Response

Abstract

In response to the four essays preceding, this article considers the question: “why it is so difficult to think maternality?” In different ways, all four of the essays in this special issue attest to the dangers of essentializing a connection between “woman” and “mother.” In order to disentangle this link, one strategy is to theorize maternality as positively distinct from materiality. The article argues, instead, that a material grounding of maternality might in fact be shown to offer a way out of essentialist (and other equally-limiting) discourses, while at the same time responding to some of the material conditions that threaten theoretical discussions of what it means to be a “mother.”

Keywords:

• materiality
• psychoanalysis
• existential phenomenology
• maternality
• feminism
• “lived body”