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- Convenor:
-
Holly High
(Deakin University)
Send message to Convenor
- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Gender, Reproduction and Sexuality
- Location:
- NIKERI KC1.211
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 23 November, -
Time zone: Australia/Melbourne
Short Abstract:
This panel explores Gumb's notion of "revolutionary mothering". How does this concept relate to earlier models of mothering, such as Chodorow's influential account of mothering as "reproduction"? How can Gumb's idea of the "mother-full" inform anthropological theory, ethnography, and practice?
Long Abstract:
This panel speaks to the conference theme of "life support" by proposing "revolutionary mothering" as a model for an anthropology of human being in a world falling apart. Gumbs defines mothering as "the practice of creating, nurturing, affirming and supporting life…", "the queerest thing human beings can do," and an act open to anyone. Mothering is revolutionary because, "children are the ways that the world begins again and again" (Jordan). A revolutionary holds that other worlds are possible and supportable. Over forty years ago, Chodorow envisaged mothering in terms of reproduction: "universal" male domination and cliched female personality traits, she argued, were re-made again and again because of female bodily capacities (pregnancy, lactation) and processes of psychological identification. Her image of revolution (male childcare and women in the workforce) sat uneasily against her universalism… but easily with neoliberalism. That said, Chodorow did put her finger on something important: there is a tendency to ignore mothers. Ethnographic attention gravitates to anything but, then and now, leaving each generation to rediscover the mother. We are always coming home. Even so, the work remains. How can we write "mother-full" ethnographies? How can mother-full writing move from the margins to the centre? How can revolutionary mothering ground renewed theory and practice? For instance, can knowledge of the too-easy the split between "bad mother/good mother" challenge the twin assumptions of pop-economics: scarcity (bad mother absence) and boundless growth (good mother abundance)? This panel is open to mother-full contributions of ethnography, theory, and history-of-anthropology.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 22 November, 2022, -Holly High (Deakin University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper is inspired by the nexus of the maternal, masochism, and sacrifice evident in the Lao revolution, asking how these appear in accounts of events in Laos and how these compare to other possibilities.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is inspired by women's experiences of the Lao revolution. The biographies, autobiographies and oral history compilations currently emerging in the local publishing scene in Lao PDR provide an intimate window into subjective experiences of the revolution. Among these, mothering emerges as an important theme. Revolutionaries included mothers as well as women who counted the relinquishment of motherhood among the sacrifices made in their revolutionary work. The conditions of the two Indochina Wars included gender-based violence, forced marriages and devastating food shortages, which framed maternal experiences for many. Images of the maternal in propagandistic accounts of the revolution mix degradation with the sublime: a grown man's life saved by suckling a woman's breastmilk, companies of soldiers dependent for their lives on rice smuggled in women's orifices, or enemy soldiers fleeing from the shame of being bombarded by a woman's artillery. The revolution returns endlessly to the theme of sacrifice, which is also a key theme of the maternal. This is true not only in Laos but also in many cultures. This paper picks at the nexus of the maternal, masochism, sacrifice and revolution, asking how these appear in accounts of the Lao revolution and how these compare to other possibilities.
Lorraine Mortimer (Deakin)
Paper short abstract:
The Zeus of Critique rules—but over a desert, said Bruno Latour. This discussion asserts that analysis, critique, affirmation and hard struggle can go together. Here, one Revolutionary Mother who was ‘disappeared’ from history takes centre stage.
Paper long abstract:
In Revolutionary Mothering, Loretta Ross declares ‘the concept of “mother” is less a gendered identity than a transformative, liberating practice irrespective of historically determinist rigidities’. Alexis Gumbs claims that to forge a living society where people help to create each other instead of destroying each other, we need to look at the practice of creating, nurturing, affirming, and supporting life that we call mothering. Such full-heartedness and affirmation has long been suspect in the academy. But this book’s title, and subtitle, ‘Love on the Front Lines’, assert that analysis, critique, affirmation and hard struggle can go together. Outraged by some existing theory in the 1970s, I had to speak for myself about the way being involved with newly emerged little humans blew apart the imagined fence between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ and gave the lie to the labels of ‘repetition’ or ‘reproduction’. What was involved was so evidently creative transformation—and new and ongoing intersubjective relationships. Yet the maternal love experience was often considered a problem for theorists, as if they shared a widespread mythical perception of women with babies entering some soft and syrupy space the non-romantic, and non-lactating mustn’t enter—in case they got stuck there. I wrote my essay, ‘What If I Talked Like a Woman Right Here in Public?’ One woman and mother who spoke fearlessly in public was a French revolutionary who wrote The Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen in 1791. She paid for the radical equality and care she proposed with her head.