After Bersani: On the Scandal of Mothers Without Maternity

Abstract

This thesis theorizes new meanings of “motherhood” in a series of fictional texts that exemplify a mother-child relationality rooted in concepts typically seen as inimical to “good” mothering: indifference, impersonality, and inhumanity. To do so, I draw primarily upon the work of the queer theorist and critic Leo Bersani, who has sought across his oeuvre to develop a mobile and wide-ranging vocabulary to describe ways of being in the world that eschew our most fundamental belief in ourselves as the possessors of unique identities. For Bersani, this belief in the “sanctity of the self” (The Culture of Redemption 4) is the purest expression of a relationality that is rooted in possession, of both self and other; it therefore makes violence, broadly conceived as acts of appropriation, the primary means by which we approach the world. The self who is self-possessed and who grasps at the world is driven by the desire for knowledge, and Bersani names the implacable desire for knowledge—for the possession of the other’s difference through the process of coming to know—epistemophilia. In this thesis, I critically examine a series of fictional representations of the mother-child relation in order to critique the ways in which motherhood is implicated, in the first instance, in the reproduction of this kind of possessive, epistemophilic, and inherently violent selfhood. I argue that our deeply held belief in the necessity of “maternal love”, the mother’s recognition of the precious singularity of the child and her pledge to protect and nurture it, is in fact an expression of epistemophilia and, hence, constitutes a fundamental violence. I also suggest that there are aspects of motherhood that make a radically new relationality possible; a motherhood without maternity names the scandalous possibility of a mother who fails to see the “sanctity” of her child’s, and her own, selfhood. This “failed” motherhood is the prism through which the following literary analyses take speculative form. Ultimately, this thesis pursues new ways of thinking about motherhood that both delink it from its conservative reproductive role and unfold new relational potentialities within it. The illumination of these non-normative, non-pathological potentialities—of indifference, impersonality, and inhumanity—represents an important contribution to that vein of critical theory that seeks to valorize the antisocial as a means of pursuing new and nonviolent ways of being.