go on mothering other children. He will continue to be ‘my child’ should I have the profound misfortune to outlive him. But he is leaving. I am ‘postmaternal’.

What might ‘postmaternal’ mean? In this article, I shall be departing from Julie Stephens’ use of this term. Stephens’ ‘postmaternal’ describes the manifestation of a generalised public anxiety about the values associated with maternal models of care, and the repudiation of the maternal in public and private(ised) life that she calls ‘unmothering’, particularly in discourses that operate in areas of the global north where neoliberal principles have dominated state interventions in the labour market (2011, 15, 132). Her argument is that the cultural ideals central to the workings of neoliberal institutions, work arrangements, and conceptualisations of the self, require a kind of ‘forgetting’ of the core dependencies of all human experience. This leads to a cultural hostility to what Richard Sennett calls the ‘dignity of dependence’ (Stephens 2011, 7). Without wanting to fully embrace a position of maternalism, even in its more recent neomaternalist evocations, Stephens nevertheless wants to ‘confront’ this repudiation of dependencies that she names as ‘postmaternal thinking’ through a practice of actively remembering feminism’s own ‘nurturing’ mothers, returning us to the possibilities of making political claims based on universal needs for care, nurturance and the management of vulnerability.

My aim here is to open up the notion of the ‘postmaternal’ through bringing it into some kind of proximity with Weeks’ (2011) concept ‘postwork’. ‘Postwork’ is a rather different attempt to respond to some of the same problematics that Stephens identifies in the ways work and care (or social reproduction) have become so separated from one another, and draws on 1970s Marxist feminist texts about wages for housework to reanimate a utopian demand for a postwork politics. In bringing these two terms into relation with one another I’m seeking to think with and against the postmaternal, by suggesting, with Weeks, that there is a strategic need for making certain demands in the name of both social reproduction and work, that go beyond the neomaternalism (albeit a feminist one) that underpins Stephens’ analysis of the postmaternal discourses that surely do surround us. However, the thrust of my argument is that we also need to continue to prize open the implications of using mothering to signify the tripartite conjunction of care, nurture and the management of states of dependency when we make arguments about work and care in public life. Mothering may include practices of care and nurturance, but it also concerns the daily management and experience, for those who mother, of hatred, aggression, guilt, fear, frustration, violence and despair, that have some relation, even if a retroactive and indirect one, to early experiences of being mothered (Kraemer 1996; Lewis 2009; Parker 1995; Stone 2011). I aim, therefore, to track across psychoanalytic and social theory, trying to keep open the meanings of ‘the maternal’, not simply in order to de-gender or denaturalise care, but to remind ourselves of the implications of ‘forgetting’ that love and hate are always bound up with one another. If we think about the maternal as a principle or model in social and psychic life that speaks to this impossibility of love without hate, an impossibility that has the potential to mobilise guilt, gratitude, and reparative wishes (if we follow Melanie Klein’s thinking about early object relations), then we might instigate a pathway from a social analysis of the ‘unmothering’ of society, to a more nuanced understanding of both motherhood, and broader ideas about the social good. Weeks seeks to address the problem of waged labour, and its implications for social reproduction by exploring the notion of a basic income for the common production of value. ‘Postwork’ undoes the relation between wage and labour through an analysis of social reproduction in neoliberal conditions, calling not just for the common production of value but for a basic income for the common reproduction of ‘life’ (Weeks 2011, 230). Weeks’ appeal to sharing the responsibility for reproducing ‘life’ rather than value maintains a relation between work and reproduction that is neither maternalist, nor occludes the possibility of such labour emanating from a demand for a form of reparation, understood both in the sense of financial recompense and in the sense of ‘repair’. This may provide us with a more radical model for rethinking a feminist maternalism that includes, but is not subsumed by, a politics of care. One element of my argument is that whilst the notion of sharing the reproduction of ‘life’ may serve us well as a figuration of the maternal that allows care to circulate as everybody’s business, we need to make sure that such a project also entails an engagement with what works against life, the ‘hostility to life’, as Derrida (1995) puts it, or in Freud’s terms, simply the death drive.

Secondly, my concerns here are with the temporality of the death drive in relation to maternal practice. Postwork calls on us to understand the temporal dimensions of the relationship between work, reproduction and care. Denaturalising the 8-hour day, or, for that matter, denaturalising the regime of ‘total work’ that is the outcome of the precaritisation of labour, in order to open up unfettered time that is required for care, may be one element of a broader operation that seeks to reconfigure the privatisation and gendering of care. But maternal practice (as distinct from maternal labour) is not simply synonymous with care. It entails a form of emotional labour in which this labour itself comes to matter to us, causing us to return again and again to the scene of love and hate. The ‘again and again’, I argue, might be understood as the temporality of a ‘maternal death drive’; a repetitive return, not exactly to a state of nothingness, as Freud’s death drive implies, but to a state in which we can tolerate the knowledge that we hate what we also love, and therefore that we may desire to repair the damage done to the loved object. Maternal time emerges from this account as the time it takes for the capacity for reparation to be established and maintained – the 17 years that it takes the mother–child pair in the anecdote above, to wave ambivalently both hello and goodbye to each other. A postwork notion of care requires not just the reorganisation of the social reproduction of ‘life’ but the time it takes to live out the complexities of caring relations, and the development of capacities that may enable the reparation of psychic life.

Love, guilt and reparation

If we frame the question in another way, what else might the postmaternal signify other than a public expression of anxiety about what Stephens assigns as the maternal values of care, nurture and dependency? In Love, Guilt and Reparation (1998, 306–343), Melanie Klein tells us that anxiety about maternal care, nurture and our dependency on the maternal body in very early life – the relationship, that is, with a feeding-object of some kind, that could be loosely termed ‘breast’ – is a result of both the frustrations of that breast (its capacities to feed but also to withhold or disappear at whim), and what the infant does with the hatred and aggressive feelings stirred up by those experiences of frustration which rebound on the infant in the form of terrifying persecutory fantasies of being attacked by the breast itself. Klein’s conceptual infant swings in and out of mental or psychic states that she calls ‘sadistic’, full of envious rage and aggressive raids on the maternal body, in an attempt to manage the treacherous initial experiences of psychical and physical survival. Where Freud saw the drive as a mental representation of instinctual wishes or urges, Klein moves us closer to a more thing-like internal world permeated less with representations and more with dynamic aggressive phantasies of biting, hacking at, and tearing the mother and her breasts into bits, and attempts to destroy her body and everything it might, in phantasy, contain (1998, 308). Libido, of you like, gives way to aggression in Klein’s thinking, so that the defences themselves are violent in their redoubling on the infant in the form of persecutory anxiety – splitting the world and the self into good and bad to keep them separate; experiences of self and objects as powerless or omnipotent with nothing in between; greed for good things which are swallowed up but constantly vulnerable to contamination by the bad; projection of unacceptable parts of the self into the other whom one then tries to control. One’s own greed and aggressiveness, in other words, becomes itself threatening in Klein’s account of the inner world of infants, and these experiences, along with the maternal object that evokes them, have to be split off from conscious thought. Coupled with this are feelings of relief from these painful states of ‘hunger, hate, tension and fear’ (Klein 1998, 307) through a temporary feeling of security that comes with gratification of both our early self-preservative needs, and what Klein calls ‘sensual desires’ (307). These ‘good’ experiences form the basis for what we could think of as love. It is only as the infant moves towards a tolerance of knowing that good and bad ‘things’, and experiences, are bound up in the same person (that is, both (m)other and self) that guilt arises as an awareness that we have tried to destroy what we also love. Whilst this can overwhelm the infant with depressive anxiety that also needs to be warded off, there is a chance that this guilt can be borne and that a temporary state of ambivalence can be achieved that includes the desire to make good the damage done. Care and nurturance emerges, in other words, out of the capacity to tolerate the proximity of love and hate towards the mother, not the other way around. To use the term maternal to simply signify care, nurturance and dependency effectively splits off this whole dynamic psychic terrain.

I argue that the ‘postmaternal’, then, could be used to raise wider psychosocial issues than those encapsulated by the unmothering of society, if unmothering is predominantly thought about as the public repudiation of nurturance, care and dependency. Perhaps postmaternal thinking, as a psychosocial phenomena, is a way of signalling the proximity of love and hate towards maternal figures that continues to inhabit and animate life ‘post’ our early experiences of being mothered, and itself forms part of our mothering practices and attitudes towards our children, and towards ‘the mother’ as a public figuration? If we read the postmaternal through the anecdote above, perhaps we are always dealing with a precarious psychic attachment to motherhood itself, played out at both individual and collective levels, suggesting that we constantly inhabit maternal and postmaternal subject positions simultaneously, as ambivalence is achieved, breaks down, and has to be shorn up again. Or maybe we are never really postmaternal, whether or not we have borne and raised children, in all the multiple ways that we might bear and raise children, and with all the multiple singularities in the call to a ‘we’, who may be implicat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Refiguring the Postmaternal
• 1 Postmaternal, Postwork and the Maternal Death Drive
• 2 The ‘Good’ Attached Mother: An Analysis of Postmaternal and Postracial Thinking in Birth and Breastfeeding Policy in Neoliberal Britain
• 3 A Vision for Postmaternalism: Institutionalising Fathers’ Engagement with Care
• 4 Belly Casts and Placenta Pills: Refiguring Postmaternal Entrepreneurialism
• 5 Embodied Care and Planet Earth: Ecofeminism, Maternalism and Postmaternalism
• 6 Postmaternal Times and Radical Feminist Thinking
• 7 Shape-shifting Around the Maternal: A Response
• Index