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.