The Performing Mother: Maternal Ethics Beyond Embodiment

Abstract

The rich and diverse history of maternal thought is at once a response to the Western philosophical tradition's relegation of the maternal to the material abject, as well as a renegotiation of the maternal body as a site of empowerment capable of destabilizing the foundations of the symbolic economy. Understanding the material and historical conditions that subject these bodies and work to construct maternity, as well as their mediating position to authentic ethical activity, reveals that maternity offers a salient schemata for, not only viewing the fundamental operations of power, but the possibilities of ethical interaction. This study focuses on, not only theoretical texts dealing with the maternal body, but in science fiction and horror works in order to highlight the possibility of discursive transcendence for non-procreative bodies achieved through performance. This project argues, initially, that the maternal body is subjected to an ideologically pervasive and historically saturated ideal of motherhood in order to produce sanctioned forms of maternity that secure the reproduction of the very conditions and structure that legitimize their subjection. Secondly, this essay posits that discursive transcendence - meaning the possibility of signifying and identity beyond the prescribed monomaternalist ideal - can be achieved immanently through the institution of a masochistic contract and the infinite performance of the masochistic fantasy shared between mother and infant. In Chapter Four, I argue that Deleuze's theory of masochism, derived from Leopold Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs, offers an interesting framework for viewing the subjection of biologically reproductive mothers, as well as a vibrant ground for the development of a theory of maternity based on performance. Finally, in Chapter Five, I argue for a reevaluation of the way in which we conceive non-procreative maternal identity and outline how the non-reproductive body takes part in the same masochistic disavow as the biological mother, yet the result is not the creation of a new and distinct identity, but the complete dissolution of the self where the past is infinitely severed from the trajectory of the future, the previous form of the subject obliterated.