Feminism,psychology and becoming a mother

Introduction

My chosen topic is becoming a mother because it is a fundamental issue for feminism and a challenging one for psychology. How we understand, theorise and represent early mothering reaches into questions of gender equality and gender difference, parenting and how feminist psychology has tended to treat bodies and the biological. My focus is on the intense perinatal period of maternal becoming because this period involves a specific set of psychological processes and psychic changes that are hard to access through available language and discourses. Bracha Ettinger’s matrixial theory (1997, 2006a, 2006b) affords such access and treats the perinatal period as continuity in contrast to the usual assumption of birth as a starting point. This article is based on a piece of empirical research about becoming a mother for the first time. During the research, I had to be open to the possibility that the experiences of women in our sample did not conveniently tally with dominant feminist and other progressive discourses concerning motherhood and gender equality.

What feels wrong?

Before I move on to describe the research, let me try to exemplify the potentially troubling nature of this discrepancy through my response to a recent newspaper article describing policy changes on parental leave in the UK. The Guardian newspaper (4 April 2015), financial section, reported on new British parental leave measures, introduced by the coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, based on the principle that “parents who both work will have the right to take up to almost a year off after having a new baby or adopting a child”. Already the father could take up to six months, but this was after the child reached 20 weeks. (Few fathers take this leave.) In the future, sharing parental leave between the parents can start two weeks after a baby’s birth: “mothers will continue to take the first two weeks, the compulsory part of maternity leave, and fathers will still be entitled to two weeks’ paternity leave”. Reportedly, more employers are now on board: the Chairman of the Federation of Small Businesses said that the measure had the potential to enable more women to return to work sooner after childbirth. A woman Vice President of a large multinational waste management corporation said:

for too long our archaic parental leave laws have hampered career women’s opportunity by not giving them the option to share leave with their husbands. It’s about time we recognised women’s careers are just as important as men’s. This is an approach fit for the 21st century and something men and women will equally welcome.

Here we have a concise statement of a basic principle of progressive politics, derived from feminism, about women’s equal employment rights. To disagree would be unfeminist. I wish more fathers would – could – take time off work after babies are born. But I was troubled: women returning to work two weeks after birth! Career women may ostensibly have a “choice”, the kind often made in response to outside pressures, such as employers wanting to disregard the inconvenient fact of a woman employee becoming a mother. Other women, such as those working on zero hours contracts with not a hint of maternity provision also have little choice. In either case, given my psycho-social focus on identity, I am concerned with a dominant discourse, here producing an image of an employee based on an autonomous (historically masculine) subject who prioritises work over all other aspects of life. I feel shocked at this new minimum of time after birth that a woman was deemed to need for becoming accustomed to her new baby and for her baby to (re)discover her as a physically external entity. It seems like a further step – facilitated by medicalised perhaps prescheduled birthing, plus bottle feeding aided by drugs to suppress new mothers’ lactation – in squeezing the creation of new life into an instrumental neoliberal paradigm where everything revolves around notionally non-gendered individuals as productive workers.

But this figure of a woman, whether career-intent or simply intent on earning a basic livelihood, has a reproductive body. In her body, she has been co-creating life for nine months and feels a unique connection which entails a responsibility for the new dependent and vulnerable being. I am referring to birth mothers here because our sample was entirely birth mothers and more broadly because this remains by far the most common experience by which women become mothers. I discuss later the distinction between birth and social mothering, to the extent that it has implications for my focus on women’s experiences in becoming mothers.

The newspaper article raises my central question about how feminist psychology addresses the question of women’s subjectivity taking into account our reproductive capacities. Connectedly, I am troubled by the indiscriminate use of the term “parenting” which facilitates the kind of policy described. For perhaps two decades now, “parenting” has been increasingly treated as the correct usage in order to make no distinction between mothering and fathering. In practice, it has facilitated an omission of considerations about the unique joint history that pregnancy and birth giving involve.

The link between avoidance of the implications of women’s reproductive bodies and the current dominance of a “parenting” discourse is that both parents, in the name of gender equality within this current view, have been shorn of their gender difference. We might even need to interrogate that usage “gender difference” because, by implying that gender is a social construction, it encourages us to bracket off the implications of reproductive biology (the earlier usage – sex difference – was cast aside precisely because of its essentialist, biological determinist connotations). I am suggesting that earlier feminist moves from biological explanations to social constructionist and socialisation accounts have left us bereft of a psychology of gender that takes seriously women’s reproductive, life-giving capacity. ¹ How do we theorise women’s changing identities as they become mothers in a way that goes beyond biology-society dualism and pays attention to the likely psychological issues at stake when a woman has given birth – issues to which the above parental leave policy pays no attention? This is where the empirical research project comes in, which I shall now briefly describe. ²

Researching the identity changes involved when women become mothers for the first time

By locating participants in East London, we wanted to situate mothers’ experiences geographically and also to sample the ethnic and class diversity that would help us avoid falling into normative treatments of motherhood. In our sample of 20 first-time mothers, ranging from 17 to 35 in age, nine were of Bangladeshi heritage, seven were white (four English, two from continental Europe and one from South Africa), two of African-Caribbean heritage and one West African. Their previous employment, partner, family and housing situations covered a wide range. The study followed the women from the last trimester of pregnancy to the baby’s first birthday and sometimes beyond. Three interviews covered that period. Additionally, six of the 20 women agreed to be visited weekly by an observer for a year following the baby’s birth.

Our research question was located in debates about identity that were high profile in the early 2000s in British social science, sufficiently so to be awarded programme status and substantial funding. ³ From my psycho-social perspective, identity theory has been a key place where social science is faced with the effects of an entrenched dualism between sociology and psychology. Social psychology – in principle the bridge discipline – has, in my view, been hampered by that same dualism such that social psychology itself tended to split into two approaches that did not talk to each other; approaches that we might roughly call psychological social psychology and sociological social psychology (see Hollway, 2007). Critical of the cognitivism and individualism of the former, many feminist psychologists, myself included, took the latter route. Consequently – to cut a long story short – a social constructionist approach, specifically a discursive emphasis, became dominant in feminist social psychology: the question of identity tended to be approached through the prism of discursive positioning. ⁴ The primary critique of this influential approach in feminist psychology was that it worked with a thin theorisation of subjectivity (see Hollway, 2007). For example, questions of identity investment, desire or anxiety barely figured, a lack that hobbles the understanding of maternal identity change. Our research question – about the experience of identity change for first time mothers – emerged from the wish to generate a more dynamic, more psycho-social (less binary) account of identity change (“becoming”) that went beyond the conscious, surface, available-to-language aspects of identity. For this, we developed psychoanalytically informed epistemology and methods.

In feminist psychology, there has been a valuable methodological history – linked to the discursive approach through its reliance on language – of privileging participants’ accounts and respecting participants’ voices (often those subordinated in dominant discourses). Likewise, my own earlier research practice was based on interviews, which, as for many other feminist researchers, moved away from highly structured replicable formats and towards eliciting narratives structured by participants. In a previous research project with Tony Jefferson, we became concerned with what participants were not saying, or could not say. This led to an interview method, the “Free Association Narrative Interview” (Hollway and Jefferson, 2013), which paid attention to the inexplicit associations between ideas in participants’ narratives, which could illuminate the emotional structure of those narratives. This succeeded partially in moving interview data and subsequent analysis beyond rationalised narrative coherence to reveal more conflictual and feeling-related meanings and investments, desires and anxieties.

Nonetheless, the Free Association Narrative Interview method depended primarily on what could be said, whereas in this new project we were using a theorisation of maternal becoming that suggested the need to tap, through our methods, the affective, relational, practical and embodied aspects of early mothering. Our ontology suggested that the deeper identity changes involved in maternal becoming are – after babyhood – the most inaccessible to language. For this purpose, we used, alongside psychoanalytically informed interviewing, a form of psychoanalytic observation originally developed to observe infants (only marginally re-orientated to observe mothers and families more broadly). ⁵ The research focus on women’s experiences when they become mothers for the first time was chosen partly as an extreme case of the more general principle that methods are required that can go beyond what can be expressed in language. In relation to this particular object of research, it was important because becoming a mother entails two features that defy discourse. The first is the transgressive corporeality (the neither/both one/two character) of pregnancy that defies (masculine) notions of the “I” (Tyler, 2000) ⁶ and, second, the fact of relating to a vulnerable being who communicates, but not through language ⁷ – a situation whose importance is magnified by a new mother’s inordinate feelings of responsibility for the life she has created.

Outcomes

Did these approaches work and did they vindicate our theoretical propositions: did they provide nuanced, deep, complex, rich and recognising insights into becoming a mother? I think they did. The data left me with the overarching impression that becoming a mother involved considerable psychological upheaval, even under favourable circumstances. Something profound was happening, difficult to understand for the participant mothers and the researchers. I wanted to make that “something” accessible, at least partially, in a way that existing discourses and methods failed to do. ⁸

Although this headline finding about psychological upheaval may seem unsurprising, I think the profound upheaval of maternal becoming is ill-recognised (two weeks maternity leave is enough for things to be back to normal!) and is compounded by mothers finding it hard to make sense of what they are going through. Julia Kristeva’s claim that we are the first civilization to lack a discourse on the meaning and complexity of motherhood ⁹ began to make more sense to me. To examine further the ineffability of new mothers’ experience, I next explore a theme from some interviews before and soon after the births. I recount it as a story about my own discovery of something unanticipated and strange, something I did not initially have the discursive and conceptual resources to make sense of. I found these in Bracha Ettinger’s matrixial theory.

Prenatal becoming

Part of the research design was to talk to women in the last few months of their pregnancies, recognising that pregnant women are “preparing” for the birth. More particularly, we were informed by a psychoanalytic literature, notably Joan Raphael-Leff’s work, ¹⁰ that explicitly talks about the way that a pregnant woman’s fantasies and ideas about the future are part of her developing relationship with the baby-to-be and a significant part of her emerging maternal identity. However, I was well into the data analytic activities before realising that I was paying almost no attention to the prenatal interview data, ¹¹ despite having listened to the successive audio records for all the interviewees in addition to reading the transcripts. Looking back, I would say that I was taking a retrospective view of these interview accounts, using the chronologically later data as the culmination point of the narratives, with birth as the fulcrum. Perhaps this would have continued, had I not come across matrixial theory, whose powerful and unusual contribution starts with refusing the idea that birth is where the story of the individual starts.

By and large, developmental psychoanalysis and psychology start their inquiries at birth. Of course the mother–baby relationship has been a significant theme in both these disciplines, but it is usually conducted in the language of the “interpersonal”, as if the units involved were automatically two beings and the baby, who is “attached”, learns appropriate separation. Pollock (2009), explaining matrixial theory, talks about this worldview being based on the “phallic” principle of “the cut and separation of birth”. Bracha Ettinger rejects the dominant psychoanalytic account based on the assumption of birth as the origin of subjectivity (which of course leaves the birth mother as the vessel of life from which the infant must separate in order to achieve personhood). By contrast, matrixial theory derives its ontology from prenatal/pre-maternal life in which the mother and child-to-be are in the process of being co-created throughout pregnancy through a process that registers both jointness and differentiation. In matrixial language, distinctions between the foetus and the pregnant woman as separate units are avoided and the continuity of pregnant into postnatal experience is of central significance.

Matrixial theory creates a new language that transcends the logic of separation, notably in the idea of trans-subjectivity originating in the language-defying state prior to birth, a state of neither two nor one, in which “the transgressive corporeality of pregnancy” (“being alive in creating life”), starts “a psychic and mental transgression of the boundaries of unicity of being” (Ettinger, 2006b: 101 and 104). The matrixial trans-subjective encounter underpinning all our subjectivities is better characterised in terms of a physics than a biology: concepts such as waves, resonances and rhythms are useful for conceptualising “occurrences at shared borderspaces whose mutually unknown and unknowable partners-in-differences register a shared event, but differently for each partner” (Pollock, 2009: 4). This initiates profound continuities that survive the separation of birth and are consequential for the becoming mother’s identity. The matrixial trans-subjective encounter originates what Ettinger calls a “trans-subjective stratum” of subjectivity, which exists in everyone by virtue of our prenatal experience, never erased by the separation of birth that initiates the later, “phallic”, or individuated stratum. ¹² This approach seems just what feminist psychology needs to take forward our critique of the masculine autonomous subject treated as universal and its systematic devaluation of care. In the process, it has profound implications for feminist and parenting discourses: just imagine the tumultousness of the trans-subjective stratum newly encountering the phallic stratum initiated with birth; imagine after only two further weeks the importance of trans-subjective continuity as the physical fact of unicity has its shared effects on mother and baby!

Matrixial theory opened my mind to noticing different aspects of the prenatal and early postnatal data. For example, I noticed the frequency with which the word “weird” cropped up. Justine expressed the experience of many in one sentence: “I can’t explain, it’s like weird knowing that you’ve got a life growing inside of you and you can feel the life every day”. “Weird” connotes Ettinger’s “transgressive corporeality”; it points to the extent that pregnancy cannot be expressed adequately in available language and consequently is hard to understand. Significantly, the most common context for its use in the research context was to talk about the experience of a life beyond the women’s own, inside their bodies. These comments were often, but not always, in response to questions about the first time they felt the baby move. For example, Sarah describes trying to make sense of the inner feelings of movement through working out how the baby was lying: “I know where the legs are … and I can feel the bum as well … and the head is there. I still haven’t figured it out, I need to sit down and think of it”. Sarah used the word “weird” before and after the baby’s birth: “It’s a bit weird the whole fact that I’m, my body’s producing the food for the baby”, her hesitation over the subject of the action suggesting that ‘I’ didn’t feel right, perhaps because it referenced a conscious intentional subject, the pre-pregnant one, whose “unicity of being” was no longer clear-cut, but one of “transgressive corporeality” (to use Ettinger’s phrases). This is what Imogen Tyler illuminates theoretically when she claims that “the pregnant subject defies the logic of classic ontology” (note 6 above). The pre- and peri-natal data provided evidence of how this language-defying state is experienced (varying at different times and across different participants) as a thrill and joy or an existentially threatening state of self, casting into turmoil what Tyler called “the I’s implied individuality”. It was only when Sarah gave up trying to breast feed and started working again that she began to feel “back to normal”, in which state “everything’s more in control”. For the sample in general, while this idea was often attractive, it was also limited: something had changed that could not be undone.

Becky’s example illustrates an unreservedly positive experience, albeit still weird, of being pregnant. In response to the first interview question “Can you tell me the story of your pregnancy so far? How has it been?”, Becky replies “Yeah, it’s been (.) nice, been weird […] like having something inside you, it’s just (.) such a weird feeling but (.) really overwhelming”. She then elaborates by contrasting her own feelings about this with imagined others who “ain’t maternal”. “But when you want a baby, really want a baby, you’re really happy about it (.) when you feel it moving it’s like (2) warms your heart [her emphasis] and you think oh my god that’s my baby”. Becky then puts her wanting this baby in the context of a “devastating” recent miscarriage. Neither pregnancy was planned. Her use of a bodily, sensory image – “warms your heart” – to describe the emotional experience connected with feeling maternal comes after many pauses during which she finds the word “weird” and then, closely linked, “overwhelming”.

The need to control participants’ experiences as first-time mothers through getting information and understanding was patterned, applying more strongly to the higher-educated women in “careers”. Sarah was one such, with a busy working life she found difficult to suspend. She expressed a wider tendency amongst this cluster when she said “as long as I have the knowledge and as long as I know what it is that it means, I’m OK”. However, the kind of informational knowledge she was relying on did not always work: for example, she did not recognise for a long time that what she was experiencing at the beginning of her labour was contractions. She attributed this to her lack of prior knowledge when she said:

you can do, you learn about umm what’s happening to your body but I I’ve never actually thought to ask what contraction pains felt like. I guess that’s the only question I didn’t ask, so I didn’t know that it actually, that these were real contractions [until] 9 o’clock I had a midwife appointment.

Becky, who saw herself unequivocally in the category of “women who are maternal”, did not want to return to the kind of unfulfilling work that would have been available to her. She found continual pleasure in attending to and learning about what her baby needed and remained close to her mother and siblings. Others, with the benefit of a six-month paid maternity leave, could relax into their new situation, secure in the knowledge that they had an income and a job to return to. Some of the women whose identity was the most heavily invested in having an independent career, found it harder to be the kind of mother that their baby seemed to want of them in the early months. While such a pattern, reflected with variations across participants, is only suggestive, ¹³ it did lead me to consider the different – and differently gendered – subjectivities that women in the sample seemed to be expressing through their experiences of first-time motherhood.

Layton (2004) observed what she thought was a changed psychic structure among young high-achieving American women students. Focusing her psycho-social argument on historically recent changes in formations of female subjectivity, she concluded that one trajectory taken by this career-orientated group of women involves a changed psychic structure away from the traditional relationship-based femininity, based on the maternal, towards a defensive autonomy that formerly characterised mainly men. Defensive autonomy is involved when autonomy is split off from relational needs and capacities, thus denying its embeddedness in relationships. For Layton, feminism began to change “the proper way to live a white middle-class female heterosexual identity”: the liberated woman was now “expected to have a career, not a job, a career”. Now, “to fit into a man’s world, women had to be able to inhabit the male version of autonomy, the psychic requirements of which conflict dramatically with those of the so-called ‘relational female”’ (Layton 2004: 34). The social diversity in our sample amply showed how their transitions to being mothers were bound up with their prior identities. Extrapolating from the data, the theoretical proposition suggested by this pattern is that higher-educated career women’s subjectivities are more closely based on the model of an autonomous (masculine) subject. Other features, for example ethnicity, intersected with this pattern. ¹⁴

It appears that such changes in subjective formation coincide with changes in the last 50 years, in expectations about what women should prioritise when they become mothers. De Marneffe (2004), for example, concludes that in the contemporary West women’s desire to mother does not get strong social approbation and criticises the binary of career and motherhood as a “scheme that pits individual and maternal aspirations against one another”. (There was plenty of evidence in the data of conflicts between a new mother’s maternal desire and her desires for a “non-maternal psychic space” (Alizade, 2006).)

Devaluation of the maternal in the current gender equality model

A situated historical analysis is reflected in Hekman’s (1999: 7) account of feminist political discourses on gender. Hekman characterised the initial stance of early second wave feminism as “the erasure of difference and the pursuit of equality”. Being an erasure of women’s difference from men, the goal was for women to gain equality by being as like men as they could be. This was followed, according to Hekman, by a second strategy, that of valorising the feminine and women’s difference from men. I remember the 1980s feminist emphasis on the relational woman and connectedness and how it was criticised for fixing women in a maternal model of caring that threatened gender equality (Hollway, 2008). I also recognise Hekman’s strategies in current ideology. The parenting leave policy with which I started this piece is a striking example of the erasure of difference as the route to gender equality and the second strategy is expressed in a recent right-of-centre UK policy paper, which represents “real women” as those “who reject the masculine value system for one that rates caring above a career and interdependence above independence” (cited in Hollway, 2015: 164–165). The trouble is that these strategies are in binary, therefore exclusionary, relation to each other, so that childcare policy is dominated by what Hekman sees as the pursuit of women’s equality through the erasure of difference. ¹⁵ Consequently, it cannot easily recognise the tensions in women’s position: a discursive erasure of difference that narrows the focus to women as primarily gender-neutral members of the workforce inevitably comes up against the reality of women’s sex difference, namely the essential difference from men that gifts women with wombs, ovaries, menstrual cycles and breasts that lactate. In the provision of a mere two weeks of immediate post-natal, specifically maternal leave, this biology is not only compressed in time, but emptied of psychological considerations about women’s experience of the maternal and a reawakened trans-subjective stratum of subjectivity through which she co-experiences her baby’s state.

Binary thinking occurs not just at the level of characterising autonomy and connectedness, and masculinity and femininity as opposites, but more widely in what matrixial theory calls phallic logic, the deeply ingrained way of thinking in terms of separations and either/or. My interest – because I am theorising identity psycho-socially – is not in these discourses per se but in how they are lived through the psychic investments and desires of women. So, for example in Knowing Mothers, I explore the theme of conflict in women’s gendered subjectivities, amplified as it is in the changing subjectivities of new mothers, through two cases, Justine and Arianna, who differed in terms of their educational, career and partner positions prior to getting pregnant (also in terms of class and ethnicity). In Arianna’s case, I was able to build a detailed picture demonstrating the unique, complex and traumatic nature of the conflict into which she was precipitated by becoming pregnant. Her condition made her fearful not just about losing her status as an autonomous subject who prioritised her career but through what she experienced as an almost unbearable feminisation of her body, which started in pregnancy.

In the following section, I want to show the subjective reach of what matrixial theory calls phallic logic, using Arianna’s experience of becoming a mother. ¹⁶ Matrixial theory exposes the profound problem of living binary gender difference, problems in the discourse of gender equality according to the masculine model and also the potential, in women and men, mothers and non-mothers alike, of the matrixial alternative.

Femininity beyond phallic logic

The key point about matrixial theory is that it transcends the binary logic of gender/sex difference and is framed outside binary categories (which also makes it quite difficult to grasp). Ettinger’s (2006a) non-binary framing distinguishes feminine^p (feminine to the power of the phallus; feminine in phallic logic premised on gender and sexual difference) from feminine^m (feminine to the power of the matrixial). Pollock (2009: 13) describes the latter as “a supplementary, shifting stratum of human subjectivity and meaning (…) delivered to us all”. In Knowing Mothers, I show how the unstable collision of the two strata – phallic (separated) and matrixial (trans-subjective) – in Arianna’s subjectivity pervade and plague her becoming a mother. In matrixial terms, my analysis traces how Arianna’s earlier gender settlement becomes unsettled with pregnancy, as a co-affecting matrixial trans-subjectivity presses into awareness, previously under erasure within phallic logic.

Pollock explains that in matrixial theory, the baby-to-come is familiar in two temporal registers, “diachronous as well as synchronous”. The diachrony is particular to the becoming mother, because

at the same time memories of the primordial condition of her own becoming […] are newly reactivated from another position: the trans-subjective matrixial encounter in a trans-subjectivising archaic environment […] asymmetrical, regressive, remembering and at the same time anticipatory and projective into living futures to come (Pollock 2009: 6).

The primordial condition is available also to a baby’s father or other – social – parent, but synchronously, deriving from “what once he co-evented at the register of his own becoming” (Pollock 2009: 9, emphasis added). In Arianna’s case, Vincent, her husband, “loved the baby, really loved her, from the start” – unlike her, Arianna suggests. It is in this second, synchronous, sense that femininity to the power of the matrixial (feminine^m) is “open to all”, if they are available to retuning in to the trans-subjective stratum that accompanies everyone’s own beginnings, woman or man. Much depends, however, on the ability of someone to tune into the trans-subjective stratum, never erased since their own beginnings, but heavily foreclosed in neoliberal global culture. This retuning unsettles the “I” based on singularity and autonomy, which has been so central to a masculine subjective formation and become more available to women (such as Arianna) through the erasure of feminine gender difference in the dominant gender equality model. Matrixial logic suggests that the early experience of birth mothering, being diachronous, is not identical to social mothering (or “parenting”) because of the experience of pregnancy. However, for women who are social mothers/parents, the two temporal registers do operate in the following, weakened, sense: “the woman doubly experiences the matrixial borderspace: first in the last period of prenatal life in the maternal womb […], and second, as someone who has a womb […], whether she is a mother or not” (Ettinger, 1997: 391). Men’s parental connection is different again – delivered at their earliest beginnings but more or less heavily foreclosed by masculine culture. ¹⁷

When Griselda Pollock introduces Ettinger’s understanding of the feminine and its connection to the maternal, she is explicit about the sensitivities she expects to arouse amongst feminists. For example: “Ettinger invites us to recognise, to re-cognise, a subjectivizing partnership that is primordially feminine […] Let me be careful here”, and Pollock goes on to differentiate Ettinger’s use of “feminine” from feminists like De Beauvoir, historically influential in the “gender equality on male terms” strategy. For De Beauvoir, the feminine was “understood to be the stereotype of woman from which feminism was in revolt” (Pollock, 2009: 11 and 12). Matrixial theory, Pollock continues, provides “an understanding of a certain deforming imposition of negativised otherness onto the feminine as the cipher through which the masculine is positivised and rendered both dominant and universal”. This is the “feminine” that Arianna rejects. The matrixial feminine reconceptualises the feminine body so that a bodily organ such as the womb is not understood as determining, but like the body more generally is “imaginatively understood as cycles, pleasures, sexualities, surfaces, contacts, even traumas”. Because such experiences are available to any being that emerges from intrauterine life, this matrixial version of the feminine (feminine^m as opposed to feminine^p) does not reduce to the maternal, although it is intimately bound up with the maternal as guarantor of life and founder of a proto-ethics based on compassion.

Ettinger (1997: 370) addresses another feminist political objection when she clarifies that her matrixial approach:

doesn’t indicate any limitation on a woman’s rights over her body, quite the contrary! As a concept, the matrix supports women’s full response-ability for any event occurring with-in their own not-One corpo-reality and accounts for the difference of such response-ability from the phallic order.

Through matrixial theory, I was able to grasp that ineffable quality of the upheaval that characterised all new mothers in the research sample, whether they embraced it wholeheartedly, like Becky, wanted to find safe rational categories for it and wished to find the normality of a prior identity, like Sarah or, like Arianna, were traumatised by the threats maternity posed to their identity. “Ineffable” has two allied meanings, both deriving from the negative of the Latin ex-fare, to speak out. The first is “incapable of being expressed”; the second is “not to be uttered”. The ineffable aspects of becoming a mother threaten to undermine the settled feeling of “I” and the accompanying phallic-based identity (the “masculinity” mired in binary logic) that language and rational logic afford. ¹⁸

Conclusions: Gender and women’s reproductive bodies in psychology and feminism

To conclude, let me revisit the claims made in the opening paragraph of this piece: “How we understand, theorise and represent the peri-natal period of mothering reaches into questions of gender equality and gender difference, parenting and how feminists treat bodies and the biological in psychology”.

I have located a certain identity formation in women associated with the dominant “gender equality through erasure of difference” perspective. While patterns in the sample suggested that higher-educated, career-orientated women are more prone to find the requirements of early mothering highly unsettling, as a consequence of being strongly invested in this identity formation, the subjectivity associated with an autonomous, historically masculine subject is widespread. This “masculine” subject is “defensively autonomous”, in Lynne Layton’s phrase (2004), a product of a defensive splitting off from connection. The identity transition occasioned by becoming a mother, which threatens this identity formation because of the “life that has unfurled itself within your own life” (Riley, 2012: 255), is therefore going to be conflictual, potentially a profound upheaval. I have used matrixial concepts to illuminate the difficulty of this transition, notably the idea that the prenatal and postnatal matrixial experience defies language and reawakens a foreclosed trans-subjective stratum: this baby is neither me nor not-me; it is both me and not-me. Categories based on the unitary “I” collapse. This can be both wonderful and terrible.

When the idea of the trans-subjective stratum is applied more generally in theorising subjectivity, it affords a way of thinking that challenges binary gender difference. The trans-subjective stratum is reawakened in pregnancy from the state of foreclosure that characterises both sexes in contemporary globalised societies, but unequally across cultural settings. This is an example of feminine^m (feminine to the power of the matrixial) rather than the gender difference of binary logic. The gender equality model that depends on erasure is also trapped in this binary logic, even while intending to erase it. I outlined the upheaval of Arianna’s identity as an example of a gender equal subjectivity that prior to pregnancy was settled within a model of erasure of difference.

The term parenting, with its political imperative to treat mothers and fathers as not just equally responsible but having the same relation to babies, is a direct product of the model of gender equality based on the erasure of difference. It also relies on and perpetuates the assumption that birth precludes continuity of prenatal experience. The press extract with which I began showed a relation to the consequent child care policy that claimed a two-week-after-birth return to work for new mothers as “progress”, no longer “archaic” and “an approach fit for the 21st century” (as the century of the triumph of neoliberal globalisation, I had to grimly agree that this is a fitting approach). The sorts of upheaval I have documented and reimagined through matrixial theory are excluded from thought in this policy. Crucially, such a policy places under erasure the continuity of prenatal and postnatal trans-subjective experience. If she can tune in to her prenatal experience, the birth mother knows her baby like no one else, despite the physical separation initiated by the severance of the umbilical cord. For examples: Becky explained how she had worked out her new-born son’s preferred sleeping routine based on the patterns of his sleep and wakeful states in the womb; Arianna, conflicted about her impending maternal state, dreamt of a baby girl the night before she was due to have an abortion.

At the same time, fathers, and other non-birth parents or carers (in Arianna’s case, it was the baby’s father and her own parents), may have access to identifications with the new-born infant through their own trans-subjective attunement. This matrixial claim successfully interrupts the binary whereby fathers are either completely estranged from maternal feelings or having exactly the same relation to their babies as mothers. It explains why, in the example of Vincent and Arianna, Vincent had easier access to the feelings deriving from the trans-subjective stratum than Arianna did. To recognise this possibility does not mean that birth mothers do not have privileged – diachronous – access to this trans-subjective stratum (that would be to fall into phallic logic), but rather to recognise the myriad ways that gendered discourses are expressed and resisted in contemporary subjectivities.

In early second wave feminism and 20th century feminist psychology, the concept of bodies (women’s bodies) was in thrall to a biological perspective whose history was inextricably tied in with the pathologising and derogating of women’s biology, stemming from her reproductive sexual differences (differing from the norm and ideal of the male). It is unsurprising then that feminist psychology enthusiastically embraced the social constructionism that provided a radical perspective for social sciences. Even now, when bodies are back in intellectual fashion, biological determinism has the capacity to capture feminist discourse and, in binary fashion, send us back to one-sidedly social explanations. Psychological processes that forge our identities from bodily, as well as social, realities often seem to be squeezed out by this binary.

Mothering an infant is a fundamental issue for feminism because it is a point of contradiction where women’s formations as notionally gender-neutral individuals collide with the actuality of women’s life-giving capacities. It is where contemporary feminism comes up against the flaw in its pursuit of gender equality via the erasure of (women’s) differences. And for the purposes of this new, “state of the discipline”, journal format, it is where we need a psychology which theorises the psychological implications of women’s capacity to create life for their changing subjectivities over a life course, and does this in a manner that recognises both the materiality of reproductive bodies and the circumstances, past, present and imagined future, within and around which their maternal identities are in continuous process.

Finally, a central theme about the state of the discipline that pervades this piece is the ubiquity of binaries and the regrettable limitations they place on our thinking and on feminist (as well as all other) politics. I have found over time that my attempts to go beyond binaries are central to my pursuit of a psycho-social approach to psychology. If feminine^m can help us go beyond the binaries of current hegemonic gender discourses, it could open up new feminist and psychological vistas. I hope I have exemplified this possibility in the case of perinatal mothering.