Mothering the Self

Mothers, Daughters, Subjects

Stephanie Lawler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134697168
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

The mother-daughter relationship has preoccupied feminist writers for decades, but typically it has been the daughter's story at centre-stage. Mothering the Self brings together these maternal and daughterly stories by drawing on in-depth interviews with women who speak both as mothers and as daughters.

This study examines the ways in which these mothers and daughters participate in their understanding of class, gender, and race locations, both using and resisting them. The result is a fresh start from which to consider the far-reaching implications of this relationship - not simply for mothers and daughters, but in terms of how we understand the shaping of the self and its place within the social world.

1 Being and knowing

The social relations of truth

We must accept that it is relations that define truth, not truth that defines relations.

(Roy Boyne, 'War and desire', p. 35)

The last chapter indicated some of the ways in which mothers are placed under an obligation to nurture the selves of their daughters – a theme which will be developed throughout the book. But what should these selves be like? and how do we come to know what they should be like? This chapter examines the kinds of self which mothers are meant to be nurturing – and the kinds of self which are assumed to be ‘healthy’ and ‘normal’ among late-twentiethcentury/ early twenty-first century Euroamericans. The aim here is to destabilize taken-forgranted assumptions about the self, and, in this way, to destabilize assumptions around mothering and childhood. The chapter explores the ways in which the self is forged on the basis of truths which, while claiming to speak about the self, work to produce specific forms of self. In this way, who we are is an effect of what (or who) we know ourselves to be. And in this being and knowing, power is at work.

Relations of expertise

In many ways, the late twentieth century looks like a period of deep uncertainty around both motherhood and childhood, for a number of reasons. The advent of new reproductive technologies potentially destabilizes the category ‘mother’ (Stanworth, 1987), the proliferation of family forms suggests that the nuclear family is increasingly unstable,¹ the British media’s attention to so-called ‘crises in childhood’ and ‘crises in parenthood’ suggests that there is a pluralization in knowledges about what children are and about how they should be brought up. All this would suggest that authoritative, expert knowledges are losing their ground as people ‘choose’ their familial lifestyles without recourse to any other imperatives than their own beliefs, or, that the proliferation of expertise and various forms of contestation between experts means that ‘expertise’ is itself breaking down (Beck, 1992).

However, these crises may be more apparent than real. Firstly, and at least so far as childcare is concerned, the intervention of law means that some beliefs will just not be tolerated.² Secondly, there seems little evidence that there has been a loosening of surveillance of mothers and their children. Mothers of infants and young children are routinely handed out charts of child development against which they are meant to monitor their child’s physical and psychological ‘progress’. Health visitors and schools also routinely monitor this progress; popular advice manuals reinforce the authoritative knowledge claims of psychological expertise at every stage of the child’s development from pre-birth to adulthood; and consumer culture is increasingly incorporating this expertise into its marketing – for example in the ‘age scales’ marked on children’s toys and in advertising which appeals to the ‘educational’ value of consumer goods.

But this surveillance is increasingly bound up with processes of self-surveillance. Hence mothers, for example, are incited to take pleasure from their subjection to expertise: their monitoring of their child’s development is a means by which they can enhance both their own self and that of the child – they can become good mothers producing good children (Urwin, 1985). In this way, the expertise which generates these discourses of ‘normality’ becomes obscured. The conditions of its production are lost in the rhetoric of ‘choice’ (Strathern, 1992a; Rose, 1992b) as people are incited to ‘choose’ to seek out and realize both their own selves and the selves of their children. But neither pleasure nor choice indicate an absence of authority or of the operation of power.

Certainly, there is always a ‘struggle for meaning’ (Walkerdine, 1987); people do not necessarily swallow whole the dictates of experts, and experts disagree among themselves. But there is a common ground on which competing discourses of childhood meet. This common ground is the ‘needs’ or the ‘best interests’ of the child. Since children’s ‘needs’ or ‘best interests’ are rarely spelled out and even more rarely problematized, hardly any conceptual space is opened up within which questions can be asked about the meanings of these needs, of childhood in general, or of the motherhood which is held to meet the child’s needs, let alone answers provided. So, changes in family form (for example) may have led to an uncertainty about what ‘the family’ is; but there is little corresponding uncertainty about what mothering is, or what childhood is. Indeed, as the next chapter will show, concepts of normality – of what constitutes the ‘normal’ child and the ‘normal’ mother – are at the very heart of public debate around childhood, motherhood and the family.

What is at stake here is the status of the truth statements generated by experts, not only in the mother–child relationship but in all areas of everyday Euroamerican life. A central argument of this book is that, far from such truths having the status of objective, disinterested ‘facts’, they are produced in the context of social and political preoccupations. Further, they are bound up with mechanisms of power and with the government of populations. In other words, the generation of knowledge is linked with the workings of power.

Power, knowledge and surveillance

A commonplace view of power is that of a prohibitive, denying force, working from outside the ‘true’ person who stands outside of the workings of power (Rose, 1992b). Knowledge, by contrast, is conventionally seen as that which will release us from the workings of power, and, indeed, as antithetical to the workings of power. If ‘true’ knowledge can be achieved, power will lose its hold as people learn to ‘see through’ power. A legacy of the Enlightenment, this conceptualization assumes a true self which lies outside of or beyond power (and, indeed, outside of the social world). This self is knowable through reason and through self-reflection, and its actualization through self-knowledge will release us from the workings of power (Flax, 1990). Autonomy, in this formulation, is at the opposite pole to regulation and government, and, indeed, to the workings of power.

The question is whether this is the best or most productive way to theorize the workings of power, or whether, indeed, its formulation is another manifestation of the workings of power itself. When we are incited to make our selves autonomous, to ‘be who we really are’, to realize and to express our ‘true selves’, what kinds of knowledges about the nature of the self are brought into play? Are these knowledges neutral, foundational and transcendent, or are they bound up with regimes of governing persons and populations? When we are most incited to be ‘free’, and to seek out the truth of our freedom, are we then most subjected to the workings of power? In other words, is power at its most powerful when it is least apparent, when it is working through our desires, when, as Rose puts it, it is ‘governing through the freedom and aspirations of liberal subjects rather than in spite of them’ (Rose, 1992b: 147)? As Michel Foucault, from whose work this concept of power derives, puts it, ‘if power were never anything but repressive, if it never did anything but to say no, do you really think one would be brought to obey it?’ (Foucault, 1980: 119).

Foucault’s work has been the object of much criticism from feminists, not least because of his almost total neglect of issues of gender (Bordo, 1990; Hartsock, 1990; Jackson, 1992/ 3; Ramazanoglu, 1993). However, his insight into the ways in which power is deployed through meaning, is extremely useful as a basis from which to analyse the meanings which structure all of our lives and relationships. These meanings articulate with social practices. Foucault uses the term ‘discourse’ to elaborate the ways in which meaning and practice coalesce. For Foucault, discourses are not only linguistic representations: they produce meaning, create categories, and form ‘objects’ (including ‘subjects’). In this sense, then, discourses are not distinct from practices. Part of his task, as he saw it, consisted in:

not ... treating discourses as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak. Of course, discourses are composed of signs; but what they do is more than use these signs to designate things. It is this more that renders them irreducible to language (langue) and to speech. It is this ‘more’ that we must reveal and describe.

(Foucault, 1992: 48–9)

This perspective highlights the ways in which nothing evades (social) meaning; these meanings produce our understanding of the world. Discourses become, as Edward Said (1991: 10) puts it, ‘epistemological enforcers’ of what can be said, thought and lived, as well as of how it can be said, thought and lived. There are certain statements, propositions, actions, which are, as Foucault puts it, ‘within the true’ of any particular culture, and others which are ‘outside of sense’ (Foucault, 1981; see also Weedon, 1989; Barrett, 1991). As Henriques et al. argue:

the argument is not that words determine but that those practices which constitute our everyday lives are produced and reproduced as an integral part of the production of signs and signifying systems.

(1984: 99)

Discourses, then, cannot be separated from material practices or from the workings of societal institutions. According to Lois McNay, Foucault’s work links together ‘the material and the non-material in a theory of discourse’ (McNay, 1992: 27). Foucault formulates this symbiosis through his conceptualization of the power–knowledge nexus:

We should abandon a whole tradition that allows us to imagine that knowledge can exist only where the power relations are suspended and that knowledge can develop only outside its injunctions, its demands and its interests. ... We should admit rather that power produces knowledge ... that power and knowledge directly imply one another; ... there is no power relationship without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.

(Foucault, 1979: 27)

Power, then, is not (only) a forbidding and denying force; nor is it a force which conceals or distorts a ‘truth’, the revelation of which will free us from the workings of power.³ Rather, power can be seen as something which works productively – producing truths, forms of pleasure, categories of normality. Rather than concealing the ‘true’ situation, the operation of power produces (what is held to be) the truth of a situation. Conversely, knowledge, far from being the innocent and transparent representation of objective truth, is intrinsically bound up with the workings of power. The truth-status of ‘truths’ derives, not from some transcendent quality of the knowledges themselves, but from specific social and political preoccupations. Rather than representing truth, knowledges create and constitute the Truths by which contemporary Euroamericans have increasingly come to know and to act upon the self, both in relation to itself, and in relations with others. Categories of human subject – the categories ‘mother’ and ‘daughter’ for example – are not only understood through the meanings put on to them; rather, they are produced within discourse.

Increasingly significant in this context is the matrix of knowledges which produces truths about the self and its relations with others and which has been coined the ‘psy complex’ (Ingleby, 1985; see also Rose, 1991). The reference here is to knowledges generated through medicine, psychology, psychiatry, pedagogy, and so on, which several commentators have seen as gaining ascendance in the contemporary world, to such a degree that they inevitably inform the self-perceptions and self-consciousness of contemporary Euroamericans.

Psy knowledges are not confined to professional practice or statements within their own fields, but ‘escape’ from their specialist enclaves (Fraser, 1989) to inform the workings of other types of professionals (social workers, teachers, health visitors, counsellors, and so on), and to inform, too, a host of fields which are currently ‘growth markets’ in Euroamerican cultures – self-help literature, ‘personal growth’, child-care advice. And, significantly, these knowledges are reiterated in the minutiae of daily life - in doctors’ surgeries, on chat shows, on ‘the radio call-in, the weekly magazine column’ – and inform the relationship of the self to itself, through ‘the unceasing reflexive gaze of our own psychologically educated self-scrutiny’ (Rose, 1991: 208). The self is increasingly becoming a project to be worked on, in pursuit of the ‘real self’.

Psy knowledges are endlessly repeated across a range of sites, and, as we will see, they are embedded in law and other state processes. This makes them particularly intractable. The knowledges generated by psy are not normally represented as theories, open to contestation, but as truths about ‘human nature’, to such a degree, Rose claims, that ‘it has become impossible to conceive of personhood, to experience one’s own or another’s personhood, or to govern oneself or others without “psy” ’ (1996a: 139).

The self and subjectivity

As a form of power, subjection is paradoxical. To be dominated by a power external to oneself is a familiar and agonizing form power takes. To find, however, that what ‘one’ is, one’s very formation as a subject, is in some sense dependent on that very power is quite another.

(Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, pp. 1–2)

Such truths, such meanings, have far-reaching consequences in the lives of mothers and daughters. Truths about the self and its development within childhood, its relations with others, and the various obligations which some selves consequently owe to other selves, are the means by which the categories ‘mother’ and ‘daughter’ are constituted. They are the means by which mothers, in particular, are scrutinized, monitored and regulated, and through which both mothers and daughters may scrutinize and regulate themselves. In becoming (maternal and daughterly) subjects, women become subjectivated in the dual sense identified by Foucault:

This form of power applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorizes the individual, marks him [sic] by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others recognize in him. It is a form of power which makes individuals subjects. There are two meanings of the word subject: subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to.

(Foucault, 1982: 212; emphasis in original)

Through subjectivation (assujettissement), mothers and daughters become tied to the identities ‘mother’ and ‘daughter’ through these relations of power and knowledge; they become (maternal and daughterly) subjects. But also, they become subjected to the rules and norms engendered by a set of knowledges about the mother, the daughter, the relationship between the two, and, in particular, the role of the mother in producing the daughter’s self. The self, itself – an entity which seems (and perhaps feels) so idiosyncratic, so natural – is forged through the workings of power. There is no ‘natural’ self which the social world shapes: rather, the self, itself, is produced within a set of social relations which themselves have relations of power/knowledge at their core.⁴ The most apparently personal and intimate parts of our lives, our desires and pleasures, are produced within systems of regulation, including (and increasingly) self-regulation. As Butler puts it, ‘one inhabits the figure of autonomy only by becoming subjected to a power, a subjection which implies a radical dependency’ (Butler, 1997: 83).

Indeed, autonomy is at the heart both of the project of becoming a subject and of being subjectified. It is through an appeal to autonomy that Euroamerican persons are incited both to understand the self, and to work on, to perfect the see This project of autonomy has become increasingly significant in the shaping of the self (Rose, 1991, 1993, 1996b) and, as we will see, it was a common theme in many of the accounts of the women in this study, who strove for both their own autonomy and that of their daughters. As Rose argues, the increasing significance of psy knowledges has led to a situation in which autonomy, as a psychological state, takes on an overwhelming significance. Autonomy is what lies behind projects of assertiveness training, self-help, therapy and counselling, and the general discourse of psy which permeates the everyday lives of contemporary Euroamericans.

The knowledges of psy promise freedom through an actualizing of the self – through uncovering the truth about the self and enabling persons to achieve the ‘real self’. Increasingly, the Euroamerican self is incited to act on itself, relentlessly scrutinizing itself in the search for the truth of the self. Normality and healthiness are established through the successful actualization of the project. The autonomy promised through these processes appears as the very opposite to government and regulation. Yet government and regulation are inherent in these meanings and these practices.

In becoming autonomous subjects, we are subjected to the workings of power. And it is, at least in part, through the relationship of the self to itself that governmentality is brought into play. In not (apparently) being regulated, contemporary Euroamericans are increasingly regulating themselves. According to Foucault, modern⁵ forms of government increasingly operate on the basis of managing populations, rather than punishing them; the demand is for ‘normality’ rather than obedience to a sovereign power. Hence, ‘techniques of normalization’ have become the preferred means of government.

This is not to say that the juridical power of the law has ceased to exist, or even, necessarily, that it has diminished in its application or its influence. While Foucault saw the coercive power of the law as likely to diminish in the face of the normalizing power of ‘psy’ discourses, Carol Smart, in contrast, points to a ‘merger’ between law and psy, such that law is able to extend its juridical power through its incorporation of psy knowledges:

Law is now the accepted mechanism for resolving social and individual conflicts. ... In this context law’s colonization by the mechanisms of discipline should be seen in a new light rather than in terms of a form of power which is withering away. There is indeed a struggle going on, but at the same time law is extending its terrain in every direction. Moreover, whilst we can see a symbiotic relationship developing between law and the ‘psy’ professions, law is hardly challenged by other disc...