Rejecting Good Mother: Becoming Otherwise in Precarity

• In Event: Fabulating Futures With Academic Mothers: Provocations for Higher Education

Abstract

Objective/Purpose:
We sought to slow down our thinking/being in academia and write/read differently. What asked what if could desire a particular kind of present, rather than an imagined future? What if we began to know from somewhere else? How might we “imagine a potentialized present that does not reproduce all the conventional collateral damage” (Berlant, 2011, p. 263). According to Berlant this requires fantasy.
Theoretical Framework:
Drawing on Berlant (2011), McKittrick (2021), and Paur (2012) we trace the presents of academic motherhood across four racialized, aged, and gendered bodies to consider what assemblages are possible. In this kinship, we asked ourselves how we might do ambition differently in the academy. What would a relational present look like? Where else might we know from (McKittrick, 2021) to rehumanize academic motherhood?
Modes of Inquiry and Data:
Our first fantasy was of how we might be in relation in writing this paper. Ingold (2021), described correspondence as a way to “catch ideas on the fly, in the ferment of their incipience” (p. 11). We agreed to hand-write letters and mail them to each other. There was no prescribed topic though we all seemed took the opportunity to focus our writings on mothering, effects of the pandemic, and navigating academia. We agreed to read Parable of the Sower (Butler, 1993/2019) and A Room of One’s Own (Woolf, 1929/2012) as a way to think motherhood and womanhood outside ourselves. We met every other week for four months. We began each meeting with 15-20 minutes of free writing. We did not have agendas. We placed all our words together in one document. We surrendered our vulnerable selves to each other, to the idea of another possibility to see what shapes of thought we settled into.
Results:
There were resonances and stark contrasts throughout our letters and across our stories. The White woman worried about her safety on her bike ride to work, about not getting tenure. The Black women worried about the lives of their sons. And, we resisted these kinds of blanket statements and collapsing identifiers. Our exhaustion from the pandemic was hardly ever acknowledged, but exhaustion from the demands of work, virtual learning days and keeping up with our own children’s needs, and personal attempts to move forward as best as we could materialized on paper. We knotted our stories together and, in doing so, opened ourselves to indeterminacy, to other possible futures and other possible nows.
Scholarly Significance:
Perhaps we enter graduate school to write different futures, full of need and desire for other ways to read and write the world beyond good and bad. We find and make kin (Haraway, 2016) with other academic mothers. Theories allow us to intellectually tuck away the concept of ‘good mother’ or to expand it out, open it up, complicate and rewrite it.

Authors

• Susan Ophelia Cannon, University of Georgia
  Presenting Author

• Tynetta Jenkins, Episcopal Day School
  Presenting Author

• Erica Warren
  Presenting Author

• Elaine Thurmond, Mercer University
  Presenting Author