This panel investigates the experience of motherhood in order to complicate and enrich the status of the mother in psychoanalytic literary/social criticism and clinical practice. While Freud notoriously emphasized the role of the father in the formation of the infantile psyche and unconscious fantasy, a number of his followers revaluated his work in terms of the mother’s importance in these processes. Notable figures here include Melanie Klein and the Object-Relations School, Anna Freud and the Ego Psychology movement, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Lacan, and Julia Kristeva. Their analyses have inspired a number of literary and critical theories of the mother and motherhood, but this intellectual history almost exclusively treats the mother as a problem for the child, whether as an ambivalent source of nourishment, a structural-symbolic position, or a devouring presence and source of existential anxiety from which the child must venture an escape. Here we set aside the question of the infant in order to ask: What are the subjective, psychological, and libidinal effects of the experience of having a child? How does this experience at once provoke and evade representation? What is the specific personhood of that generic being called the mother? And how can literature modulate these questions in collectively salient ways?

The political exigency of this issue cannot be understated. As federal and state reproductive freedoms are restricted, women are increasingly reduced, imaginatively and legally, to mere vessels for social-biological reproduction. This further buttresses heteropatriarchal imperatives and heteronormative assumptions concerning who, or indeed what, a woman may be, as well as who may be a mother. Accelerating anti-immigrant rhetorics, policies, and police actions further treat motherhood as a matter of national security, as certain racially marked mothers are deemed threats to the integrity of the body politic. On our view, the mother is first and foremost a subject of desire. A psychoanalytic attunement to the effects—at once physical, psychical, affective, social, and aesthetic—of the experience of motherhood thus offers a unique and urgent opportunity to articulate alternative conceptions of motherhood that refuse biological essentialism, social determinism, ethnonationalism, and other forms of sentimental prurience.

Our topic offers a fresh intervention into ongoing scholarly debates surrounding reproductive futurism, feminist legal theory, and the entwined problematics of racial and sexual difference in the context of contemporary and emergent cultural fixations. Each of our three papers more specifically considers the as-yet unthought potential of motherhood as either a subversive or a conservative force in literature and culture. Professor Shannon Mussett’s paper addresses de Beauvoir’s Freudian and existentialist depiction of tyrannical motherhood in The Second Sex and in de Beauvoir’s posthumously published novel, Les inséperables, to forward a critique of maternal tyranny in the age of artificial intelligence and genetic augmentation through Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel, Klara and the Sun. Anwita Ghosh situates Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015) alongside and against Roland Barthes’ characterization of the literary text as “the mother’s body,” finding in Nelson’s experience of motherhood a style and strategy of writing that subverts the long, phallocentric history of the mother’s consignment, including by psychoanalysis itself, to the field of the pre-symbolic. And Ran Deng disputes Kristeva’s position that to become a subject requires an act of symbolic matricide, and instead follows Laura Green and Luce Irigaray in positing a maternal space of connectivity between the mother and the child from which a more feminine model of subject-formation could be imagined.

The session will follow a standard conference panel model, with the Presider speaking for no more than five minutes to introduce the panel’s themes and core stakes. Each of the three featured panelists will speak for 15-18 minutes, leaving 15-20 minutes for general discussion. Time limits will be strictly enforced. The makeup of the panel includes a diversity of positionalities from several countries and includes graduate students and full-time/tenured faculty at both teaching and research universities.