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Beyond the Maternal Turn

Submitted to Program Units
1: Study of Judaism Unit

Charlotte Fonrobert, Stanford University, Presiding

Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)

The last few years have yielded a body of work in Jewish and Christian thought calling for a (re)turn to the maternal as a rich but marginalized source for thinking about these traditions’ central philosophical, theological, and ethical preoccupations, including obligation, love, vulnerability, embodiment, and care. While this panel shares concern for exclusion and inattention to questions of care, domesticity, vulnerability, and embodiment, it details the ways that the unacknowledged normative starting point informing much of this work, in which maternality is a privileged, paradigmatic lens, precludes the realization of this scholarships' stated goals of challenging dominant categories structuring collective life through the consideration of minoritized subject positions. This panel poses a series of methodological critiques that refigure the possibilities and limits of thinking with “the maternal turn.”

Papers

  • Fannie Bialek, Washington University in St. Louis

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

    Abstract

    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, they recreate some of the problems they seek to resist by fixing complex power relationships in time. 

  • Alexandra Zirkle, University of Chicago

    Temple Breasts, Parental Pleasure, and Jewish Thought

    Abstract

    Mara Benjamin’s The Obligated Self: Maternal Subjectivity and Jewish Thought (2018) reclaims parental caregiving as a way to rethink relationality in concert with the sources of biblical, rabbinic, and modern Jewish thought. The perceptive reader of Jewish texts, she suggests, may apprehend through the silver traceries of child-rearing deeper insight into the ways that biblical and rabbinic texts think about obligation, love, power, teaching, and kinship. By scoring maternal subjectivity into the catalog of Jewish thought, Benjamin sonorously interrupts “a cavernous intellectual silence [reigning] where centuries-long, voluble conversation ought to have been” (xvi). This paper takes up Benjamin’s invitation to plumb “the constructive possibilities latent within [midrash]” by weaving together the purported binary between abstract thought and embodied ways of knowing, exploring what becomes knowable about rabbinic conceptions of the Torah when we read rabbinic texts through the lens of chestfeeding parental pleasure.

  • Sarah Zager, St. Olaf College

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

    Abstract

    This paper 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). This paper suggests that neither the phenomenological nor ethnographic methodologies used in existing scholarship on the maternal turn have lived up to their promise to make Jewish thought genuinely attentive to the complex relationship between a range of embodied experiences and philosophical reflection. 

  • Larisa Reznik, University of Chicago
    Rafael Neis, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

    Otherwise than Birthing

    Abstract

    This paper is an experiment in collaborative authorship and presentation. We utilize the resources of queer theory to stage the problem of reproductive futurism—namely, whether the normalization of reproduction forecloses upon the possibility of radical change.  This will be done through a discussion of two distinct case studies.  The first reads Hannah Arendt’s conception of natality against some of its invocations by the maternal turn. It offers the natality of abortion—the newness and possibilities opened up by the refusal to reproduce—as a counter-paradigm for the newness and transformative possibilities imputed to birth.  The second turns to rabbinic literature to explore figures and categories for birth, reproduction, etc. that emphasize not only important discontinuities between rabbinic categories and our own but also allow us to see the investments in heteronormative reproductive futurity as strange to the rabbinic sources as (many claim is) authorized by them.

Business Meeting
Andrea Dara Cooper, University of North Carolina, Presiding
Shari Rabin, Oberlin College and Conservatory, Presiding

Sabbath Observance

Saturday (all day)

Full Papers Available

No
Program Unit Options

Session Length

2 Hours
Schedule Info

Monday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM

Tags

# feminism
# women and gender
#Jewish thought and philosophy
#Modern Jewish Thought
# queer and trans studies in religion
# Ethics
#feminist care ethics
# feminist studies in religion
#feministtheology
#jewish

Session Identifier

A25-230