Otherwise than Birthing

In pledging to give experience, embodiment, and concreteness its philosophical and anthropological due, the maternal turn also rhetorically positions itself as offering something new and transformative. With the growing visibility of different communities and the body of scholarship that thinks with and about them (e.g., queer and trans studies, disability studies, ethnography), we may have a grammar more robust than ever before to think, feel, and “do”/“undo” sex, gender, sexuality, and embodiment. In the estimation of the maternal turn, however, these trajectories have not quite given scholars a discourse on experience, embodiment, and concreteness that matters—namely, that of maternality. To accept the claim to emancipatory newness of the maternal turn, one must first override the seemingly ubiquitous solicitations of reproductive futurity.  The “we” in whose name it speaks promises to be more inclusive and more methodologically adequate for the aims of a “we” that has been excluded from the conversation. Even when spoken in the I voice, to honor the singularity of experience, the speaking I, as Robyn Wiegman suggests, anticipates, or hopes for a “we.” In this way, motherhood-talk positions itself as a singularity en route to universalizability. While this may just be a feature of all attempts to speak, the “maternal turn” promises to speak something both new and excluded, in the name of justice and equality. After all, the promise of the new—a beginning, a different way of being and doing—is a simultaneous break with the old order of things.

This paper, an experiment in co-authorship between two scholars, uses queer theory’s confrontation with reproductive futurism to read against the grain two case studies  broached in the maternal turn. The first examines the juxtaposition between maternality and Hannah Arendt’s conception of natality  (recently suggested by Cara Rock-Singer) in order to offer a counter-reading of the natality of abortion. The second offers scenes from rabbinic literature that so confounds contemporary categories of sex, gender, reproduction, and embodiment that it estranges us from what we think we know about what the rabbis teach about bodies, genders, and so on.  Together, these two case studies generate figures of the new unthought (and perhaps unthinkable) by the maternal turn. In so doing, this paper parochializes the universal ambitions and interrogates the emancipatory promise of the “newness” of motherhood-talk.

“Natality” in Arendt names the capacity to bring something new into the world. Though Arendt did not propose such a move, the claim that birth enacts something new into the world is appealing and seemingly commonsensical to many. But is it persuasive? For one thing, as Lee Edelman has suggested in No Future, the regime of reproduction, and the child, in whose name it speaks, functions to ward off radical change, while authorizing the extension of the same, old social order we already know. In some sense, every action is new since its repetition entails both sameness and difference. And yet, a world divided into “mothers,” “fathers,” children (and a few “others”) still preserves the most profound similarities and continuities with what came before. By imagining maternality as an exemplary case of natality, we foreclose upon the newness embedded in maternality’s refusal, among other foreclosures. It’s not necessary to position maternality as a paradigmatic case of natality to argue for its recognition; after all, something needn’t be novel to be valuable, resourced, etc. But the attempt to accrue value, recognition, and significance for maternality through its juxtaposition with natality invites an opposite reading: namely, that maternality is an obstacle to natality and that, as such, it ought to be resisted and critiqued. Put as a provocation, at this historical, geopolitical, environmental, etc. juncture, might the calls to value and support reproductive projects enjoin us to do well, more justly what ought not be done at all? However much this perspective cuts against certain sensibilities and pieties, it may, in fact, be necessary to think through the natality of non-reproduction and abortion. Reflecting on the paradoxical natality of antinatalism is one way to examine the categories sustaining the discussion of the maternal turn.

Another venue we propose turns to rabbinic literature, which has been fingered as both the enabling and exclusionary set of norms with which the maternal turn contends. One critique issued to the rabbinic corpus is that its ironclad homosocial world imitates, while usurping, women’s creative capacities of certain kinds in the sage/disciple relationship. While it is undoubtedly true that in rabbinic literature the work of reproducing Torah scholars is rendered more valuable than other forms of reproductive labor, must we reaffirm the facticity of gender binaries and the ideologies of biological determinism and the parochialisms of twenty-first century bioreproduction in issuing such a critique? This affirmation is also resident in a turn related to the maternal turn in ancient studies, which understandably seeks to raise up and retrieve women’s “experiences,” lives, and stories. But in the uncritical use of “women '' as almost always opposed to a binary patriarchal “men,” problematic assumptions of a transhistorical cisness abide. What if we questioned the very translatability of rabbinic categories into our own?  What if our notions of cis-heterosexual, same-species “reproduction” and concomitant maternality (or even homo-maternality) were unsuited to ancient rabbinic conceptions thereof in key respects? For instance, the rabbis live in a world where the fixity of species cannot be taken for granted - women might give birth to ravens, or to bovine creatures - and the task is to trace species in a world of variability. Humanness itself is fragile. Similarly, for the rabbis and other ancients, the mechanisms of human reproduction involved more than two human heterosexual parties, and included various nonhuman entities from the divine and the angelic, to the demonic and the material object. In scenarios where multiple beings and entities were parties to reproduction, the maternal as a ground is in the very least in need of rethinking.

Taken together these case studies attempt to unseat the very norms “the maternal turn” rightly takes to task without replacing them with a new gendered certainty and normativity.