What’s the Emergency in Maternal Emergence? A Response to Hoskins-Murphy’s “Close to the Bone”

Abstract

ABSTRACT In response to Nicola Hoskins-Murphy’s paper, I wonder about the limitations of and contradictions embedded in the formulation of a maternal that requires foreclosure of a longed-for emergence of self and endless sacrifice in service of meeting the child’s needs, and I offer a framework for a meta-examination of the structures – mythological, psychoanalytic, political, historical, and economic – that shape such maternal formulations. I examine the sense of threat that circulates in the paper around the desire for and fear of this “emergence” and wonder how a greater awareness of the social dimension the mothers and their sons are situated in might help shift its presence. I argue that there are unique new challenges to maternal subjectivity posed by children in later adolescence and in the transition to young adulthood which need further theorization in general, and suggest that feminist critical voices can support emergence that deviates from and coexists with nurturance of children, especially but not only in this developmental period.