Daughter-Centricity

Daughter-centricity is a term used often in association with psychoanalytic theory to describe the narrative of the daughter/child that comes at the expense of the narrative of the mother. While the subject of the narrative may be the experience of motherhood, daughter-centric accounts are conveyed through the singular perspective of the daughter, thus skewing the position toward that of the daughter/child while marginalizing or ignoring the position of the mother. Daughter-centricity can be viewed as developing out of the oedipal theory of psychoanalysis, both processes that deny maternal subjectivity in favor of the child's sense of selfhood and independence. Striving for selfhood through maternal denial results in a negation of the mother, or as has often been found in myths, legends, and folklore, the demonizing of the mother into a monstrous figure.

Maureen T. Reddy uses the term daughter centricity to refer to the tendency of feminists such as

Nancy Chodorow, Dorothy Dinnerstein, and Carol Gilligan to write about female experience from the point of view of daughters rather than mothers: they are more concerned with the experience of being mothered, rather than being a mother.

Feminist theorists have pointed out the inherent dichotomy of daughter-centricity, which would appear, on the surface, to advocate for women's individuation. Yet, the absence of the mother's sense of self through a focus on the story of the daughter is a divisive situation, since the mother is also a daughter. To escape patriarchally defined conditions of motherhood, scholars note that analysis by the feminist daughter must shift from the centrality of the daughter's experience to the marginalized locus of the mother's existence. While there are numerous publications across disciplines that detail, critique, praise, and analyze issues surrounding motherhood, very few perform their objective through the particular vision of the mother as an individual subject with personal agency.