Motherhood: ‘A motherhood of objects’ – Felicity Joseph
Motherhood, babyhood and parenthood generally tend to escape the formal masculine language bequeathed to us, a fact noted by feminist philosophers, such as the Belgian-French philosopher Luce Irigaray (b.1930), who tells us:
We must also find, find anew, invent the words, the sentences that speak the most archaic and most contemporary relationship with the body of the mother, with our bodies, the sentences that translate the bond between her body, ours, and that of our daughters. We have to discover a language which does not replace the bodily encounter, as paternal language attempts to do, but which can go along with it, words which do not bar the corporeal, but which speak corporeal.[1]
Art objects are corporeal also: not the human body but an expression of it and a production by it: art precedes philosophy because it may express what the French phenomenologist philosopher Merleau-Ponty calls ‘mute life’ – a life which does not speak itself, but awaits appropriate expression. Art and poetry can express what philosophers do not yet have the words for, implying meaning without uttering a word…
The beautiful and poignant object, an ancient pottery Baby feeder from Cyprus, stands not on its own but immediately exists in a network of connections and meanings: 700 years BCE or last year? Does it matter? Time collapses, and women, men, any parent, looks upon such an object with tenderness and suddenly all those feelings rush back: the little one, the crawler, the toddler, the mess and milkiness of feeding, the smells and the physicality of it all… We did not know her but we know her, that Cypriot mother in her motherhood, a motherhood of objects.
She is also the Mother in Anne Newman’s Queen of Hearts a mere couple of millennia later, as she wrestles with / breastfeeds her baby in another permutation of the feeding process. The child is born, but still attached, the bodies flow into each other to the point we do not know where one stops and the other starts. The Australian philosopher Elizabeth Grosz (b.1952) famously invokes the moebius strip, the looped piece of paper with a half-twist that counter-intuitively has only one edge and one side: what appears to be two is actually one: to capture the complex relationship between mind and body, which can be extended to capture the intertwining of mother and child:
The Moebius strip model has the advantage of showing that there can be a relation between two ‘things’… which presumes neither their identity nor their radical disjunction… they have the capacity to twist one into the other.[2]
Whether feeding from a breast or chest or bottle, whether draped over the mother’s shoulder to form a loving dyad as in Judy Cassab’s exquisite image, these invocations of babyhood convey what our worldly concepts cannot so far… This challenge to capture in concepts the ontological relationship of mother or parent and child has been taken up in modernity by feminist philosophers, who reflect upon the possibility that the intertwining of mother and child counterintuitively continues after ‘birth’ – there is no one moment of ‘birth’ – is it when the baby is ‘born’? When the umbilical cord is cut? When it takes it first cry? When it is separated from the mother for the first weigh-in and medical check-up? Is there a fact of the matter? Arguably, the feeding, whether from breast or chest or bottle or ancient feeder, and the holding, whether over the shoulder, cuddling into the chest, or curled up in bed co-sleeping, are all continued intertwinings of the moebius-style prenatal connection. Where does one life and another life really depart from one another? The philosopher of biology Anne Sophie Meincke observes in her study of the ontology of pregnancy and birth:
Substances—things—observe a binary logic of ‘either-or’: either they exist, or they do not; and, accordingly, either there is one, or there are two. However, for biological processes it is normal to emerge gradually and fade away gradually… It is fine to admit that there is no exact time when a mammalian organism comes into existence.[3]
Object or subject? One or two? Neither and both. The object of the ancient baby feeder presents the subjectivity of mother and baby to us as it were today, and the subjectivities of the mother-baby relationship are both contained in and spill over the paper upon which Anne Newmarch and Judy Cassab present their art. Motherhood has a way of restructuring time, and to contemplate this triptych of subject-objects is to enter into this most ancient of time-warps, in which the years from babyhood onwards are both too short and too long, but in this moment of contemplation the unnamed mother and baby are inextricably intertwined.
[1] Irigaray, I. (1991) in Irigaray, L. & Whitford, M. The Irigaray reader. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 43.
[2] Grosz, E. (1994) Volatile Bodies. New York: Routledge, 210.
[3] Meincke, A. S. (2022). One or two? A Process View of pregnancy. Philosophical Studies, 179(5), 1495–1521. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-021-01716-y
Dr Felicity Joseph is Lecturer in Philosophy and Political Theory at UNE. She has a background in the Continental/European Philosophy tradition, and has a particular interest in applying the philosophical methods of phenomenology and existentialism to analyse contemporary issues around motherhood/parenthood and work.
Image credits:
Judy Cassab, Mother love (detail), 2004, etching on paper. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Peter Kampfner in 2020. NERAM Collection.
Baby feeder (detail), 750-600 BCE, ceramic, Cyprus. MA1978.106. UNE Museum of Antiquities.
