Becoming a ‘Mother’ in the South and the global Paradox of Ignorance: Unpacking Through Perspectives of Women in Pakistan and India

• In Event: Counternarratives, Decolonising Methodologies, and Gender Justice in Research

Proposal

Domestic spaces can become breeding ground for feminist alliances between mothers and daughters which ultimately transform the futures of daughters (Khalid and Rose, 2022). The social processes within these domestic spaces are scarcely theorised in liberal feminist traditions and are often undervalued in terms of collective feminist action. This paper sheds light on the processes of social transformation within domestic spaces by focusing on the role of mothers. Global social justice and rights frameworks present mothers in the global South as a paradox, hypervisible and invisible simultaneously (Newton, 2023, p. 166). Mothers are visibilised objectively, with the potential of transforming the lives of their children (mostly girls). However, their subjectivities are invisible or enshrined in deficit discourses. They are recognised as important figures impacting their children’s well-being but also vilified for failures in these gains. Khalid (2023) shows how global policy discourses present mothers in a portrait-like fashion painting them as 'unsuccessful' and impacting their families negatively when they lack attributes such as education or empowerment. Such perceptions are rooted in Western feminist logics which require women/mothers to be empowered in particular ways, such as active resistance to power, subversion, and resignification of hegemonic norms. History shows that even within the Western feminist movements there were internal political differences that translated adversely for some. Through this work we seek to answer: How do we draw on Southern epistemological world sense to conceptualise the role of mothers for their children’s well-being when feminist struggles are unique within and across contexts and time? In the words of Audre Lorde, ‘There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not lead single-issue lives’ (p. 183). Herein lies the paradox of presenting the role of women as mothers in non-liberal traditions which we aim to unpack in this paper.
We argue that by creating discourses around mothers through a global North thought-frame that doesn’t align with a diverse world sense, global perceptions engage in active ignorance (ignoring Southern worldviews on mothers) which is embedded in these re-presentational errors. We conceptualise this as the paradox of ‘ignorance’ which is rooted in the perceived logic that whiteness/global conceptions (here the global understanding of mothering) sustains its perceived superiority through time and consequently results in the cognition that uses the global North epistemic lens to make sense of the world (Mills, 2015). We argue that this kind of ignorance also prevails in the way that mothers are seen in the global human rights vocabulary. The production of this paradox is important because it fuels the ‘ignorance’ around the conceptualisation of mothers, ‘this foundational miscognition necessarily ramified throughout … perceptions, conceptions, and theorizations, both descriptive and normative, scholarly and popular’ present the issue of mothering in deficit discourses (Mills, 2015, p. 218). What this means in terms of the conceptual paradox under discussion is that global attempts to engage with issues of human rights and social justice related to mothers would draw on conceptions and theorisations that conceive of the mothers’ role as devoid of subjectivity.
Martin (2021) argues that ‘to study ignorance is of paramount importance both theoretically and ethically. For example, white ignorance is argued to emerge from social practices and structures, shows patterns and maintains and sustains (racial) inequality’ (p. 865). Ignorance in the sense that Martin imagines, if left unexamined allows for racial inequality to sustain itself. If left unchecked an ‘ignorance’ about the role of mothers in the global policy discourses will lead to the marginalisation of the knowledge claims from the South in terms of how mothers impact global aspirations for girls to acknowledge women’s struggle for social change.
It is the aim of this paper to decentre the Western world sense and replace it by proposing an African feminist perspective on mothers. African feminist thought emphasises on mothering, family and intersectional oppression as foundational to social transformation. African feminisms incorporate multiple world views that cluster together under a unified cause of rights. The variety of African feminisms is illuminative of how mothers are conceptualised in this worldview. Methodologically we achieve this ambition in three ways. Firstly, we build a narrative by unraveling the historical global policy discourses about mothers. This is achieved through a global policy discourse analysis of texts, including UNICEF, UNESCO, the World Bank reports, and human rights conventions such as CEDAW and CRC, to explore narratives about mothers with respect to issues like daughters’ education, female circumcision (FC), and child marriage. Secondly, we propose an African feminist conceptualisation of mothers and propose this as an approach that allows for analysis from a Southern worldview. We propose that this is a valuable resource for understanding the experiences of mothers. Lastly, we draw on African feminist perspectives and apply them to analyse the stories of mothers in Pakistan and India. The data for these case studies were collected through narrative interviews with mothers in multiple neighborhoods of Pakistan and India. The capability approach was applied to design and collect data. Both case studies come from extended Ph.D. projects of the authors. The case study in Pakistan focuses on mothers’ efforts to support their daughters’ education and the India case study explores the issue of female circumcision and early marriage.
Through these empirical case studies focused on sensitive topics such as FC and gendered perspectives on daughters’ education, we explicate how untold stories of active and passive engagement with gendered norms illuminate the richness of gendered experiences. The paper argues for a world sense that recognises the knowledges of women who live in non-liberal feminist traditions and engage in feminist struggles in unconventional ways. The main contribution of the paper is to introduce African feminist perspectives and apply them to analysing the feminist struggles of mothers in the global South. We wish to demonstrate through our analyses how nuanced understandings around mothers’ parental experiences of sensitive issues such as FC and child marriage allow us to see the world of women in multiple and insightful ways.

Authors

• Aliya Khalid, University of Oxford

• Debangana Chatterjee