The Subversive Act of Navel Gazing: How Maternal Experiences Are Lost from the History of Philosophy to the Gender Gap and a Subsequent Lesson from Maternal Subjectivities

Abstract

A survey of the history of philosophy reveals a preoccupation with death to contend with life’s meaning and moral obligations. But what of another type of universal experience that can provide similarly important existential and ethical lessons, such as the birth of oneself from another? In the first section, I show deficiencies in traditional political, moral, and existential philosophical discourses and turn to pre-natal and maternal life for insights on relational identity formations and its ethical possibilities. Discourses by Hannah Arendt, Julia Kristeva, and Lisa Baraitser on split forms of identity ground my discussion on maternal subjectivities and their ethical responsiveness before I turn to Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics. His ethic illustrates an interrupted form of maternal subjectivity and sense of time despite the gender gap that exists in the philosophical literature on maternal experiences. I will conclude with a glance at recent literature on matrescence as an existential condition that creates ambivalence in a caretaker, which if occluded increases cases of what is believed to be post-partum depression. As a way of readdressing this gender gap in philosophical literature, I offer a final recommendation to re-evaluate traditional values that do not address maternal experiences or the preontological relationality that they illustrate.