Abstract
My chapter explores the ways in which the colonization of motherhood has shaped my own struggles of caretaking and how mothering has become a form of spiritual practice for me. Reflecting on my experiences and practices of mothering and the place of shared vulnerability therein, this chapter examines the practices of mothering and its relationship with vulnerability, spiritual care, and belonging. Specifically, my work looks at the ambiguity and vulnerability of caretaking and how vulnerability provides opportunities for spiritual growth. My chapter explores the ways in which caretaking can be seen as a spiritual practice for engaging in—and dismantling—social injustices.
“Wo/man” is a neologism coined by feminist liberation the*logian Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza. “Wo/man” signifies the limits of focusing solely on a sex/gender identity because we are not a unified social group. Wo/men are a heterogeneous category, fragmented by multiple subject positions due to race, class, religion, ethnicity, colonialist historiography, and so on.
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Notes
- 1.
Wo/men of color feminists have recognized the importance of seeing mothering as a verb and a practice, and in doing so, of dismantling stereotypes in the discourse on motherhood.
- 2.
A genealogy of human rights historiography shows that it is neither the result of a secular nor religious practice/doctrine. Rather, the pluralistic human rights practices I want to highlight are the ones that grew out of grass roots liberative work being done by colonized third world peoples in the recognition of the importance of dignity and care for self and others.
- 3.
bell hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place (New York: Routledge, 2009), 85.
- 4.
David Palumbo-Liu uses the term, Asian/American, denoting that the slash, “/” signifies the distinction between “Asian” and “American,” at the same time also constituting a fluid movement between the two. Both “Asian” and “American” are unsettled meanings in Asian/American discursive historiography. Like Lisa Lowe, Palumbo-Liu argues that the boundaries that have been constructed between the two terms are not as solid and distinct as once assumed. “Asian/American” also underscores the inclusion/exclusion of how Asian/Americans can be seen as either/or in terms of our identity. We exist on a yellow peril spectrum. Writing “Asian/American” as such denotes the interculturality and hybridity of my Korean/American identity. Whether here in the United States, or in Asia, we are affected by the dynamics of both Korean and U.S. cultures, as well as the cultures of the Americas and their respective and intermingled modern histories. “Asian/American” also delineates multiple border crossings, traversing back and forth, not just physically, but also intellectually, historiographically, discursively, and spiritually. See David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Fontier (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). See also Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996).
- 5.
Martha A. Fineman, The Neutered Mother, the Sexual Family, and Other Twentieth Century Tragedies (New York: Routledge Publishing, 1995), 38.
- 6.
Adrienne Rich. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton. 1976), 13.
- 7.
Dianne Otto, “Queering Gender [Identity] in International Law,” Nordic Journal of Human Rights 33, no. 4 (October 2, 2015): 314.
- 8.
Dianne Otto, “Disconcerting ‘Masculinities:’ Reinventing the Gendered Subject(s) of International Human Rights Law,” in International Law: Modern Feminist Approaches, ed. Doris Buss and Ambreena S. Manji (Oxford & Portland, OR: Hart Publishing, 2005), 107.
- 9.
Dianne Otto argues that the realization for feminist goals within the international human rights movement have been back-tracked. Gender mainstreaming, while having some positive effects, has also further re-entrenched stereotypes of wo/men in need of protection. And resolutions 1325 and 1820, in further strategizing “Violence Against Women” in terms of the sexual violence that wo/men encounter, have further disempowered women. See Dianne Otto, “The Exile of Inclusion: Reflections on Gender Issues in International Law Over the Last Decade,” Melbourne Journal of International Law Vol. 10, no. 1 (2009): 11–26.
- 10.
Otto also believes in the importance of resurrecting wo/men’s untold narratives and undocumented histories of local resistances to “dominating and controlling forms of power.”
- 11.
Martha A. Fineman, The Neutered Mother, the Sexual Family, and Other Twentieth Century Tragedies (New York: Routledge Publishing, 1995), 51.
- 12.
Ibid.
- 13.
Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “Feminist Studies in Religion and the Theology In-Between Nationalism and Globalization,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 21, no. 1 (2005): 118.
- 14.
Susan Abraham, “Strategic Essentialism in Nationalist Discourses: Sketching a Feminist Agenda in the Study of Religion,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 25, no. 1 (2009): 156–161.
- 15.
Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers: 2003), 134–135.
- 16.
There were multiple colonial projects going on in Asia in the late nineteenth/twentieth century, one of which was the construction of the “modern woman.” The idea of the “modern woman” is replete with notions of civilized, European, Christian, bourgeois domesticity.” Nakamura Masanao first coined the phrase in 1875.
- 17.
Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity, 141.
- 18.
Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “Social Constructions of Mothering: A Thematic Overview,” in Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency, ed. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey (New York: Routledge Publishing, 1994), 1–32.
- 19.
Louise Michele Newman, White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 22.
- 20.
Ibid.
- 21.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics, A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution (Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1898), cited in Mary Hawkesworth, Globalization and Feminist Activism (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2006). Perkins Gilman went on to become the most well-known feminist of her day after publishing a book, Women and Economics, where she argued that white women’s relegation to the home and economic dependence on white men subverted their opportunities for social evolution.
- 22.
Newman, White Women’s Rights, 153.
- 23.
Ibid.
- 24.
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), 56.
- 25.
My children attend a progressive private school in Atlanta, so I was sadly disappointed when a dad jokingly said to me, “tiger mom, you are late!!” pointing to his watch and laughing because I was late picking my kids up from an after school activity. He smiled and went on, “Asian moms are never late picking up their kids.” The phrase, “tiger mom,” was popularized by Amy Chua in Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (New York: Penguin Random House, 2011).
- 26.
Notes on transliteration: I use the McCune-Reischauer system for the Romanization of Korean, except when proper names and nouns are written otherwise (or the individuals themselves have chosen to write their names in accordance with the Revised Romanization of Korean, the official Korean language Romanization). Historians and Korean scholars continue to use the McCune-Reischauer system, citing problems of standardization with the Revised Romanization of Korean. Until this system is more widely accepted in academia, I adhere to the McCune-Reischauer system as well.
- 27.
During an American Academy of Religion panel, for example, some of the panelists referred to the signifiers han and chŏng to show solidarity with Asian/American feminist theology: “Engaging Asian/Asian North American Feminist Theologies,” November 23, 2015.
- 28.
Hellena Moon, “Genealogy of the Modern Theological Understanding of Han 恨,” Pastoral Psychology 63, no. 4 (August 1, 2014): 419–435.
- 29.
Derald Wing Sue, “Surviving Monoculturalism and Racism: A Personal and Professional Journey,” in Handbook of Multicultural Counseling, ed. Joseph G. Ponterotto et al., 2nd ed. (London: Sage Publications, 1995), 45–54.
- 30.
Gary Okihiro, “When and Where I Enter,” in Asian American Studies: A Reader, Ed. Jean Yu-wen Shen Wu and Min Song (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 11. Reprint of Gary Y. Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1994), 3–30.
- 31.
Glenn, “Social Constructions of Mothering.”
- 32.
Ibid., 3.
- 33.
Saba Mahmood, “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival,” Cultural Anthropology, 16, no. 2 (2001): 210.
- 34.
Feminist theologian Valerie Saiving Goldstein has pointed out the androcentric construct of Hannah Arendt’s concept of “the human condition.” She uses the phrase “the human situation” to point out that there are aspects of women’s experiences that are not made obvious when using the phrase, “the human condition.” Using the phrase, “the human situation” reveals understandings of the human in ways that were previously ignored or overlooked by taking into account both wo/men’s and men’s experiences. Every experience we encounter shapes who we are, and we become impacted by it. The human situation is perspectival, having mostly been influenced by male perspectives until recent feminist critiques. Valerie Saiving Goldstein, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” Journal of Religion, 40, no. 2, (1960): 100–112.
- 35.
Martha Albertson Fineman, “The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition Essay,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 20, no. 1 (2009, 2008): 8.
- 36.
Martha Fineman, “‘Elderly’ as Vulnerable: Rethinking the Nature of Individual and Societal Responsibility,” The Elder Law Journal 20, no. 1 (2012), 119.
- 37.
Feminist theorist Katie Oliviero describes three genealogies of vulnerability in the works of feminists. She describes the work of Judith Butler (2004) on the precariousness of our subjectivity and relationality; followed by Fineman’s (2008) work, as well as that of Bryan Turner (2006) and Peadar Kirby (2005) as the second genealogy. The works of wo/men of color feminists such as Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Kimberly Crenshaw, constitute the third genealogy. Fineman denies that her work is a part of what Oliviero refers to as a “genealogy of vulnerability.” Her work is part of her own genealogy of dependency (1995) and the myth of autonomy (2004). Katie Oliviero, “Conserving Vulnerability: Affecting Victimization in Reactionary Movements,” (paper delivered at a “Violence and Vulnerability Workshop,” Emory University Law School, November 2009).
- 38.
Lisa Isherwood and Marcella Althaus-Reid, “Introduction: Queering Theology, Thinking Theology, and Queer Theory,” in The Sexual Theologian: Essays on Sex, God and Politics, Ed. Marcella Althaus-Reid and Lisa Isherwood (London: Continuum, 2004), 5.
- 39.
Fineman, “The Vulnerable Subject,” 9.
- 40.
Ibid., 10.
- 41.
Ibid.
- 42.
Ibid.
- 43.
Ibid.
- 44.
Political theorists Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon trace the changes of the term and write a genealogy of dependency. See Nancy Fraser & Linda Gordon, “A Genealogy of Dependency: Tracing a Keyword of the U.S. Welfare State,” Signs 19, no. 2 (1994): 309–336.
- 45.
Fineman, The Neutered Mother.
- 46.
Fineman, “The Vulnerable Subject.”
- 47.
Fineman, The Neutered Mother, 163. The phrase, “derivative dependency,” refers to the need for resources by caretakers in order to perform the caretaking work. Fineman argues that caretaking produces a public good and therefore warrants support from government and other institutions, including accommodation of caretakers’ needs by employers. She gives us a theory of dependency which is a “claim of ‘right’ or entitlement” to support from the state and its institutions on the part of caretakers. Inevitable dependency is episodic, sporadic, and largely developmental in nature. Vulnerability is a constant, shifting situation because of the unpredictability of life forces.
- 48.
Jeanne Stevenson-Moessner, “From Samaritan to Samaritan: Journey Mercies,” in Through the Eyes of Women: Insights for Pastoral Care, Ed. Jeanne Stevenson Moessner (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1996), 322–332.
- 49.
Ibid., 323.
- 50.
Ibid.
- 51.
The topic of citizenship is an ambivalent one for many feminists, regarding it as a masculine concept. I see the importance of reconfiguring the topic as a necessary step in tackling masculine discourses of nationalism and militarism, as it is imbricated within these discourses. I employ Ruth Lister’s understanding of citizenship, where at its core, she sees citizenship as an expression of human agency to transform oneself and the social world governed by the nation-state. See Ruth Lister, “Citizenship: Towards a Feminist Synthesis,” Feminist Review, 57 (1997): 28.
- 52.
Ruth Lister, “Dialectics of Citizenship,” Hypatia, 12, no. 4 (1997): 6–26.
- 53.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Differences (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 101.
- 54.
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000).
- 55.
Laura T. Kessler, “Transgressive Caregiving,” in Feminist and Queer Legal Theory: Intimate Encounters, Uncomfortable Conversations, ed. Martha Fineman, Jack E. Jackson, and Adam P. Romero (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 349–372.
- 56.
hooks, belonging, a culture of place, 77.
- 57.
Ibid.
- 58.
Macrina Wiederkehr, A Tree Full of Angels: Seeing the Holy in the Ordinary (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1988), xiii.
- 59.
Thank you to Dr. Bruce Feldstein, Jewish chaplain and physician at Stanford University Hospital, for inspiring me to see my mothering work as holy wrapped in the ordinary. Thank you, my friend.
References
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Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.
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Fineman, Martha. “‘Elderly’ as Vulnerable: Rethinking the Nature of Individual and Societal Responsibility.” The Elder Law Journal 20, no. 1 (2012): 71–111.
———. “The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition Essay.” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 20, no. 1 (2009, 2008): 1–24.
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Goldstein, Valerie Saiving. “The Human Situation: A Feminine View.” The Journal of Religion 40, no. 2 (1960): 100–112.
hooks, bell. Belonging: A Culture of Place. 1st ed. New York: Routledge, 2008.
Isherwood, Lisa, and Marcella Althaus-Reid. “Introduction: Queering Theology, Thinking Theology, and Queer Theory.” In The Sexual Theologian: Essays on Sex, God and Politics, edited by Marcella Althaus-Reid and Lisa Isherwood. London: Continuum, 2004.
Kessler, Laura T. “Transgressive Caregiving.” In Feminist and Queer Legal Theory: Intimate Encounters, Uncomfortable Conversations, edited by Martha Fineman, Jack E. Jackson, and Adam P. Romero. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009.
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———. “Dialectics of Citizenship.” Hypatia 12, no. 4 (1997): 6–26.
Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996.
Mahmood, Saba. “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival.” Cultural Anthropology 16 no. 2 (2001): 202–236.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” In Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, edited by Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991.
Moon, Hellena. “Genealogy of the Modern Theological Understanding of Han 恨.” Pastoral Psychology 63, no. 4 (2014): 419–435.
Newman, Louise Michele. White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Okihiro, Gary. “When and Where I Enter.” In Asian American Studies: A Reader, edited by Jean Yu-wen Shen Wu and Min Song. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000.
Okihiro, Gary Y. Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1994.
Otto, Dianne. “Disconcerting ‘Masculinities:’ Reinventing the Gendered Subject(s) of International Human Rights Law.” In International Law: Modern Feminist Approaches, edited by Doris Buss and Ambreena S. Manji. Oxford & Portland, OR: Hart Publishing, 2005.
———. “Queering Gender [Identity] in International Law.” Nordic Journal of Human Rights 33, no. 4 (2015): 299–318.
———. “The Exile of Inclusion: Reflections on Gender Issues in International Law Over the Last Decade.” Melbourne Journal of International Law 10, no. 1 (2009).
Palumbo-Liu, David. Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier. Stanford University Press, 1999.
Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: Norton, 1976.
Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. “Feminist Studies in Religion and the Theology In-Between Nationalism and Globalization.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 21 no. 1 (2005): 111–119.
Stevenson-Moessner, Jeanne. “From Samaritan to Samaritan: Journey Mercies.” In Through the Eyes of Women: Insights for Pastoral Care, edited by Jeanne Stevenson Moessner. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1996.
Sue, Derald Wing. “Surviving Monoculturalism and Racism: A Personal and Professional Journey.” In Handbook of Multicultural Counseling, edited by Joseph G. Ponterotto, J. Manuel Casas, Lisa A. Suzuki, and Charlene M. Alexander, 2nd ed. London: Sage Publications, 1995.
Wiederkehr, Macrina. A Tree Full of Angels: Seeing the Holy in the Ordinary. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1988.
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Moon, H. (2017). Transgressive Mothering as Wo/Men’s Human Rights Work… Holiness and the Human. In: Bischoff, C., O’Donnell Gandolfo, E., Hardison-Moody, A. (eds) Parenting as Spiritual Practice and Source for Theology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59653-2_5
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