Lisa Baraitser

Maternal publics: time, relationality and the public sphere

I took the image in Figure 11.1 on my mobile phone in the East End ofLondon, on a familiar ‘desire path’ across an urban landscape between home and taking my kids to one of their endless after-school activities. In this case it was their karate class, somewhere on the border between the London Borough of Tower Hamlets and the London Borough of Hackney, where I have been living for the past 15 years. It is an area that has undergone dramatic gentrification recently, shifting from being characterized by extreme poverty, unemployment and socio-economic stagnation, to being an area in which those conditions still prevail, but now alongside, and somewhat veiled by, a throbbing middle-class street culture focused around the local park and a vibrant weekend organic farmers market. As I trampled along my desire path each week, children and equipment trailing behind me (quite literally, in the case of the white karate suit regularly dragging through the mud, and one red boxing glove already missing, abandoned irretrievably somewhere en route) I walked past this site, watching a derelict ‘public house’ going up for sale, watching no one buy it for years, and then eventually seeing a notice for planning permission for the development of 15 ubiquitous new apartments overlooking the park. The building was then partially demolished, and, for a briefperiod of time, one wall was left standing. It was during this moment that someone, or a group of someones, felt compelled to climb over the fence of the now privatized site and make this intervention. This was not a small job — not a passing act of graffiti with an aerosol. This would have needed tools, possibly noisy tools to cut these letters into the plaster of the remaining wall. It must have taken a considerable time to do — hours certainly, perhaps all night. The letters are over 2 metres high; the wall stretches for about 8 metres in length. It was a transitory intervention. I think of it as a scream: ‘MOTHER’ across the urban landscape, and a week later, it was gone.

Temporal Drag: Transdisciplinarity and the ‘Case’ of Psychosocial Studies

Psychosocial studies is a putatively ‘new’ or emerging field concerned with the irreducible relation between psychic and social life. Genealogically, it attempts to re-suture a tentative relation between mind and social world, individual and mass, internality and externality, norm and subject, and the human and non-human, through gathering up and re-animating largely forgotten debates that have played out across a range of other disciplinary spaces. If, as I argue, the central tenets, concepts and questions for psychosocial studies emerge out of a re-appropriation of what have become anachronistic or ‘useless’ concepts in other fields – ‘the unconscious’, for instance, in the discipline of psychology – then we need to think about transdisciplinarity not just in spatial terms (that is, in terms of the movement across disciplinary borders) but also in temporal terms. This may involve engaging with theoretical ‘embarrassments’, one of which – the notion of ‘psychic reality’ – I explore here.

Giving an Account of Another: Commentary on Rozmarin's “Maternal Silence”

This discussion of Miri Rozmarins “Maternal Silence” (this issue) situates Rozmarins article within a wider literature on motherhood and writing before moving on to argue that although a powerful account of maternal ethics, Rozmarins call for a certain stepping aside from maternal narrative has particular resonance with discourses of maternal masochism. I argue that the childs “open future” cannot be protected by maternal silence as, following Jean Laplanche (2007), both maternal and social “noise” precipitate the possibility of a future that is never fully open. I close by linking maternal narrative with maternal temporality and suggest that this may entail an acceptance of what refuses development, what resists time.

Communality Across Time: Responding to Encounters with Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption

I am grateful to the editors and contributors for this wonderful collection of articles that respond to Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (Baraitser, 2009). Rather than restaging the arguments I made in the book, I attempt here to extend my discussion of the maternal subject as a figure that disrupts or interrupts our notions of subjectivity and ethics. Following Elisabeth Freeman, I propose that the temporality of maternal labor binds a socius that is enunciated not just by an irruption of subjectivity (the “discontinuity in the Real”) but also by an irruption of collectivity in the present tense of neoliberalism. This irruption, in other words, creates a commons, that is, the endurance of communality across time.

Pleasure, Pain, and Procrastination: Reflections on the Experience of Doing Memory-Work Research

The focus of this article is the process of doing memory-work research. We tell the story of our experience of what it was like to use this approach. We were enthused to work collectively on a “discovery” project to explore a method with which we were unfamiliar. We hoped to build working relationships based on mutual respect and the desire to focus on methodology and its place in our psychological understanding. The empirical activities highlighted methodological and experiential challenges, which tested our adherence to the social constructionist premise of Haugs original description of memory work. Combined with practical difficulties of living across Europe, writing and analyzing the memories became contentious. We found ourselves having to address a number of tensions emanating from the work and our approach to it. We discuss some of these tensions alongside examples that illustrate the research process and the ways we negotiated the collective nature of the memory-work approach.

Postmaternal, postwork and the maternal death drive

ABSTRACT The term ‘postmaternal’ has recently emerged as a way to articulate the effects of neoliberalism on the public devaluing of caring labour [Stephens, Julie. 2011. Confronting Postmaternal Thinking: Feminism, Memory, and Care. New York: Columbia University Press]. This term suggests a valorisation of values associated with care and mothering that have traditionally been gendered and rely on a heterosexist matrix for their intelligibility. Marxist feminist writers during the 1970s struggled with the question of the particular form of care that reproduction entails, and this feminist archive has been recently extended to a discussion of ‘post-work’ [Weeks, Kathi. 2011. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham: Duke], in which calls for the valuing of unpaid work as a viable form of labour have been reanimated. In this article I examine the relation between these two analytic categories – ‘postmaternal’ and ‘postwork’. Both categories require that we re-think some of the most trenchant issues in feminist thought – the sexual division of labour, the place of ‘reproduction’ in psychic and social life, and the possibilities for a new feminist commons.

Duration, skin, and the ageing subject

I read Lynne Segal’s book Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing (2013) as a radical account of subjectivity in which, drawing on Freud, she proposes that what is lost, and therefore constitutive of the subject of old age, is time itself. This temporalization of subjectivity allows us to see more clearly the relation between time and materiality and more specifically between time, subject, and skin. I respond to Segal’s powerful work with some comments on Henri Bergson and Didier Anzieu.

Thinking Through Affect and Psychoanalysis: Introducing Papers from the Conference “Worldings, Tensions, Futures”

ABSTRACT This is an introduction to the panel of papers collected from the affect theory conference “Worldings, Tensions, Futures,” comprising the stream focusing on psychoanalysis, affect and time.

YouTube birth and the primal scene

Motherhood has recently re-emerged as ‘material’ for artistic practice, and as a viable subject of academic research that both recognizes and extends earlier feminist assertions that the maternal is a key site for the anxious psychosocial negotiations of identity, subjectivity, equality, ethics and politics. Additionally, pregnancy and birth have graphically entered the public domain. Hundreds of thousands of short films of live birth, for instance, circulate around the globe on video sharing platforms such as YouTube, some with followings of many million viewers. Yet, how might we understand the desire to perform and spectate birth? ‘YouTube birth’ raises questions about performing and spectating birth in digital culture, and the meaning of watching our own birth with a mass public of millions of viewers. In this paper I explore these questions through revisiting the psychoanalytic notion of the ‘primal scene’. The primal scene is the Freudian articulation of the crucial role of infantile sexual and violent fantasies in structuring psychic life, linked to the loss of, or denial of, the material/maternal body as source or origin. Although within feminist scholarship the primal scene as a theoretical concept is radically out of date, it may be productive to revisit primal fantasies in the digital age, and the ways digital technologies shift our relation to ‘analogue’ notions of place, scene, birth, origin and loss. Exploring the continued place of psychoanalysis in helping to understand issues to do with origin, reproduction and temporality, I ask both what psychoanalysis might have to offer our understanding of performing and watching birth, and how a psychoanalytic configuration of the primal scene may itself need to change in relation to digital primal fantasies and technologies that function through fungibility and loss-less-ness.

Editors’ Introduction to the Special Issue — Bion: Here, There, and In Between

ABSTRACT We introduce this special issue of Studies in Gender and Sexuality, “Bion: Here, There, and In Between.”