Maternal Politics Against the Grain

Session Submission Type: In-Person Roundtable

Session Description

Much political thought regarding the maternal has focused on mothers’ moral claims addressed to states, from spectacles of public mourning to anti-war organizing to demands for the institutionalization of care. In this roundtable, in contrast, we think through a quite different plurality of maternal configurations. We take up questions of maternity in relation to states’ violent antagonism, parasitism, abandonment, or apocalypse; as well as the maternal itself as a key site of political vision and praxis, from everyday labors and materialities to precarious collectivities to literary and cinematic representations. Participants’ contributions will span the notion of a subaltern “maternal contract” as a supplement and challenge to state sovereignty, taking as a case study Latin American mothers’ collectives responding to feminicides; abolitionist engagements with the ongoing legacies of captive Black maternity and fugitive practices of freedom; ecological apocalypse, white settler innocence, and fantasies of the maternal in the film MAD MAX: FURY ROAD; and the prostheses of motherhood, delving into the maternal itself in its constructedness and plurality.

Sub Unit

• Division 3: Normative Theory

Chair

• Annie Menzel University of Wisconsin

Presenters

• Annie Menzel University of Wisconsin

• Lori Marso Union College

• Elva Fabiola Orozco Mendoza University of Connecticut

• Jasmine Syedullah Vassar College