The Body in Question:
Rethinking Motherhood, Alterity and DesireAndrea Liss
In my continuous research toward thinking difference and desire other than markers of discrimination and inscriptions of unidirectional control, I turned to feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz’s writing on ethics:
In the work of French feminists, ethics is not opposed to politics but is a continuation of it within the domain of relations between self and other. Ethics need not imply a moral or normative code, or a series of abstract regulative principles. Rather, it is the working out or negotiation between an other (or others) seen as prior to and pre-given for the subject, and a subject. Ethics is a response to the recognition of the primacy of alterity over identity. Ethics, particularly in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, is that field defined by the other’s need, the other’s calling on the subject for response. In this case, the paradigm of an ethical relation is that of a mother’s response to the needs or requirements of a child.1 (emphasis added)
I knew that my attraction to Grosz’s way of thinking, even in this short excerpt, would yield areas of touching between difference and desire. The strategic import of recognizing interpersonal relations as political investment. Making room for an other who would not be construed as so distant that there could be no points of convergence between self and other. Not confusing places of merging as sameness. Respecting independent otherness. As I continued reading, my musing/theorizing came to a halt when I reached the point in Grosz’s discussion where the mother was introduced. I was riveted by her representation, following Emmanual Levinas, that the perfect exemplar of the ethical relationship is that of the mother’s lack of selfhood (“the primacy of alterity over identity”) and her complete giving to the child. Indeed, is this not a contemporary reworking of the all-too-pervasive legacy of the sacrificial (virgin) mother? My feminist-mother self felt betrayed. How disheartening to find, in a book titled Sexual Subversions, the figure of mother again, ad infinitum, at the selfless center bearing the burden of representation and singular responsibility. We can’t blame Grosz, my microconversation with myselves continued, she’s not speaking for herself. She’s offering a concise recapitulation of Levinas’s complex and alluring conception of self and other in an encounter where they might meet in the new space of alterity.2 Yet, for all of Levinas’s attempts to detour the self-righteousness embedded in much of Judeo-Christian ethics in order to reconfigure an expanded sense of self, he nonetheless falls into some central unquestioned biblical conventions. This often occurs in the instances when he weaves the figures of woman and mother into his writing.3
Feeling I had fairly well satisfied my unease with that portion of Grosz’s passage, I wanted to move on. But I couldn’t cut myself loose from it: “the paradigm of an ethical relation is that of a mother’s response to the needs or requirements of a child.” Wait a minute. There was something oddly impersonal in this description of the most perfect of intersubjective ethical relations. Why didn’t the passage read “her child” rather than “a child”? Was this distancing the author’s perhaps unconscious fear of the child and/or her recognition of the impossibility of the mother in this paradigmatic relation?
It’s 2:30 Pm already. Naptime at The Song of Songs Preschool. Miles is probably in luxurious sleep by now. I feel myself relax a bit. This is time I couldn’t be with him anyway, so theoretically it doesn’t have to be as productive as the hours when he is awake and out of the house. If only he could be transported here during naptime so we could be in each other’s presence. I could continue to work, feel my love for him, but not have to attend to any of the care giving. So I’m not the most ethical mother.
When Levinas was thinking about the ethical mother, he did not endow her to muse on child care, economic or professional concerns. But Marx and Darwin weren’t thinking about their mothers at all. Freud thought about his perhaps in excess. Rather than being theoretically violated as the site of sensational lack as in Freud’s conception, the Levinasian mother has the agency of caring, of not turning the other cheek. Caring and empathy, you (and I) might say, are the quintessential qualities traditionally coded as feminine, maternal. Who wants them? Let’s give them up. But watch out, what we just gave away could become valued commodities and we’ll be written out of the profits. An infinitely more difficult strategy whose benefits would be longer term, however, is to embrace just these qualities and not allow them to be kept solely in the private realm, assigned to their “proper place.” Much more subversive is to embrace maternal giving and set it into motion in unexpected places rather than to passively/aggressively let it be stolen from us and allow ourselves to become men-women in a man’s world. In other words, to grant oneself the gift of what is normally taken for granted.
At stake then is strategically negotiating between engrained codes of maternity and embracing the lived complexities of chosen motherhood. This, as you can imagine, is hazardous double labor. There is no other body so cruelly and poignantly posed at the edges dividing the public and private realms. The issue may still be so silent, too, because of the uncertainties surrounding the issue of sacrifice related to women in a supposedly “post-feminist” culture. The dilemma becomes, indeed, how to speak of the difficulties and incomparable beauties of making space for another unknown person without having those variously inflected and complex experiences turned into clichés of what enduring motherhood is supposed to be. Such tyrannical moves occur in the propaganda where the diverse complexities are so flatly neutralized that the (feminist) mother finds part of herself being dumbly celebrated as the paradigm of domesticity and compliance to the limits of passivity in the (perverse) name of patriotism. Especially if that public mother has stepped too far out of her assigned place. Remember Hillary Rodham Clinton reduced to participating in a chocolate-chip cookie bake-off with Barbara Bush? The (Im)Moral Majority’s failed rhetoric is also embedded, however differently and unconsciously, in the minds of many feminists. There is the silent sympathetic assumption that we will involuntarily lose part of our thinking creative (male) minds when children are born from our all-too-female bodies.
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How could I blame them for thinking this? During pregnancy and immediately afterward, I had my own always-in-flux fears. My anxieties kept the body and mind intact, time is what I couldn’t make sense of. “Will you be going back to work in three months?” asked one of my maternity nurses in the disembodied voice of an unemployment benefits officer. Little did she know that my life was about constantly thinking and working. Her foreign question was unwelcome and lodged itself in the private hospital room made public where my newborn child and I had come to know each other for only one day.
Then there is the false belief that these equally mindless creatures called infants will turn our heads to mush from our so-called idle hours of adoration or devour us by their own frighteningly relentless bodily needs. The hazards in approaching these half-truths are that, of course, these conditions exist, if only partially and temporarily. The taboo against representing motherhood again strikes deep because the real pleasures of caring for a new other and falling in love again differently are tyrannically conflated with essentialized, feminized qualities projected as implacable and designed to keep us assigned to our proper places. The “truth” is that we are constantly in motion, are never only in one place. We work against allowing “mother” to slip into a place of nostalgia for the norm. The mind and body of the mother are constantly in labor.
I wonder if I am risking too much here, conjoining my voice as an art historian-critic with my newly acquired mother chords/cords? In a rare public forum on motherhood initiated by Mira Schor and Susan Bee in their M/E/A/NI/N/G magazine (No. 12, November 1992), the editors posed a series of questions to a diverse group of women artists who are mothers. These included, “How has being a mother affected people’s response or reaction to your artwork? How has it affected your career? Did you postpone starting your career or stop working when your children were young?” May Stevens chose not to respond to the questions the editors addressed to her. Here is what she offered as a counter-response:
How many artists are fathers? How has it affected their work, people’s response to their work, their careers? Did Jeff Koons or Frank Stella postpone their careers in order to take their responsibilities as fathers seriously? Did Pace, Castelli, Sonnabend, or Mary Boone discriminate against Schnabel, Salle, or Marden because of fatherhood?...
I will be happy to discuss questions of motherhood after your journal seriously researches fatherhood among artists. In the present, when women bring up children alone and bear primary—often sole—responsibility, financial and emotional, for the next generation, it’s fatherhood that needs looking at. (p.40)Indeed, Steven’s warning call is absolutely necessary, lest public discussions of the dilemmas facing artist-mothers involuntarily shield the “prolific artist” father who so gratuitously moves between the public and private realms. But such a warning cannot be sent at the cost of silencing the mother, again. Indeed, as the editors wrote in their introduction to the forum, “[T]he subject proved too painful for some artists who couldn’t write responses. More than one artist wondered how we’d found out that she had a child, so separate had children been kept from art world life.” (p.3) When I recently told a male academic colleague that I was writing an essay on motherhood and representation, he enthusiastically suggested that there must be a great deal of visual work on the subject. He said, “I would think that it would be natural.” “What is ’natural’ is the repression,” I responded. It’s about time the taboo was unleashed, for mother’s sake. As Dena Shottenkirk so aptly put it in M/E/A/NI/N/G:
Like morality, good manners, and a criminal record, motherhood has nothing to do with making art. Its presence neither improves one’s ability, nor does it sap one’s creativity like Nietzsche’s worried model of having one’s vital powers drained from sperm ejaculations. Giving birth does not automatically mean giving up. (p.34)
The “one’s ability” and “one’s creativity" in this section of Shottenkirk’s account is strategically interpolated as both male and female. It is women, however, who give birth. And, as artist Joan Snyder put it, “The bottom line is that you don’t have to be a mother or a daughter to be discriminated against in the art world...you just have to be a woman.” (p.37)
At stake in breaching this taboo and giving birth to a new provocation is recognizing that motherhood and woman are passed over in the unacknowledged name of devalued labor, whether in procreation or artistic-thinking activity, within a patriarchal scheme crafted to inflate supposedly male qualities of rigor and singularly driven creativity. The uneven distribution of interest between woman and artist-thinker becomes all the more cruelly amortized in the case of mother as artist-thinker. “Mother” hovers as the uneasy subset to “woman” as well as silently operating as its unacknowledged frame. The devaluation of mother is always at once the devaluation of women. Conversely, and especially in relation to the current hateful debates and legal dogma against abortion, the degradation of women/woman is being forcibly exercised on her decision not to mother. “Mother” takes on an especially irregular symmetry to women/woman. Psychoanalytically construed, woman is always at a loss. The exception to her lesser condition is pregnancy, which gives her a provisional status of phallic proportions and privilege—another of Freud’s dreams of plenitude. She immediately loses that privilege in the postpartum state. She is further insulted through the processes by which her children gain accession to “proper” or normal sexual coding. The young boy is traumatized by the difference in his and his mother’s genitals; her gaping hole (we are inclined to write this abyss as a whole) signals primordial lack. He can proclaim what he has as distinct from hers and find clear-cut identification with the father. And with that, he can take a sigh of relief.
Have you ever tried to tell your young son that he has what his father has? I recently asked my three-year-old if he thought his genitals were like his daddy’s. “Oh yukky, mommy,” he most independently proclaimed, “daddy’s are daddy’s, and mine are mine.” “Do you have balls, mommy?” he then asked. “No,” I replied, “I have doors, and openings and other things inside.” Miles looked at me thoughtfully, “Oh, that’s good.” Pause. “Can we make Jell-O now?”
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JUDY GLANTZMAN, Untitled, 2004
Oil paint on canvas, 80 in. x 70 in.According to the psychoanalytic scheme, the daughter’s sense of identification is more marred, less distinct (we would write it as infused with oscillation, open-ended). Because the sign of “mature” sexual development in psychoanalytic terms is separation, the girl too must make her leave of the mother. But imagine her dilemma: she has what the mother has but must denounce it. This disavowal must not be too strong lest the young girl loses all identification with the mother and tries to accede toward male identity. She must not cast off the memory of her own tainted incompleteness for it is her legacy to pass it on. The girl then becomes a mother and must undergo a triple debasement—her daughter’s repudiation. So for the mother, Freud’s deaccessioning of the feminine is a multiple site of violation. If woman is bodiless and the daughter is always the indistinct shadow of her mother, the mother (once a daughter) bears the impossible burden of being both the figure of invisibility and the embodiment of vulnerability, of exposed body. So the asymmetrical relation of mother to women/woman becomes even more acute. Between “woman” (the projection) and women (the deceitful ones who don’t match up, who always inscribe their multiple selves onto the scene) there is forceful play. Ironically, “mother” has not been accorded an oscillating, de-referential term that acknowledges there is a real mother and that there are both grave and joyful differences between tyrannical expectations and lived experience. “(M)other” thus conflates the uneasy absence/ presence of the mother’s body in the non-space between palpable body and its impossible representation.4
Father’s Day, 1989. I am ten moons pregnant and could give birth any minute. My brother is given a package of wildflowers to disseminate, although everyone’s eyes are on me. So I take out the snapshots of a recent bike-riding jaunt, half forgetting/remembering that the roll also contains frames of my posed naked pregnantness. No one said anything until the photographs reached my husband’s mother. “I didn’t know you were such an exhibitionist!” she shrieked. I enjoyed her embarrassed surprise, for it seemed to be ever-so-coyly tinged with her own mischievous delight. So let the prepartum gazes be multiple. What I had been thinking about was making traces of pregnancy for myself and for my then-opaque child, far from the Demi Moore glamor on the cover of Vanity Fair.5 Not to promenade my body, but to show her/him that there are no stigmata attached.
“Mommy,” Miles said to me the way he does, inflecting this laden term with a healthy mix of wonder, curiosity and skepticism (my projections?), “Mommy, pee like me. Stand up and do it.” Holding back my laughter, I tried not to say I “can’t”, but that I do it another way. He insisted, “No, do it like me.” When I couldn’t stall him any longer, he broke out in a scream and a torrent of tears such as I had never seen before. Then came the dreaded “I hate you.” A few seconds later, calm. He embraces me to comfort him. “Mommy, I love you.”
AURA ROSENBERG, Mike/Bogyi, 1997
C-print, 40 in. x 30 in.
“Don’t you think that risks reifying essentialism?” was the response one of my feminist colleagues gave me when I told her I was inviting into the classroom the facts, falsities and experiences of my being a mother. “No,” I remember saying, “I am scheming on my ‘mother’ identity in order to bring out multiple, conflictive responses and encourage new ways of thinking.” The conversation did not progress on those grounds and turned to more “objective” discussions of which feminist writers we were currently reading. What I would want to say, to continue the discussion, is that when only one student in my Feminist Issues class brings in an image of a mother to my call for images of working women, we have much more work to do. I would want to say that, indeed, this strategy does verge on provocative ways of acknowledging the body of woman/mother, those sensual and very sexy virgin spaces that must be conceived. That such conceptions help to breach the very obdurate wall of fear that has so vehemently separated women’s public and private lives. Call it essentialism if you like, but realize that such name-calling wrapped in binarism risks its own stultification. I would rather use my body as a site of knowledge than rhetorically give it up.
As feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti thinks it:
The “body” in question is the threshold of subjectivity: as such it is neither the sum of its organs—a fixed biological essence—nor the result of social conditioning—a historical entity. The “body” is rather to be thought of as the point of intersection, as the interface between the biological and the social, that is to say between the socio-political field of the microphysics of power and the subjective dimension.6
Braidotti further writes that this multifaceted way of thinking the body “opens a field of possible ‘becoming’.” (p. 102)
To assert the sexed bodily “I” of the woman then becomes, indeed, a doubled and risky reinvestment in the body of mother. Claiming there is a body in the maternal subject might be, to some, stating the obvious. But in the face of this “natural body,” this material presence, the patriarchal mode has manufactured the mother/woman into a site upon which it occupies feminine territory as mystery, artificiality and emptiness. To reassert the sexed “I” of the mother engages her sexuality in a new field of becoming.
It is altogether fitting that Luce Irigaray’s body of thinking would surface in any discussion about reinvesting the name of the mother. What I would like to highlight here is the special significance Irigaray gives to the body of woman and the doubled rhetorical insistence she accords the body of mother. Through her incisive and strategically “excessive” language, language rejoicing in women’s bodily fluids and mindful openings, Irigaray renders psychoanalysis’s feigned posturing an impostor. That is, male-inflected psychoanalytic theory tells us that we are being too literal if we read the phallus as solely biological and confined only to male member/ownership. It functions, after all, as a figure and a sign. But, let’s remember, there is no corollary ambiguity when it comes to female members. Irigaray plays on this unbridgeable difference with a vengeance:
Speculation whirls round faster and faster as it pierces, bores, drills into a volume that is supposed to be solid still…Whipped along spinning, twirling faster and faster until matter shatters into pieces crumble into dust. Or into the substance of language? The matrix discourse? The mother’s “body”?…The/a woman never closes up into a volume… But the woman and the mother are not mirrored in the same fashion. A double secularization in and between her/them is already in place. And more. For the sex of woman is not one.7
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MONICA BOCK,
Sunday News (Daughter), 2001
Lead frame, newspaper clipping, antique doily, baby teeth, painted wood pedestal.
Installation with pedestal:
8 1/4 in. x 38 in. x 5 in.“Ethics…is that field defined by the other’s needs, the other’s calling on the subject for a response. Inse, the paradigm of an ethical relation is that of a mother’s response to the needs or requirements of a child.” It has been two and a half years since that passage, in the echo of Levinas, arrested me. It seemed an impossible burden for the mother (me, and many others) to bear. Even outside of the mother paradigm, it has been noted that Levinas’s philosophy puts an enormous weight of ethicalness not only on the subject, but also on the other who is asked to call the subject to responsibility.8 Yet the mother’s responsibility no longer seems so formidable. In the Levinasian sense, it simply is. And one responds. Responding and giving to the child’s utter otherness is, indeed, an act of sacrifice. Rather than construing the mother-child relation as an essentialized binding, the coupling can be embraced as yielding the fruits of reciprocal relations. The task now is to think the mother-child paradigm in its material complexities as well as a metaphor for new relations of alterity between sexes, races and classes. In relation to the infamous Baby M case, feminist legal contract lawyer Patricia J. Williams juxtaposes her mixed ancestry with the legal ramifications of “likeness”:
A white woman giving totally to a black child; a black child totally and demandingly dependent for everything, for sustenance itself, from a white woman. The image of a white woman suckling a black child; the image of a black child sucking for its life from the bosom of a white woman. The utter interdependence of such an image; the selflessness, the merging it implies; the giving up of boundary; the encompassing of other within self; the unbounded generosity, the interconnectedness of such an image. Such a picture says that there is no difference; it places the hope of continuous generation, of immortality of the white self in a little black face.9
Indeed, embedded in the notion of sacrifice is the act of giving. This giving need not always devalue her/him by giving under unfavorable conditions, but may be construed as enhancing the giver through the offering. To attempt to represent the unrepresentable, shifting beauties of being a mother to a very specific child is also to acknowledge our historical inscription as gendered bodies while refusing boundaries and reinscribing desire. Be/coming different: outside of oneself, inside the other, in both places at once. Neither occupying nor dominating. To love without domination might then be a coming to understand that one cannot overwhelm, cannot completely inhabit, cannot “have” the other. To love without overtaking might then be an admission of distance, a recognition of sorrow. A little bit of figurative mourning. The geographies of self expanding. Succumbing as powerful abandon.
“Mommy, are you done writing about women?” In his tenderly demanding voice issuing forth with uncanny timing, Miles interrupts my reverie. I cross over the threshold between mindful musing and maternal imperative, a space women/ mothers have been crossing for an eternity, knowing that my work on both sides of the portal will never be finished.
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Notes
This essay is a shortened version of the original text. The full text first appeared in “The Body in Question: Rethinking Motherhood, Alterity and Desire,” in New Feminist Criticism: Art, Identity, Action, eds. Joanna Frueh, Cassandra L. Langer and Arlene Raven (New York: HarperCollins, 1994) pp.80-96.1. Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists. (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1989) p. xvii.
2. For Grosz’s reading of Levinas’s notion of alterity through Luce Irigaray’s ethics of sexual difference, see her Chapter 5 in the book cited above. For Luce Irigaray’s reading of Levinas and the touch of the other, see her “Fecundity of the Caress,” in Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Richard A. Cohen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), pp. 231-56. For Levinas’s own writings, see especially his Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1978), “Ethics and the Face,” in Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1981).
3. Jacques Derrida notes Levinas’s ambiguity toward “woman’s place” in “Choreographies,” interview with Christie V. Mcdonald, Diacritics (Summer 1982) pp. 72-73, footnote 5. Is it interesting that Jacques Derrida, who himself weaves the figure of woman into some impossible projections (her “non-essence” within the fantasy of artificiality), would be so attentive to these slippages. For Derrida’s use of the figure of woman, see especially the “Choreographies” interview as well as Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak, “Displacement and the Discourse of Woman,” in Displacement: Derrida and After, ed. Mark Krupnick (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983) pp.164-95 and her essay “Feminism and Deconstruction, Again: Negotiating with Unacknowledged Masculinism,” in Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, ed. Teresa Brennan (London and New York: Routledge, 1989) pp. 206-23.
4. The mother’s in-between space of ever-presence and invisibility was again brought to the cultural surface when I was in search of the important and wonderful book Narrating Mothers: Theorizing Maternal Subjectivities, eds. Brenda O. Daly and Maureen T. Reddy (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991). I first went to find it at a college bookstore whose critical studies section is especially good and whose buyer is very conscientious. When I queried him about why this particular reference was not ordered, he responded self-consciously,“I thought it was too specialized.”
5. Annie Leibovitz’s photographs of a seven-month’s pregnant Demi Moore were featured in Vanity Fair’s August 1991 issue. As cited in the magazine’s October 1991 issue, in the United States alone ninety-five different television spots on the photographs reached 110 million viewers; sixty-four radio shows on thirty-one different stations were devoted to the subject; and more than 1,500 newspaper articles and editorial cartoons were generated. The movie star’s nude appearance was also noticed in publication in the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan and South America. In a paper given by Susan Kandel on May 9, 1992, at the Whitney Museum’s 15th Annual Symposium on American Art and Culture, whose theme was “Femininity and Masculinity: The Construction of Gender and the Transgression of Boundaries in 20th-Century American Art and Culture,” the author noted the “while the self-righteous on the right lambasted the photos’ flamboyant immodesty, the well-intentioned on the left hailed its progressiveness.” In her paper Kandel makes the crucial point that despite the photographs’ insistence that sexuality and motherhood are not mutually exclusive, their feigned feminism “is fashioned out of a set of conventions peculiar to the little-known subgenre of pregnancy porn: belly displayed as if it were—to borrow fro m the pornographic lexicon—tits, ass or bush; and woman displayed as an expanded object, happily complicit both with her expansion and her objectification.”
6. Rosi Braidotti, “The Politics of Ontological Difference,” in Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, cited above (n.3) p. 97.
7. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985) pp. 238-39.
8. See Alphonso Lingis’s translator’s introduction to Levinas’s works cited above (n. 2).
9. Patricia J. Williams, “On Being the Object of Property,” Signs, vol. 14, no. 1 (Autumn 1988): p. 15. William’s poignant and powerful essay conjoins personal and rhetorically autobiographical voices with her knowledge of the law field to think the possibilities of rewriting personal property contracts. Such contracts might be flexible enough to respond to racial, class and gender inequalities as well as changing emotions and appreciations of the normally nonremunerated acts of loving and caring for the elderly.
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Updated: February 28, 2007 5:32 PM