Abstract
Kate Boyer’s Spaces and Politics of Motherhood draws from a series of research studies on mothering practice in the first year after birth, exploring what Boyer terms ‘maternal becomings’; that is, the processual and relational practices that make a mother. Her approach to motherhood is influenced by the substantial work on mothering practice in social and cultural geography, recognising as well that motherhood studies is an interdisciplinary field encompassing everything from psychoanalytic approaches to the maternal subject to political economic studies of social reproduction. Boyer’s book reflects the wide-ranging cultural and social geographical interpretation of mothering practice as multi-scalar, drawing into her frame of analysis what feminist geographer Robyn Longhurst (1994) terms the ‘geography closest in’ – the body – as well as the role of urban infrastructures and national policies in shaping mothering practice.
A key argument in the early part of the book is that currents within contemporary feminist theory such as New Materialism and the work of philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari can be productively brought to bear on the making of maternal subjects and the practices of mothering. For example, despite several decades of health policy promotion programmes and efforts to encourage breastfeeding as the most beneficial form of infant feeding, mothers in the UK have some of the lowest breastfeeding initiation and duration rates in the developed world. Boyer’s interest in exploring the complexities of this issue – why don’t more mothers start to breastfeed and why do mothers who want to continue stop? – leads to novel insights into how researchers and UK health policy makers might begin to address it. Inspired by New Materialist feminist approaches to the body, Boyer argues for the need to acknowledge not only the social dimensions of early mothering and infant feeding practice, but also the ‘materialist’ and corporeal dimensions of infant feeding. She suggests that health promotion campaigns that prioritise the nutritional benefits of breastfeeding tend to obscure its corporeal and biophysical dimensions, in which both mother and baby must learn and adapt to a relational practice often accompanied by intense physical discomfort and pain, and for which new mothers often feel deeply unprepared and unsupported.
In other chapters drawing on philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s writings on the ‘larval subject’ or subject in becoming, motherhood is defined as processual and relational, in order to destabilise narratives of static or singular maternal identity. While Boyer’s treatment of the dense elaboration of alternative forms of subjectivity in Deleuze’s work is made very accessible in the text, these insights are not carried through subsequent chapters of the book to explore, for example, the implications of the larval subject for mothering policy and practice in different sites, or the conceptual tensions around figuring motherhood as a relational identity when Deleuze’s philosophy is usually read as extremely anti-identitarian. Deleuze’s work, it could be said, is notoriously difficult to apply, and the larval subject of the becoming-mother works in the text more as an invitation to consider the transformative dimensions of motherhood rather than as a sustained elaboration of a Deleuzian theory of mothering. That said, I think there is much to gain from exploring how mothering practice and maternal subjectivity can be re-imagined, and Boyer offers some intriguing possibilities for further conceptual work on this issue.
Other chapters focus on more familiar conceptual frameworks for understanding mothering practice, exploring how ‘space’ is both a historical and cultural context as well as a disciplinary force shaping how maternal and infant bodies relate to each other and to the world, or how the neoliberalisation of care work blurs the boundaries between work and non-work while also emphasising the responsibility of individual mothers for their child’s health. This last point is explored in the concluding empirical chapter as Boyer’s discussion moves to the USA to analyse the passage of a law governing the provision of break time for breastmilk pumping at work. She argues these provisions reinforce what Sharon Hays (1998) describes as the expectation of ‘intensive mothering’ while also obscuring other policy options open to US legislators, such as mandating an extended period of maternity leave.
Boyer’s prose is concise and accessible, making this an engaging text for scholars and students of motherhood studies. The underlying presumption of all the chapters is the importance of a diverse set of ‘materialities’, from architecture and city planning to the biochemical capacities of the lactating body, in shaping the practices of mothering. The book also opens up the possibility that philosophical insights into subjectivity as in-process, relational and ecological in the widest sense can be productively translated and applied to inform health care practice and policy. I hope to see more of Boyer’s keen attention to the spaces and politics of motherhood through these perspectives in the future.