Navigating M/other-Son Plots as a Migrant Act: Autobiography, Currere, and Gender

• In Event: M/othering a Bodied Curriculum: Emplacement, Desire, and Affect

Abstract

I navigate how m/others-son relations are potentially conceived and delivered as men’s life-narratives. I draw on Pease’s (2000) memory work with men to both stitch together and deconstruct mother-son narrative patterns of distancing, devaluing, blaming, and dependency to illustrate how such narrative plots are reproduced in student-teacher relationships within the context of public education.

I draw on the intellectual work of various critical gender theorists as a politically profeminist conscious act to provide a methodological filter for how we might navigate our interpretations of mother-son life narratives (Hesford 1999). Feminist and masculinist theorists (Digby, 1998; Munro, 1998), along with Pinar’s (1994, 2004) autobiographical method of currere, have helped to shape how I de/re/construct the m/other-son plots. Pease asks us to reconsider four “normative” relationships of dis/ease between m/others and sons: distancing, devaluing, dependence, and blaming. The public school curriculum, often teaches boys to disavow a need for their m/others’ feminine love. Instead men must learn to honor their m/others and develop relationships of interdependence with them, where narratives of separation and attachment complement each other. “When women think back through our mothers” Grumet (1988) explains, “we look past the natural order expressed in physics, astronomy, biology, our second nature, to the first nature that male identity and male science have repressed” (p. 184). Therefore, must men think back through their m/others in order to reconnect with that first nature? If so, perhaps autobiographical writing affords such an opportunity. Thinking back through our m/others can help sons, men, politicians, and educational bureaucrats to question the ways in which a national curriculum of disavowed “femininity” projects onto—dominating through “masculine” epistemologies and patriarchal ideologies—education’s center stage.

The current rhetoric of accountability suggests that we can depend on our teachers (our m/others) to save us economically and militarily. Pinar (2004) suggests, “‘accountability’ would seem to be nothing more than a ‘projection’ onto educators of what many businessmen and politicians themselves lack” (p. 164). Such reactions are possibly a man’s misrecognition of himself, where in his repudiation of “femininity,” imagined metamorphosis toward manhood, is projected as a lack of “masculinity,” onto the schooling system. Our m/others, first teachers, daughters, and sisters have become political scapegoats, constructed by narratives of distancing, dependency, blaming, and devaluing. In their nightmares, in their narrative accountings, politicians imagine that teachers in the public schools are failing North America’s children and neglecting their civic duties. This is the present un-homed madness of schooling.

Author

• Nicholas Ng-A-Fook, University of Ottawa