“Did I Conceive This People?”: Experiences of Infertility in the Maternal Turn

In recent years, Jewish thought—as well as Christian thought, and to some extent general philosophy—has become increasingly preoccupied with theorizing maternal experience. This work has had a significant impact on the field—it has helped fill in the profound gaps left by women’s persistent erasure from the pages Jewish thought’s philosophical canon and the authors who populate it. It has helped make Jewish thought a more livable, even vibrant, field.

One of the most important features of this critique has been its conviction that Jewish thought’s assumed phenomenological starting point, is not the particularized, ethically self-conscious subject that it claims to be. Instead, as Mara Benjamin has argued, modern Jewish thought’s canon structures “the ethical relation” around an imagined, disembodied other with no particular traits. To remedy this, Benjamin suggests that maternal experience offers a more useful, more genuinely particularized starting point. Similarly, Andrea Dara Cooper identifies how gendered concepts of fraternity have dominated modern Jewish thought, obscuring potential contributions of sorority and maternity. Attending to these experiences can, Cooper suggests, get us a philosophy that is close to “life,” rather than the obscure phenomenological language which characterizes the work of figures like Rosenzweig and Levinas. For both Benjamin and Cooper, a certain kind of phenomenology remains at the center of their accounts—we are interested in mothers and children rather than the “subject" and “the Other,” in sisters rather than brothers. Other scholars have turned to ethnography as the primary tool to access these excluded experiences. Scholars including Michal Raucher and Cara Rock-Singer have used ethnographic methods to thematize the ways that embodied experiences of motherhood intersect with Jewish identity, community, and religious practice. These ethnographic approaches too, seek to make maternity visible to a tradition of thought that has repeatedly ignored it. 

In both its ethnographic and phenomenological guises, this scholarship has highlighted three main features of maternal experience: its characteristic embodiment and the forms of knowledge that embodied experiences of motherhood can afford, its complex relationship to liberal notions of chosenness and freedom, and its implied relationship to embodied and particularized practices of care, and, in turn, the ethical connections generated by those experiences. This paper considers how experiences of infertility trouble all three of these features of motherhood as constructed by existing scholarship on the maternal turn. In doing so, it takes experiences of infertility as a methodological provocation, asking scholars to consider what methodological tools need to be developed to theorize the full range of parental experience (in all of its diversely gendered forms). It suggests that characterizations of motherhood, whether phenomenological or ethnographic, need to be responsive to experiences that are often seen to be at its periphery, rather than its center. This paper suggests that neither the phenomenological nor ethnographic methodologies have lived up to their promise to make Jewish thought genuinely inclusive of, and attentive to, a wide range of complexly embodied experiences. 

To do this, the paper first documents the ways that infertility has appeared in recent scholarship on the maternal turn in Jewish thought and general philosophical reflection, to the extent that it has. It argues that infertility has generally appeared in one of two ways: either as a form of motherhood, which can more or less be absorbed into other experiences of pregnancy and childbearing, or as an experience which is so different from motherhood that it appears alongside, but never quite part of, the discussion. Neither of these strategies brings infertility’s complex relationship to motherhood into view. Instead, they occlude the distinctive cognitive, embodied, and social features of experiences of infertility, making it difficult for them to substantively shape the conceptual work done by the maternal turn. 

The paper then seeks to give a methodological etiology for the ways that infertility has failed to appear in its full complexity in the recent maternal turn in Jewish thought. The paper argues that, by accepting the phenomenological terms of debate set by the modern Jewish thought canon, phenomenologists have been forced to conceptualize “motherhood” too narrowly, thereby turning maternal experience into yet another overly abstract dyad—this time between mother and baby, rather than “Self” and “Other.” The paper then argues that ethnographic work in the recent maternal turn in Jewish thought has faced a similar problem—in an effort to reply to a set of canonical texts that this scholarship saw as disconnected from “life” it figured a very specific form of maternity, figured through the embodied experiences of wanted, medically uncomplicated pregnancy and breastfeeding. This construction of motherhood pulls against other ethnographic work which recognizes that pregnancy, motherhood, and embodiment, are complexly related and do not always travel together. When presented as Jewish thought or Jewish ethics, both phenomenological and ethnographic accounts of motherhood need to be responsive to experiences that seem to fall outside its initial boundaries. Doing this will require work using tools from outside of each of these methods.

Addressing this methodological problem also has political stakes. If we assume that infertility just is a kind of maternity, we underread, and therefore fail to address, the implicit hierarchy between maternal “success” and “failure” which is prevalent in both popular culture and scholarship on motherhood. If infertility just is maternity, then we cannot make sense of why it is that infertility is so particularly emotionally and physically painful, and so consistently stigmatized in social, political, and medical discourse. Similarly, if we elide infertility all together, we over-determine what maternity is like. This makes it  impossible for in-between sorts of experiences—experiences characterized by both closeness and distance, by both embodiment and a devastating lack of embodiment, by both knowledge about one’s body and deep alienation from it— to produce theoretical insights, or to hold existing theoretical constructions to account. In doing so, we reinscribe hierarchical discourses which privilege childbearing over barrenness, the “natural” over the prosthetic or assisted, and the “successful”  or “hopeful” over the “failed.” Feminist scholarship deserves better, and feminist politics, especially in the current legal environment, demands it.