Maternal Sovereignty

“Astute, layered, and provocatively argued, Maternal Sovereignty gives name to the current moment in the US, identifying what happens when one must continue to make reproductive decisions in an increasingly repressive state that has stripped the possibility of bodily autonomy for millions of people.” —Karen Weingarten, author of Abortion in the American Imagination: Before Life and Choice, 1880–1940

“Morgenstern rethinks the overdetermined idea of ‘mother’ and traces a path through the contradictory images of mothers as omnipotent/abject, hated/loved, and natural/technologically denaturalized, offering understandings of how these fantasies shape, undo, and remake identities and social allegories for relationality.” —Mary Thompson, author of Ordinary Abortion: Reproductive Choice in Twenty-First-Century Women’s Writing

Develops a feminist theory of sovereignty grounded in a post-liberal theory of maternal relation and reproductive decision-making.

In Maternal Sovereignty, Naomi Morgenstern knits together feminist political theory, deconstructive philosophy, literary criticism, and critical race studies to redefine sovereignty, justice, and democracy in contemporary North America from a maternal perspective. Reading widely across novels and films such as Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, Carola Dibbell’s The Only Ones, and Grant Sputore’s I Am Mother, Morgenstern examines the “maternal sovereign” as a recurring figure whose reproductive and childcare decisions must be understood both as individual responses to existential and ethical crises and as allegories of social reproduction in a neoliberal context, especially absent any simple right to decide.

While the figure of the maternal sovereign coincides with (or is produced in response to) the collapse of the social, she or they may also signify the possibility of emerging social forms and new ways of thinking about sovereignty, kinship, and reproduction. In linking sovereignty and the maternal (defying longstanding attempts to efface the maternal and material dimensions of reproduction), Morgenstern prompts a paradigm-shifting reconsideration of both—and shows us how fictional representations of maternal decision-making enable us to theorize and imagine a more democratic future.

Naomi Morgenstern is Professor of English at the University of Toronto. She publishes on feminist theory, psychoanalytic theory, and American literature and is the author of Wild Child: Intensive Parenting and Posthumanist Ethics.

Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Introduction Maternal Sovereignty and Reproductive Justice
• Chapter 1 Love Machines: Maternal Decision in the Age of the Ultrasound
• Chapter 2 Destruction, Survival, and the Omnipotent Mother
• Chapter 3 Gift or Weapon? Reproductive Decision and the Phenomenology of Pregnancy
• Chapter 4 “Gene for Gene”: Cloning and the Postmaternal
• Chapter 5 Surrogacy, Racialization, and the Technomaternal
• Chapter 6 Natality and Radical Maternal Politics
• Conclusion Viable Life
• Works Cited
• Acknowledgments