Mother–Daughter Relations and the Maternal in Irigaray and Chodorow

Abstract

Feminist theorists, writers, and artists have done much to bring mother–daughter relationships into representation and to reimagine the maternal beyond its traditional subservience to father–son dynasties. Amongst continental feminists, Luce Irigaray has made major contributions to this task. Within Anglophone feminism, too, feminist psychoanalytic thinkers have sought to rectify Freud’s overemphasis on the paternal and father–son relations. Nancy Chodorow’s important work in this area paints a portrait of contemporary mother-daughter relations which seems, at first sight, strikingly similar to Irigaray’s. Both thinkers suggest that mothers and their infant daughters experience a unique level of mutual identification. But under patriarchy—specifically, given exclusively female childrearing for Chodorow and the absence of any symbolization of female subjectivity for Irigaray—daughters are forced to turn to the father to achieve any psychical independence from their mothers. Bringing Irigaray and Chodorow together across their different intellectual contexts, this chapter compares and partially synthesizes their visions of the maternal and mother–daughter relations. By integrating their perspectives, we can move beyond the impasse between Lacanian and object-relations feminisms that dominated psychoanalytic feminist debates in the 1980s and 1990s.

Originally published in philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism 1, no. 1 (2011): 45–64, reprinted with permission.