Privatized Bodies in Public Locations

Understanding motherhood as practices of mothering not necessarily limited to women’s bodies, this chapter sets out to examine some of the many and various ways in which neoliberalized public spaces enable, encourage, and reproduce motherhood. It asks, specifically, how, where, and why human, mothering bodies are subjected to the neoliberal “gaze,” how this gaze on motherhood privileges certain forms of identity and practice over others, and how this influences, overtly and indirectly, the moral status of “mothers” in neoliberal societies. Neoliberal governmentality has been vastly effective in enacting its own self-reproduction across divergent societies, masking the totalitarianism of its core focus on centralizing the “free” market in social life through clever reconstructions of conflicting social value systems and practices. This can be seen, this chapter argues, in the normalization of highly invasive medical procedures on mothering bodies, in the proliferation of professionalized parenting “experts,” and in the individualization and social segregation of “mothers” themselves. In particular, the author examines how everyday moments in and practices of motherhood have become highly effective normative technologies of neoliberal governmentality. The author takes as a starting point those “small” things about life as a mother (or as someone who mothers) in a neoliberal society in terms of how they represent two interwoven social elements: the impacts of the prejudiced gaze of neoliberal authorities, including hospitals, supermarkets, cafés, trains, and day care centers; and the apparent achievement of limitless neoliberal tolerance and acceptability.

The Global Politics of Maternality

This chapter emphasizes that motherhood matters in global politics. Beginning from the position that the institution of motherhood is complicated and constructed in diverse ways across diverse settings, the chapter traces the work and influence of feminist contributions to the theorizing of motherhood and maternity to explore the ways in which practices of global politics shape and are shaped by the institution of motherhood. Calling attention to the increasing and at times deadly infringements on women’s reproductive rights across the globe, the chapter explains the role of reproduction as central to the site of maternity and motherhood, negotiating the relationship between women, reproductive bodies, and the state, and how the gendered logics of war frequently rely on maternal imagery, discourse, and representation. The chapter concludes with a description of the volume’s three sections and individual chapter contributions.

Earthborn

This chapter takes up the ecological debate over maternity in the Anthropocene, a time in which prominent feminists like Donna Haraway are advocating against reproduction and natality. In focusing on population figures, Haraway and others have (re)ignited a debate about whether such concerns can ever be separated from the history of racist reproductive governance. The author focuses on feminist debates over maternity itself—as practice and ethics—and reasserts maternity and natality as important critical resources for living in the Anthropocene. What might we gain if we could approach the problem of reproduction without renouncing natality? Thinking with maternity and natality presents just as many risks as thinking with population, given the common tendency to essentialize women-as-mothers and to romanticize maternity to the detriment of women. The author turns to Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero, who proposes maternal inclination as a founding moment for a postural ethics. The chapter proceeds through a familiar maternal genre, offering a collection of birth stories that begin to weave Cavarero’s inclination into Haraway’s non-natalism. The author concludes by arguing that maternal inclination is an important conduit for achieving multispecies reproductive justice.

Mother Knows Best?

This chapter utilizes a critical maternal theory to examine rape politics and, particularly, children born from forced sex, focusing on the 2017 UK “rape clause.” The UK Conservative new tax credit policy limits parents to claim and receive benefits for only two children, as part of new austerity measures, except under extenuating circumstances, for example, if a child had been “conceived without consent.” This is colloquially known as the “rape clause.” By unpacking this policy, this chapter highlights the tension between the state, as the patriarchal caregiver, and the citizen, constructed as an inadequate carer. These patterns of power are visible through the lens of critical maternal ethics. This lens’s strength in moral epistemology, obtained by valuing the virtues of care, is crucial in communicating how these moral boundaries are constructed and permitted through power hierarchies. Therefore, this chapter argues that a critical maternal theory can act as resistance against masculine policies by uncovering these moral boundaries that legitimize rape politics, such as the “rape clause.”

Logics of Protection and the Discursive Construction of Refugee Fathers

Images of war-affected populations generally affirm the gendered war story that the majority of civilians and refugees are “womenandchildren.” The “womenandchildren” discourse remains prominent in constituting humanitarian protection norms that (re)produce the gendered distinction. Western European discourses concerning refugee masculinity posit two narratives—refugee men as potential terrorists and/or rapists and refugee men as caring, paternal saviors. This chapter explores the latter, questioning whether discourses that construct refugee men as caregivers and saviors are a departure from the “womenandchildren” narrative so dominant in gendered war stories. Accordingly, the chapter argues that the discursive construction of refugee masculinities reproduces the heteronormative family and is an intrinsic feature of the gendered war story of refugee men. In conclusion, the author suggests that this narrative of “refugee father” presents a partial disruption to the discursive construction of the “ideal victim(s)” (women, children, and the elderly). The disruption from the “ideal victim” image is, however, only partial, because images of refugee men as fathers remain intelligible through troubling logics of gender, race, and sexuality.

Extending Acts of Motherhood

This chapter highlights the different ways mothers engage in storytelling to resist stigma, while also rejecting the idea that they are “bad” mothers. The prevailing story told about what makes a “good” mother relies on the construction of an ideal mother parenting within a specific vision of the nuclear family. Mothers who do not live up to this ideal construction of motherhood are punished through various forms of stigma such as sexual stigma and abortion stigma. This chapter considers the impact of stigma on two groups of women: lesbian mothers and mothers who have had abortions. Mothers from both communities who have faced stigma are finding ways to rewrite the script about how to mother without shame. Some of the forms of resistance these mothers have engaged in include abortion speak-outs, online storytelling through blogs and videos, and storytelling through art. The chapter also explores how community-based initiatives informed by the principles of reproductive justice make possible new narratives of maternity and as well as visions for a future for mothering without stigma.

Protestant Paramilitary Mothering

This chapter explores what often appear to be the irreconcilable differences between embracing and resisting normative tropes of maternity and motherhood that have long preoccupied some feminist scholars of International Relations. Drawing on interview data collected by McEvoy from 2006 to 2017, the chapter interrogates the use of political violence by politically violent mothers who served in Protestant paramilitary organizations (PPOs) in Northern Ireland during the 30-year conflict between 1968 and 1998. The chapter sheds new light on understanding mothers’ roles in political violence in their service to PPOs by exploring motivation for participation and familial opinions of this participation. To further complicate women’s revelations in this regard, the chapter investigates the strategic (gendered) benefits and implications of mothers who embrace political violence. The chapter also reaches beyond scholarly interpretations of motherhood and political violence by including of a coauthor and key informant, “Chloe White.” Chloe is a mother and former member of a PPO in Northern Ireland, and her insights on the relationship between political violence and motherhood complement similar insights from more than a dozen PPO mothers who participated in groups during the conflict.

Celebrity Global Motherhood

This chapter centers on global motherhood, a conceptual label that defines the ethical underpinnings of female celebrities’ undertakings beyond borders. The analysis of global motherhood is located within the ethics of care, noting that global expressions of care ethics are useful for thinking through celebrities’ maternal practices beyond borders. The research focuses on the maternal practices and discourses of Cate Blanchett (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees [UNHCR] Goodwill Ambassador since 2016) and Angelina Jolie (UNHCR Special Envoy since 2012), in particular their tendency to relate to refugees through their personal experiences as mothers, their sense of cosmopolitan obligation, and the racial implications of their global engagements. The chapter advances the argument that cosmopolitan thought is abstract, is gendered, and prioritizes men’s moral reasoning rather than women’s ethical stories and experiences. Nonetheless, cosmopolitanism can provide fertile ground for studying celebrity humanitarianism because celebrities themselves resort to cosmopolitan-inflected language in describing their activism. Moreover, the study of the other-regarding acts of individual celebrities can reduce the abstraction inherent in cosmopolitanism. These arguments are sustained through a discursive analysis of texts that center on celebrity global motherhood, as performed by Angelina Jolie and Cate Blanchett in the area of refugee policy.

Ideal Citizens and Family Values

Motherhood is political, fundamental to the social (re)production of values, norms, and culture. This chapter shows how the institution of Motherhood, “family values,” and traditional gender roles have been coopted by the rhetoric of the nation and institutionalized by the state as a site of difference, (re)producing Insiders and Outsiders, exclusionary logics of collectivity, and embodied national boundaries. The chapter first identifies and defines “biological” reproductive difference as the foundation of traditional sex/gender roles, particularly emphasizing the focus on procreation in normative femininity. Reproductive difference is foundational to Western patriarchal society and its definitions of kinship, family, and sociopolitical belonging. I differentiate the patriarchal institution of Motherhood and the active “mothering,” showing how the institution of Motherhood privileges heterosexual, reproductive sex and essentializes the (cisgender/heterosexual) female body as necessarily reproductive. This normative maternal identity is racialized and can be seen through the politics of reproductive fitness. I examine this through an analysis of differences in sterilization laws and practices across the globe. Sterilization is accessible and/or enforced differently based on one’s identity; gender/sexual orientation, race, class, and ability dictate both historically and in modern society voluntary and involuntary sterilization practices. Ultimately, I demonstrate that one of the products of the institution of Motherhood is a normative model of raced female sexuality: a necessarily reproductive, white female sexuality.

Speaking from the Margins of Motherhood

For centuries, the knowledges of raced mother-subjects have been denigrated, denied, and misrepresented. What might it mean, then, to bring to thought and to “speak” epistemologically and politically from this place of (m)other absence? In this chapter, the author explores such a (m)other speaking through three themes and experiences. The first is interruption and/as failure, in which the messiness of motherhood and the untimely, unruliness of children becomes present in the space-times of political encounter and foregrounds the possibilities of other affectivities of play and wonder and other rhythms of spontaneity and nonlinearity to enter as underpinnings of shared (political) collaborations and creations. The second is fragility, which is an invitation to embody stillness and silence to allow the unspeakable to emerge from wounds of coloniality and foregrounds a maternal ethic of care, mutual self-fragilization, and surrender to the unknown possibilities of Nepantla pluridiversity. The third is a methodology for healing mother-lines, which enables the recuperation of the maternal as an energy, a symbol, a memory, a story, a practice of being held, of being mothered and of mothering self, others, and cosmos. Together, these moments and experiences offer enfleshed visions with which we might co-create a (geo)politics (m)otherwise.