Feminism, Psychoanalysis,
and Maternal Subjectivity
Alison Stone
First published 2012
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the UK
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stone, Alison, 1972
Feminism, psychoanalysis, and maternal subjectivity / Alison Stone.
p. cm. (Routledge studies in contemporary philosophy ; 30)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Mothers. 2. MotherhoodPhilosophy. 3. Motherhood
Psychological aspects. 4. Subjectivity. 5. Feminist theory. I. Title.
HQ759.S698 2011
306.874'301dc23
ISBN13: 978-0-415-88542-3 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-203-18293-2 (ebk)
Contents
Acknowledgments
I am very grateful to the Leverhulme Trust, who awarded me a Philip Lever-hulme Prize in 2007. This distinction funded a period of research leave during which I wrote most of this book.
I am also grateful to many people who have commented on earlier versions of chapters of this volume or discussed its ideas with me. These include Lisa Baraitser, Emily Brady, Rachel Cooper, Sigal Spigel, and John Varty. They also include the many people who responded to earlier versions of this material presented as conference or workshop papers, at Situated Selves: Law, Phenomenology, and Aesthetics (Liverpool University, 2009); Mother Trouble (Birkbeck College, London, 2009); Debates in Feminist Theory: Beyond Gender (La Laguna University, Tenerife, 2009); Double Edges, the conference of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature (Brunel, London, 2009); and Sexuate Subjects: Politics, Poetics, and Ethics (University College London, 2011). In addition, this book has benefited from the responses that anonymous referees and editors made to journal articles and book chapters in which I explored the ideas developed further in this book: these editors include Gillian Howie, Sheila Lintott, Maureen Sander-Staudt, and Margrit Shildrick. The book has benefited, too, from the invaluable comments of the two anonymous researchers at Routledge.
Earlier versions of some material included in this book have appeared as journal articles or book chapters. These are: French Feminism: The Maternal Against Disciplinary Power, in Studies in the Maternal 1: 1 (2009) (online at http://www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk/journal.html); Mother-Daughter Relations and the Maternal in Irigaray and Chodorow, in PhiloSOPHIA: Journal of Continental Feminism 1: 1 (2011): 4564; Against Matricide: Rethinking Subjectivity and the Maternal Body, in