Abstract
In this article the storylines of a religious mother are read with Rosi Braidotti’s formulation of joyful and affirmative ethics. This ethics sets these storylines in motion and illuminates the changes that occur concerning devotion, resistance, and resilience in the face of the expectations of religious motherhood. This diffractive reading makes explicit the changing affects functioning in non-normative narratives and the compound and polyvocal ethics of becoming concerning (religious) motherhood, reproduction, and sustenance in these troubling times—times which compel us to live within compassionate ethics. The ethics of joy brings forward affective elements by allowing also the negative affects entangled in pain and trauma to be recognised as resistance. Besides assisting in reading the storylines for possible breaks, turns, and changes, diffractive reading makes often-neglected tacit elements matter. The forces fuelling the movement in the storylines bring forth equally symmetries, disparities, and changes, and the complex but also complementary relation of resilience and resistance as a part of feminist genealogies of affect.
Highlights
Joy augments our power of acting (Deleuze [1970] 1988, p. 100).The ethics of joy is about power—the ability to affect and to be affected
In the ethics of joy, the joy is desire, Spinozian conatus, an affirmative, non-intentional intensity, which cannot be possessed: It is neither a ‘want’ nor ‘lack’ but the effort of an individual entity to persevere in its own existence
Provided that we do not separate essence from action, a conatus can be understood as the essence of an entity or its degree of power
Summary
Joy augments our power of acting (Deleuze [1970] 1988, p. 100). The ethics of joy is about power—the ability to affect and to be affected. In this context the storylines of a Laestadian mother form a significant basis for understanding the Laestadian women’s desire to mother and belong to patriarchal conservative movement, even though the laws of their patriarchal religious community aim to limit the women’s use of contraception and their control of their own bodies and reproductive lives (see Roberts 2015) These limitations set by the religious movement further complexify the discussion on reproductive rights and freedoms of religious female subjects in the Western world, since the Laestadian women are members of Finnish society with equal rights and access to its reproductive services. The affect in resistance allows the process itself, and the changes in the process of resistance, to push toward qualitative shift and situated ethics, and toward an understanding of the connections between the potentially oppositionally positioned subjects, politics and spheres in feminist analysis practice
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