Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity: 30 (Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy)

Alison Stone

ISBN 10: 0415885426 / ISBN 13: 9780415885423

Published by Routledge 2011-09-23, 2011

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 6666-TNFPD-9780415885423

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity: 30 (Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy)
• Publisher: Routledge 2011-09-23
• Publication Date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0415885426
• ISBN 13: 9780415885423
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

In this book Alison Stone develops a feminist approach to maternal subjectivity. Stone argues that in the West the self has often been understood in opposition to the maternal body, such that one must separate oneself from the mother and maternal care-givers on whom one depended in childhood to become a self or, in modernity, an autonomous subject. These assumptions make it difficult to be a mother and a subject, an autonomous creator of meaning. Insofar as mothers nonetheless strive to regain their subjectivity when their motherhood seems to have compromised it, theirs cannot be the usual kind of subjectivity premised on separation from the maternal body. Mothers are subjects of a distinctive kind, who generate meanings and acquire agency from their position of immersion in the realm of maternal body relations, of bodily intimacy and dependency. Thus Stone interprets maternal subjectivity as a specific form of subjectivity that is continuous with the maternal body. Stone analyzes this form of subjectivity in terms of how the mother typically reproduces with her child her history of bodily relations with her own mother, leading to a distinctive maternal and cyclical form of lived time.

About the Author

Alison Stone is Reader in European Philosophy at Lancaster University. She is the author of Petrified Intelligence: Nature in Hegel's Philosophy (SUNY Press, 2004), Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and An Introduction to Feminist Philosophy (Polity Press, 2007).