Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies - Volume 16, Issue 3, 2013

In 1998 and 2002, U.K. citizen Diane Blood conceived sons from a sample of her late husband Stephen’s sperm in a private Belgian fertility clinic. Although Stephen’s sperm was illegally harvested from his comatose body in 1995, the British Court of Appeal decided in 1997 that Diane was not to be prevented from consuming commercial infertility service in a European member state pursuant to the terms of the Treaty of Rome (1957). As a result, I try to show, Stephen’s sperm was effectively reconstituted as a material resource, passive and dispossessed, for usage in a commercial transaction. This article discusses the ramifications and implications of this case and the developments it pinpoints, and calls for a reconsideration of the consensus view according to which (material) sex and (discursive) gender are seen as distinct from each other, if not altogether opposed to each other. From the perspective of the Diane Blood case, the article revisits the advantages and drawbacks of the sex/gender split in influential writings by Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler, then to move to indicate a persistent association between an excessive materiality and femininity running from Aristotle to contemporary psychoanalytic theory (Kristeva). After analyzing the paradoxical and anachronistic forms of maternity that inform the Blood case, I conclude that medical, commercial and technological advances have forged the full materialization of the male body and its reproductive capability, thus questioning the very form of gender in the future.

Choosing to have a baby after the age of 40 has become something of a cultural touchstone in the developed world. At best, women face grim warnings of risks to child and mother. At worst, they are accused of being ‘selfish’ by doctors and pundits alike. All this takes place at a time when the numbers of over-40 mothers are thought to be increasing explosively. However, a historical overview shows that women aged 40 to 44 were giving birth at almost twice the rate in Europe before 1790 than they are currently. Moreover, the countries with the highest rates of older mothers nowadays are not in Europe or North America, but rather in the developing world. The difference, the author argues, is choice. When a woman in an Afghan village gives birth to her tenth baby at forty-four, she is accorded the pity with which we condescend to the poor. When a woman in New York City chooses to have a baby at the same age, the knives come out. Reproductive choice being such a new concept and phenomenon, it could very well be that women are being vilified for exercising it at almost every stage of their lives, including when they choose to become mothers in their forties.

In this essay I address the popular notion that reading literature is a way to gain empathy through identification. Using the relatively new phenomenon of the lesbian mother as an example, I ask through which cultural repertoires lesbian mothers are made visible, which subject positions are available for them, and which identificatory positions are made available to readers. I explore a number of representations of lesbian mothers from comics, TV-series, films and Dutch children’s books. Depending on whether the lesbian mother is initially presented as a lesbian or as a mother, and depending on the context, a different coming out process is at stake: either she has to come out as a(n aspiring) mother; or she has to come out as a lesbian.

In this article Maaike Meijer argues that not only the film One flew over the cuckoo’s nest (1975), but also its literary pretext and the history of its interpretation serve as valuable objects of analysis. Four distinct interpretations of the film offer diverse readings of its narrative in general, and of nurse Ratched in particular. Depending on the interpretative point of view, nurse Ratched has been read as a figure of repressive, sadistic motherhood; of resistance against the injustices of the psychiatric institution; the film as sexist and racist hatespeech; and as a gender-critical reflection on men’s emancipation. Meijer, however, offers a fifth interpretation – one that focuses on the invisibility of male and institutional violence – in which nurse Ratched is understood as a ‘Momist’ figure on which the blame for such invisible violence is projected. These interpretations invite a further reflection upon the historical reception of the film, which has tended to pass over its confounding and problematic gender dynamics. Could it be that the ubiquity of the sadistic mother figure is so ingrained in the cultural imagination is what makes her so imminently recognisable and effective? If so, ongoing attempts to reinterpret the film and to deconstruct the figure of nurse Ratched remain relevant today.

In the first half the 1990s, Kees van Kooten and Wim de Bie appeared in twelve television skits as Carla and Frank van Putten, mother and son. Each instalment follows a fixed narrative development, in which Carla’s domineering behaviour causes deep frustration with Frank. I investigate how these skits relate to Momism: a psychiatric and sociological discourse that ascribes a large number of ‘disorders’ with men – including asthma, autism, homosexuality, and schizophrenia – to an incorrect upbringing by a mother who either suffocates (too hot) or neglects (too cold) her son. Van Kooten and De Bie are commonly thought to make subversive satire. However, by way of a narratological analysis I show that, with the exception of the first two skits, the viewer is consistently invited to laugh at Carla as a bad mother.

In her contribution Mineke Bosch tries to explain the success of the major box office movie Mary Poppins that came out in 1964. Feminist critique of the movie seems by and large rather predictable in its presupposition that popular success means ideological weakness. Especially the comic representation of the suffragette mother of the children is seen as meaningful in this respect, and the movie’s main message is read as enforcing family life. More positive assessments of the movie, on the other hand, emphasize the vital role of Mary Poppins who teaches feminine values in a non-linear and fragmented way that leaves room for multiple interpretations. However, Bosch argues that the magic of the movie is mainly in the figure of Mary Poppins, who incorporates two aspects of feminism: equal rights feminism as symbolized in the umbrella and a feminism that is defined as ‘spiritual motherhood’. God knows what the second wave of feminism owes to Mary Poppins!

In this pictorial essay, Buikema investigates the image that won the World Press Photo award in 2012. This photograph of a veiled woman cradling the body of a fallen revolutionary in a mosque in Yemen evokes in western audiences the image of the pieta. Buikema argues that the image pictorially stages a confrontation between east and west, and owes its affective power to the similarities with and difference from christian depictions of the virgin mother.

No other researcher of religion revolutionized the way we look at Greek antiquity like the Hellenist, archaeologist and feminist Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928), who taught at Newnham womens College, Cambridge (UK). Harrison’s avant la lettre performative and material turn challenged the text-based approach to Greek culture. The article reconstructs parallels between Harrison’s Becoming Goddess and the early work of Luce Irigaray on the ‘feminine’ and the maternal body as the excluded figure – the chôra – of the patriarchal symbolic order. It starts historically with the parallel ‘events’ of the archaeological ‘discovery’ of the ‘matriarchal’ Minoan culture of the ‘Great Mother’ on Crete, and Harrison’s epistemological reconstructions. Methodologically it combines close readings of her texts, inspired by feminist theories especially Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray with a history of knowledge approach. The article focuses on a reconstruction of Butler’s and Irigaray’s discussion of the Platonic concept of chôra and relates it to Harrison’s attempts to formulate a non-phallocentric notion of a matrilineal culture. Her utopian idea of maternal symbolizations is based on an ‘energetic’ notion of the maternal and an ethic in the ‘name-of-the-mother’. Is there a ‘third’ way to considering the material-maternal-matter, that does not imply a rejection of discourse analysis, nor an essentialist understanding of ‘femininity’?

In this short analysis of Catholic representations of St. Mary throughout the centuries as a breastfeeding mother, we see that this very popular image in early Christianity and the Middle Ages is banned after 1593 and replaced by a childlike virgin. Thereby the power attributed to Mary’s milk, as the embodied transmission of the Holy Word in early Christianity, slowly dissipates. What once was holy is now abject, and this is linked to the more general sexualisation of the female body, and the ambivalence about feeding breasts in wider society.

This column argues that the slogan ‘the personal is political’ – when slightly rephrased – is now even more to the point than ever before. The personal has become ‘geopolitical’ due to the emergence of the socalled ‘global care chain’. Nowadays, families at both the higher and lower strata of society are organizing themselves on a transnational scale in a multitude of ways: as migrant care workers in the first world remitting their wages to their families in developing countries; as ‘dual career’ couples pursuing careers with globally operating companies and organizations; as transnational adoptive families; or as gay parents who have children with (foreign) surrogate mothers. These developments call into question the institute of the nuclear family that is securely embedded within one nation-state. Feminists would do well to take the lead in formulating new normative concepts and images of what families could and should be like.