Winner of the 2009 Feminist & Women's Studies Association
(UK & Ireland) Book Award
Many women find mothering a shocking experience in terms of the
extremity of feelings it provokes, and the profound changes it
seems to prompt in identity, relationship and sense of self.
However, although motherhood can catapult us into a state of
internal disarray, it can also provide us with a unique chance to
make ourselves anew. How then do we understand this radical
potential for transformation within maternal experience? In
Maternal Encounters, Lisa Baraitser takes up this question through
the analysis of a series of maternal anecdotes, charting key
destabilizing moments in the life of just one mother, and using
these to discuss many questions that have remained resistant to
theoretical analysis the possibility for a specific
feminine-maternal subjectivity, relationality and reciprocity,
ethics and otherness.
Working across contemporary philosophies of feminist ethics, as
well as psychoanalysis and social theory, the maternal subject, in
Baraitser s account, becomes an emblematic and enigmatic formation
of a subjectivity called into being through a relation to another
she comes to name and claim as her child. As she navigates through
the peculiarity of maternal experience, Baraitser takes us on a
journey in which the mother emerges in the most unlikely,
precarious and unstable of places as a subject of alterity,
transformation, interruption, heightened sentience, viscosity,
encumberment and love.
This book presents a major new theory of maternal subjectivity,
and an innovative and accessible way into our understanding of
contemporary motherhood. As such, it will be of interest to
students of family studies, gender studies, psychoanalysis,
critical psychology and feminist philosophy as well as counselling
and psychotherapy.
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