Maternal Subjectivities

Understanding Maternal Subjectivity

When the maternal is described as a subjectivity, an attempt then is being made to signal the simultaneity of a psychic, embodied, and affective lived experience that arises out of a specifically structured relation with a child, and a variety of heavily regulated norms and discourses that surround motherhood. Regulation of maternal practice occurs at the level of direct state intervention (such as government-sponsored promotion of breastfeeding) as well as through powerful, culturally produced and circulated discourses (such as fertility and infertility, pregnancy and maternal bodies, birth and lactation, parenting practices, and so on).

Parenting generally can be seen as producing particular anxieties about the reproduction of the national body, control of the next generation of citizens, and more recently, anxieties about the reproduction of future consumers in the context of advanced global capitalism. How individuals involved in maternal care respond to such anxieties, through the complex ways they perform, reproduce, and resist these maternal discourses, may constitute one way of understanding maternal subjectivity.

Feminist and psychoanalytically inspired theorizing has attempted to foreground the aspects of maternal subjectivity that involve an understanding of human experience formed through emotional relationships. Here, subjectivity entails the ongoing management of both conscious and unconscious emotional impulses, not just for the infant, but for the mother as well. Highlighting the maternal as a potential site for subjective experience raises age-old ontological concerns, as the maternal in Western philosophy has traditionally been understood as that which gives rise to subjectivity (the developing subjectivity of the infant), occluding the capacity for the maternal to be a subject position itself. This is crystallized in Plato's idea of the chora as the “receiving principle;” as that which gives form to matter, but which cannot have form itself. The maternal subject has therefore been identified in this tradition as a puzzling and threatening ontological paradox, one that has been famously considered and reworked by feminist theorists such as Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Iris Marion Young.

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