The Boundaries of the (M)other

Reviving the Idea of Maternal Finitude

Photo by Alexey Shikov on Unsplash

‘The definition of motherhood in our culture is one in which the mother sacrifices herself to the child. She sacrifices her self,’[1] argues Susan Griffin in ‘Feminism and Motherhood’, an essay she originally published in the 1970s. Like many of her influential contemporaries, such as Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, or Adrienne Rich, Griffin is interested in the idea of ‘maternal finitude’[2], which subverts the traditional ‘belief that she [the mother] could satisfy our desires if she really wanted to’[3].

“The murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness.”

Although motherhood implies ‘a space shared with the other’[4], the aforementioned feminist theorists renounced the concept of the mother and the child as a unity ‘expressing the original unity of the world’[5], claiming that such definition only reinforces the Christian ideal of ‘kenosis or the loss of self’[6] traditionally encouraged in mothers. Instead of idealising the mother as a selfless martyr suppressing her own needs to fulfil those of the F/father and the child, second-wave feminists perceived motherhood as ‘the field of contradictions’[7], a space for ‘ambivalence: the…