Beyond the Maternal Turn

Over the last few years, a body of work has emerged in Jewish thought that calls for a (re)turn to the maternal. In the first of this collection of works, Mara Benjamin’s_The Obligated Self_ (2018) poses the query: if the narrow canon of modern Jewish thought and theology is preoccupied with existential and ethical questions around autonomy and obligation, power and its negotiation, relationality and kinship, why would such questions be best addressed by generations of men reflecting abstractly on their own experiences, or on “experiences” of others as described in texts? In response, Benjamin offers the concrete, ongoing experience of mothering as the richest phenomenological archive for these sorts of questions. Andrea Dara Cooper’s _Gendering Modern Jewish Thought_ (2021) turns to maternity and sorority as a way of re-integrating concepts of “life” into a philosophical tradition often preoccupied with death. Michal Raucher (_Conceiving Agency_, 2020) and Cara Rock-Singer (“Milk Sisters,” 2020; “Natality,” 2023) have centered ethnography of women in their experiences of pregnancy, nursing, and navigating different sites of authority(religious, medical, spousal, etc.) as an overlooked contribution to Jewish philosophical and theological claim-making. What unites those hailed by the maternal turn is the conviction that a thick phenomenological and/or ethnographic description of the specificity of the maternal experience provides a much-needed corrective to the disembodied, unencumbered, abstraction-laden, universals-chasing, vulnerability-eschewing world of male-dominated discourses and structures in which the subjects/subjectivities of these thick descriptions are embedded.

This panel shares the concern of this literature for exclusion and inattention to questions of care, domesticity, vulnerability, and embodiment. However, it questions whether “the maternal turn” scholarship has already foreclosed the possibility of realizing its stated goals of challenging dominant categories structuring collective life through the consideration of minoritized subject positions. If feminist theorizing of the 90s problematized the coherence, stability, or even desirability of be-ing and “do-ing” binary sex/gender, does the emerging maternal research trajectory risk side-stepping these theoretical conversations in lieu of some direct, unmediated access to the maternal? If “the maternal'' emerges unproblematically as already extant in the world, with the scholarly community ready to transcribe, learn from, and disseminate its seemingly varied but surprisingly universalizable experiential insights, we worry that this turn accomplishes a type of inclusion by perpetrating a host of exclusions. In the discursive networks and thought worlds of the maternal, figures like those experiencing infertility; pregnant and chest-feeding men; non-binary parents; queer kinship beyond the nuclear family unit; or parents for whom biological reproduction, lactation, or ‘non-medicalized’ pregnancy is not an option can only become intelligible as absences, aberrations, or exceptions to the norms of motherhood.

The literature on the maternal proceeds with one hand in the idiom and methodology of description—ethnography, phenomenology, etc.—describing, reporting, capturing what already is the case on the ground. On the other hand, it constructs a reality where mothers, mothering, reproduction, parenting, etc., _matter_ and, perhaps, matter _more_ than other forms of life. These descriptions are never without normative stakes. None of them are undertaken, for example, to demonstrate reproduction as undesirable or how much people ought to strive and aspire to avoid it, if possible. The assumption is that reproduction and parenting, and mothering as a statistically and culturally dominant form of parenting, is a social and societal good, and thus we ought to understand and value it. But what would it look like if we build a culture, institutions, discourses, and even theologies and philosophies that actively _disincentivized_ natalism or, at the very least, did not actively incentivize it at every turn and much more than other forms of life? The goal of this panel is not to flip hierarchies, advocating some new norm that supplants the norm of mothering. Instead, we develop this conversation as a set of questions: can the maternal turn think and reflect on these possibilities? What would that look like?

The first 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.

The second paper revises and extends Mara Benjamin's reclamation of parental caregiving as a resource for thinking with the sources of Jewish thought and theology. Through feminist theories of breastfeeding, this paper weaves together the purported binary between abstract thought and embodied ways of knowing suggested in Benjamin's work, thereby offering an account of maternal subjectivity that is sufficiently capacious to generate, rather than merely coordinate, theological and philosophical reflection.

The third 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 inclusive of, and attentive to, the complex relationship between a range of embodied experiences and philosophical reflection.

The fourth paper, an experiment in collaborative authorship, presents two case studies, using resources from queer theory to stage the problem of reproductive futurism—namely, whether the normalization of reproduction forecloses upon the possibility of radical change. The first reads Hannah Arendt’s conception of natality against the grain of the maternal turn. It offers the natality of abortion—possibilities opened up by the refusal to reproduce—as a counter-paradigm for the new potentialities imputed to birth. The second explores figures and categories for birth, reproduction, etc. in rabbinic literature that emphasize not only important discontinuities between rabbinic categories and our own but also allow us to see cis-heteronormative reproductive futurity as strange to the rabbinic sources as (many claim is) authorized by them.