Subaltern Maternals: Domestic Reason, Emancipation and the Maternal Contract

• In Event: Rethinking Kinship and the Family

Abstract

Women simultaneously occupy a space of both strength and vulnerability in Mexico. While existing institutions, traditions, and gender norms create the conditions whereby feminicide and forced disappearance become the norm, responses to these conditions prominently feature women’s mobilization in collective demands for justice, particularly the victims’ mothers. This simultaneity poses a question: How do the victim’s mothers counter extreme gender violence? Existing scholarship on maternal politics typically falls into three different categories: celebratory accounts, critical approaches, and the paradoxical view of maternal politics. While these accounts provide important insights into the political power of maternal politics today, they do not adequately address the emancipatory function of what I characterize as subaltern maternals: those biological and politically-proclaimed mothers (as well as their allies) dedicated to defending the rights of feminicide and forced disappearance victims. Drawing on decolonial feminist thought and Africana philosophy, this paper develops the notion of the maternal contract as a framework through which to analyze maternal acts of resistance against extreme gender violence. In doing so, this paper suggests that subaltern maternals transform private experiences of violence and structural neglect into political expressions of agency that counter contemporary pedagogies of cruelty.

Author

• Elva Fabiola Orozco Mendoza, Texas Christian University