Parents as Paradigms: Recasting the Problems of Individualism in a New Mold?

Maternal relationships are asymmetrical, even when measured at moments where certain asymmetries may have reduced in adulthood or inverted in older age. Feminist turns to maternal experience have emphasized its asymmetries of power, capability, vulnerability, and need against traditional philosophical paradigms of individual subjectivity as ideally invulnerable, self-sufficient, and self-controlled. This paper considers how mother-child relationships have been used in recent feminist thought to develop accounts of obligation from asymmetries of power, vulnerability, and need. It argues that taking maternal experience as an ethical paradigm obscures important questions about domination in care, both because maternal experience might be relatively exceptional, instead of exemplary, with respect to domination and because of the way these projects focus on the immediacy of care, fixing the mother-child relationship as a dyadic encounter. Where these accounts depend on a paradigm of encounter instead of a description of ongoing relationship, they recreate some of the problems they seek to resist by fixing complex power relationships in time. Instead, they should return to an earlier insight of the feminist ethics of care: the continuation of relationships over time changes the possibilities for both conflict and care within them. 

Feminist theorists in many traditions have suggested that asymmetries of power and vulnerability are part of why philosophers have diminished, denigrated, or ignored maternal relationships altogether. Asymmetries are disconcerting, in many contexts: they can seem to threaten the possibility of certain conceptions of justice and equality, independence and freedom, or a sense of a self who can act and think “for themselves.” They can also indicate, simply, that someone has lostin a contest for power or control. Hence Nietzsche’s suggestion that the “free spirit” is yoked by his mother, and “will always breathe a sigh of relief when he has finally decided to shake off the maternal care and protection administered by the women around him.” (And note the agential language: when he has decided to shake off maternal care and protection.) Or, similarly, Kant’s rejection of mothers as perpetually indulging the state of minority: finding their children endearing for being unable to think for themselves, encouraging that state of incapacity, and hearing their children’s cries as cries for them, the mother, instead of the cries of a person longing for freedom from infancy and infantilization, as Kant interprets newborn screams.

Asymmetries of power, capability, and experience between mother and child trouble the projects of strength, independence, and autonomy that such philosophers pursue. They disrupt ethics and politics, or maybe embarrass them. But feminist theorists have used the asymmetries of the maternal relationship very differently: to ground ethical and political obligations and motivate their pursuit, hearing the cries of the newborn as calls to care instead of pleas for independence from it.

This paper considers how the mother-child relationship has been used in feminist thought to develop accounts of obligation from asymmetries of power, vulnerability, and need. Feminist ethicists of care—Virginia Held, Nel Noddings, and Sara Ruddick particularly—and, more recently, the Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero and Jewish ethicist Mara Benjamin have located in the maternal relationship a paradigm of the demands of vulnerability: the asymmetry of power and need between the mother and child make the “demands” of the child’s vulnerability clear, and an example of the demands of vulnerability more broadly. In this way, as Leora Batnitzky, Judith Butler, and others have argued, they offer similar pictures of the demands of vulnerability as Levinas. But do these turns to vulnerability demanding a response account sufficiently for the uncertainty of vulnerability, and the potential for domination in the anticipation of needs and provision of care? 

As Mara Benjamin helps to show in The Obligated Self, the mother-child relationship is best understood as dynamic and ongoing, shot through with uncertainties and possibilities because of its continuation in time. Through a consideration of her work in reply to Cavarero’s, this paper suggests that a static account of asymmetries of power cannot address crucial issues of domination in care. More broadly, it fails to capture the potential lessons of the mother-child relationship as an example for ethical and political thought. Destabilizing this asymmetry by resetting the relationship in time is an important correction to feminist considerations of maternal care and obligation, and offers new ways of interrogating the relationship for a range of questions about power, vulnerability, and uncertainty.