Purging Matrophobia: Theorizing a Matrophobic-Free Feminist Subject Position on Contemporary Maternity

Abstract

The “big” question in Chapter 4 is, What’s wrong with a little lingering matrophobia? When both chapters 3 and 4 are read together, the “quick” answer is, the contemporary sisterly, daughterly, and new feminist maternal subject positions and lingering matrophobia embedded in all three have created important partial but problematic analyses of the contemporary feminist rhetorical and maternal contexts. The more detailed answer is as follows: Chapter 3 reveals that contemporary feminist analyses of maternity are thick with lingering layers of matrophobia, which are primarily but not exclusively founded on scholars’ simultaneous identification and disidentification with one part of Adrienne Rich’s two-part understanding of maternity as both institutionalized motherhood and the potential in mothering.

My hope is to contribute to an ongoing conversation about the meanings of that larger picture [post — second wave feminism], to affirm for future generations that they do indeed have a history, by turns glorious and distressing, on which they can build. (Sara Evans 16–17)

To accept and integrate and strengthen both the mother and the daughter in ourselves is no easy matter, because patriarchal attitudes have encouraged us to split, to polarize, these images and to project all unwanted guilt, anger, shame, power, freedom, onto the “other” woman. But any radical vision of sisterhood demands that we reintegrate them. (Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born 253)