- London, London, City of, United Kingdom
- Affect, Materiality, Temporality, Event, Gender and Sexuality, Motherhood, and 65 moreFeminist Theory, Psychoanalysis, Feminist Ethics, Philosophy of Time, Feminism, Feminist Philosophy, Transnational Feminism, Feminism(s), Social Psychology, Psychotherapy and Counseling, Theories of Motherhood, Gender Studies, Temporality (Time Studies), Ideologies of Motherhood, Motherhood Studies, Theories of Gender and Transgender, Maternal and Child Health, Women and Gender Studies, Women's Studies, Subjectivity, Subjectivities, Transhumanism/Posthumanism, Psychosocial Studies, Feminist Literary Theory and Gender Studies, Time Studies, Women and Culture, Feminist Sociology, Feminist Geography, Sex and Gender, Ethics, Assisted Reproductive Technologies, Motherhood and Maternity, Queer temporality, Public Sphere, Space and Time (Philosophy), Public Space, Metaphysics of Time, Object Oriented Ontology, Philosophy of the Subject, Reproduction, Single Mothers, Breastfeeding, Birth, Postfeminism, Sigmund Freud, Psychoanalysis and culture, Philosophy Of Climate Change, Feminist Political Theory, Psychotherapy, Class, Family studies, Constructions of femininity, Family, Mothering, Freud and Feminist Psychoanalysis, Psychosocial Research, Crip theory, Childbirth, Visual Culture and Media Studies, Fatherhood, Feminist activism, Subjectivity (Culture), Poststructuralist Theory, Performance/live Art, and Women's Rightsedit
- One major strand of my research has centred on the fraught relations, as well as creative tensions, between motherhoo... moreOne major strand of my research has centred on the fraught relations, as well as creative tensions, between motherhood, female subjectivities and ethics. I am interested in different ways of understanding the conjunction ‘maternal ethics’, especially what ‘mothering’ does to our concepts of care, labour and subjectivity if we strip normative and idealised figurations out of mothering itself. How, in other words, might we think about maternal subjectivity as an utterly new position of experience, that goes on to challenge and deform our understandings of singularity and relatedness, ethics and care, encounter and event? I draw on debates in contemporary psychoanalysis, feminist and social theory, the ethics of care, and philosophies of otherness and event to articulate this unique subject position. I am also interested in the use of autobiographical writing, anecdote, and other literary forms as ways of generating theory. A monograph entitled Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (Routledge, 2009) draws this work together. More recent maternal research focuses on what happens when mothering ‘erupts’ into the public sphere, prompting us to think about the public anew. I run an international research network – Mapping Maternal Subjectivities, Identities and Ethics (MaMSIE - see MaMSIE.org) - which organises events and publishes a scholarly online journal, Studies in the Maternal, in collaboration with Sigal Spigel at the University of Cambridge. A second area of my research focuses on the psychosocial, particularly its epistemological and methodological dimensions. This includes work on the relation between psychoanalysis as a theoretical and clinical practice, and debates on affect, emotions, ethics, performance and the emerging discipline of psychosocial studies itself. My current work is on gender and temporality. I’m interested in time that fails to unfold, and the place of this kind of ‘stuck’ time in a capitalist conditions in which time has been reduced more and more to the ‘qualified’ time of work. Climate change, unending violent conflict, fraying material infrastructures, permanent debt and widening social inequalities mean that we no longer live with an expectation of a progressive future, a generative past, or a flourishing now that characterized the temporal imaginaries of the post-war period. Time, it appears, is not flowing, but has become ntensely felt, yet radically suspended. My recent monograph, Enduring Time (Bloomsbury, 2017) raises the question of how we might now 'take care' of time? How can we understand change as requiring time not passing? What can quotidian experiences of suspended time - waiting, delaying, staying, remaining, enduring, returning and repeating - tell us about the survival of social bonds? And how might we re-establish the idea that time might be something we both have and share, as opposed to something we are always running out of?I am co-Principal Investigator on a major collaborative award from the Wellcome Trust entitled 'Waiting Times' that is investigating the relation between time and care in the health service from a humanities perspective. See waitingtimes.exeter.ac.uk.edit
Waiting is at the centre of experiences and practices of healthcare. However, we know very little about the relationship between the subjective experiences of patients who wait in and for care, health practitioners who ‘prescribe’ and... more
Waiting is at the centre of experiences and practices of healthcare. However, we know very little about the relationship between the subjective experiences of patients who wait in and for care, health practitioners who ‘prescribe’ and manage waiting, and how this relates to broader cultural meanings of waiting. Waiting features heavily in the sociological, managerial, historical and health economics literatures that investigate UK healthcare, but the focus has been on service provision and quality, with waiting (including waiting lists and waiting times) drawn on as a key marker to test the efficiency and affordability of the NHS. In this article, we consider the historical contours of this framing of waiting, and ask what has been lost or occluded through its development. To do so, we review the available discourses in the existing literature on the NHS through a series of ‘snapshots’ or key moments in its history. Through its negative imprint, we argue that what shadows these disc...
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Book synopsis: The work of the political theorist Jane Bennett over the last two decades has consistently drawn attention to and has possessed a feeling for things, for the inorganic, and for the agency or quasi-agency of nonhuman... more
Book synopsis: The work of the political theorist Jane Bennett over the last two decades has consistently drawn attention to and has possessed a feeling for things, for the inorganic, and for the agency or quasi-agency of nonhuman actants. Her project of developing a new political ecology and renewed vitalist thought, beginning with Thoreau’s Nature: Ethics, Politics and the Wild (1994) and further developed in The Enchantment of Modernity: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (2001), has found its fullest expression in her latest work, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010), a book which has thoroughly reshaped the ways in which we think about landscape, ecology, matter, vitality and the terrain of post-continental philosophy in a time of critical climate change. This collection, which originated in a 1-day workshop on Bennett’s vibrant materialist thought held at the Institute for Social Research, Birkbeck College, University of London in September 2013, makes the writ...
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Book synopsis: Psychoanalysis, having been situated in the borders of natural and social sciences and humanities as well as at the crossroads of Romantic, Modern and Postmodern historical conditions, continues to inspire and learn from... more
Book synopsis: Psychoanalysis, having been situated in the borders of natural and social sciences and humanities as well as at the crossroads of Romantic, Modern and Postmodern historical conditions, continues to inspire and learn from extremely rich human imagination, thought and experience. This volume brings together leading scholars and practitioners from different parts of the world who present unique insights into the field of psychoanalysis. It forms novel dialogues between different psychoanalytic orientations as well as the particularities of diverse socio-cultural and historical contexts. The interconnected chapters in this collection: critically explore important aspects of psychoanalysis which have been underutilized in socio-historical and political analysis provide new insights on human psychosocial world in terms of embodiment, subjectivity, collective action, contemporary societal structures and political cultural dynamics in order to facilitate further transdisciplinary conversations re-vision psychoanalysis as a self-reflective way of life, which is significantly relevant to, and is a meaningful way out of, many of our contemporary dilemmas
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In this paper, we explore the way in which the ‘margins’ can be a space for excitement as well as for threat. We examine how the pursuit of truth can be disrupted by marginalia, which appear as unwanted intrusions. However, attending to... more
In this paper, we explore the way in which the ‘margins’ can be a space for excitement as well as for threat. We examine how the pursuit of truth can be disrupted by marginalia, which appear as unwanted intrusions. However, attending to these marginal experiences and interruptions produces opportunities for newness, among them recognition of the value of trivia and failure. A literary example is given to show how texts might be read against themselves to invoke moments of disappearance, from which the subject might return changed.
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EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo
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This editorial introduces a collection of research articles and reflections on what it means to wait during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. Written from conditions of lockdown, this collection gathers together the initial thoughts of a... more
This editorial introduces a collection of research articles and reflections on what it means to wait during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. Written from conditions of lockdown, this collection gathers together the initial thoughts of a group of interdisciplinary scholars in the humanities and social sciences who have been working on questions of waiting and care through a project called Waiting Times.
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Taking up the themes of Lisa Baraitser's recent book <em>Enduring Time</em>, this talk will offer some reflections on the relations between time and care. Care is often assumed to be a set of practices that take the form... more
Taking up the themes of Lisa Baraitser's recent book <em>Enduring Time</em>, this talk will offer some reflections on the relations between time and care. Care is often assumed to be a set of practices that take the form of an affective engagement with others, so that the world can be maintained, sustained, and repaired. Yet care can also be thought about as a political and ethical decision to remain in what Christina Sharpe calls 'the wake': the ongoing disastrous time of the persistent effects of slavery. Remaining, for Sharpe, involves inhabiting and rupturing the wake's elongated temporality. From this perspective, Baraitser will argue that care is bound up with histories of the antithesis of care, or failures of care, that bring on ways of thinking that may also need to be taken care of and involve the temporal practices of staying alongside others and ideas when care has failed; waiting, staying, delaying, enduring, repeating, and returning as the t...
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Book synopsis: The field of literary studies has long recognised the centrality of psychoanalysis as a method for looking at texts in a new way. But rarely has the relationship between psychoanalysis and performance been mapped out,... more
Book synopsis: The field of literary studies has long recognised the centrality of psychoanalysis as a method for looking at texts in a new way. But rarely has the relationship between psychoanalysis and performance been mapped out, either in terms of analysing the nature of performance itself, or in terms of making sense of specific performance-related activities. In this volume some of the most distinguished thinkers in the field make this exciting new connection and offer original perspectives on a wide variety of topics, including: · hypnotism and hysteria · ventriloquism and the body · dance and sublimation · the unconscious and the rehearsal process · melancholia and the uncanny · cloning and theatrical mimesis · censorship and activist performance · theatre and social memory. The arguments advanced here are based on the dual principle that psychoanalysis can provide a productive framework for understanding the work of performance, and that performance itself can help to inves...
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In this paper we take up three terms – containment, delay, mitigation – that have been used by the UK Government to describe their phased response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the terms refer to a political and public health... more
In this paper we take up three terms – containment, delay, mitigation – that have been used by the UK Government to describe their phased response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the terms refer to a political and public health strategy – contain the virus, flatten the peak of the epidemic, mitigate its effects – we offer a psychosocial reading that draws attention to the relation between time and care embedded in each term. We do so to call for the development of a form of care-ful attention under conditions that tend to prompt action rather than reflection, closing down time for thinking. Using Adriana Cavarero’s notion of ‘horrorism’, in which violence is enacted at precisely the point that care is most needed, we discuss the ever-present possibility of failures within acts of care. We argue that dwelling in the temporality of delay can be understood as an act of care if delaying allows us to pay care-ful attention to violence. We then circle back to a point in twentieth-centu...
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This chapter is about forms of hidden time: the disavowed durational activities behind every person, situation or phenomenon, behind every institution, and art object, and behind the maintenance of everyday life. It is about touching or... more
This chapter is about forms of hidden time: the disavowed durational activities behind every person, situation or phenomenon, behind every institution, and art object, and behind the maintenance of everyday life. It is about touching or grasping time through noticing when it has gone into hiding. It takes up an old feminist theme about the relation between time, gender, race, class and care, by examining practices of maintenance. By maintenance I am referring to durational practices that keep ‘things’ going: objects, selves, systems, hopes, ideals, networks, communities, relationships, institutions. These durational practices are forms of labour that maintain the material conditions of ourselves and others, maintain connections between people, people and things, things and things, people and places, and social and public institutions, along with the anachronistic ideals that often underpin them, and that constitute the systems of sustenance and renewal that support ‘life’.1 Maintenance is in part generated by conditions of vulnerability that we all share, and in part by the excesses and internal logics of capitalist cultures that make maintenance so necessary (whilst at the same time utterly devaluing practices of maintenance by generating products, for instance, specifically designed to break down without the possibility of being mended).2 As Carole Pateman argued in The Sexual Contract back in 1988, it is structural to both patriarchy and capitalism that the labour of maintenance remains hidden.
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Research Interests: Sociology, Feminist Sociology, Media Studies, New Media, Media and Cultural Studies, and 15 moreFeminist Theory, Family studies, Digital Media, Feminist Philosophy, Family, Social Media, Feminist Art, Motherhood and Public Discourse, Feminist Literary Theory and Gender Studies, Birth, Childbirth, Feminist Political Theory, Motherhood, Family Studies, and Maternal Studies
&quot;The collection of 23 essays provides an exciting snapshot of contemporary theorising on the maternal within psychoanalytic and social theory. The introduction serves as an excellent overview of this interdisciplinary field and... more
&quot;The collection of 23 essays provides an exciting snapshot of contemporary theorising on the maternal within psychoanalytic and social theory. The introduction serves as an excellent overview of this interdisciplinary field and its importance both to motherhood studies and broader feminist thinking. This book is a triumph!&quot; Assistant Professor Julie Kelso, Department of Philosophy and Literature, Bond University &quot;Mothering and Psychoanalysis brings together a vibrant collection of critical, interdisciplinary perspectives on psychoanalysis, feminism, motherhood and sociology. In her engaging introduction, Petra Bueskens provides a comprehensive overview of the key debates in the field and their contemporary implications. The collection includes reprinted essays from important thinkers and international contributions from a diverse range of writers who offer fresh and original insights into psychoanalysis and mothering. The book represents some of the best of the new scholarship in maternal studies.&quot; Associate Professor Julie Stephens, College of Arts, Victoria University, Australia
Research Interests: Psychoanalysis, Feminist Theory, Gender and Sexuality, Critical Social Theory, Feminism, and 15 moreContemporary Social Theory, Freud and Feminist Psychoanalysis, Feminist Art, Psychoanalysis and art, Ideologies of Motherhood, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Mothering and Sociology, Motherhood, Psychoanalysis and culture, Motherhood Studies, Classical and Contemporary Social Theory, Images of Motherhood in Literature and Culture, Psychoanalysis and Social Theory, Motherhood and Maternity, and Feminist Mothering Studies
Research Interests: History, Reproduction, Time Studies, Philosophy of Time, Motherhood and Public Discourse, and 9 moreTemporality (Time Studies), Ideologies of Motherhood, Temporality, Maternity, Assisted Reproductive Technologies, Theories of Motherhood, Motherhood, Motherhood Studies, and Open Library of Humanities
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In this short piece, I respond to the invitation to write differently about families, relationships and societies by drawing out an anecdotal approach to theorising family time. The anecdote I use highlights the temporal dimensions of... more
In this short piece, I respond to the invitation to write differently about families, relationships and societies by drawing out an anecdotal approach to theorising family time. The anecdote I use highlights the temporal dimensions of family life, and the ways that time can be ‘mushed’, resisting the rhythms of late-capitalist domestic life. By ‘mushing’ time, ‘the ‘kids’ in the anecdote propose an alternative undifferentiated experience of communality, which links with wider generational concerns with how communality may only emerge when narratives of national progress are countered, and attention is turned to ‘mush’.
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Research Interests: Sociology, Law, Gender Studies, Feminist Theory, Feminism, and 3 morePublic Space, Feminist, and Motherhood
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I am grateful to the editors and contributors for this wonderful collection of articles that respond to Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (Baraitser, 2009). Rather than restaging the arguments I made in the book, I attempt... more
I am grateful to the editors and contributors for this wonderful collection of articles that respond to Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (Baraitser, 2009). Rather than restaging the arguments I made in the book, I attempt here to extend my discussion of the maternal subject as a figure that disrupts or interrupts our notions of subjectivity and ethics. Following
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... TO CARE Wendy Hollway SANCTIONING PREGNANCY Harriet Gross and Helen Pattison ACCOUNTING FOR RAPE Irina Anderson and Kathy Doherty THE SINGLE ... Derek Hook and Calum Neill continue to keep me intellectually to task, for which I am... more
... TO CARE Wendy Hollway SANCTIONING PREGNANCY Harriet Gross and Helen Pattison ACCOUNTING FOR RAPE Irina Anderson and Kathy Doherty THE SINGLE ... Derek Hook and Calum Neill continue to keep me intellectually to task, for which I am truly grateful, and my ...
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This discussion of Miri Rozmarin's “Maternal Silence”(this issue) situates Rozmarin's article within a wider literature on motherhood and writing before moving on to argue that although a powerful account of maternal ethics,... more
This discussion of Miri Rozmarin's “Maternal Silence”(this issue) situates Rozmarin's article within a wider literature on motherhood and writing before moving on to argue that although a powerful account of maternal ethics, Rozmarin's call for a certain stepping aside from ...
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This paper seeks to examine two particular and peculiar practices in which the mediation of apparently direct encounters is made explicit and is systematically theorized: that of the psychoanalytic dialogue with its inward focus and... more
This paper seeks to examine two particular and peculiar practices in which the mediation of apparently direct encounters is made explicit and is systematically theorized: that of the psychoanalytic dialogue with its inward focus and private secluded setting, and that of theatre and live performance, with its public focus. Both these practices are concerned with ways in which "live encounters" impact on their participants, and hence with theconditions under which, and the processes whereby, the coming-together of humansubjects results in recognizable personal or social change. Through the rudimentaryanalysis of two anecdotes, we aim to think these encounters together in a way that explores what each borrows from the other, the psychoanalytic in the theatrical, thetheatrical in the psychoanalytic, figuring each practice as differently committed to what we call the "publication of liveness". We argue that these "redundant" forms of humancontact continue to provide respite from group acceptance of narcissistic failure in the post-democratic era through their offer of a practice of waiting.
Research Interests: Affect and Subjectivity
This discussion of Miri Rozmarin's “Maternal Silence”(this issue) situates Rozmarin's article within a wider literature on motherhood and writing before moving on to argue that although a powerful account of maternal ethics,... more
This discussion of Miri Rozmarin's “Maternal Silence”(this issue) situates Rozmarin's article within a wider literature on motherhood and writing before moving on to argue that although a powerful account of maternal ethics, Rozmarin's call for a certain stepping aside from ...
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I am grateful to the editors and contributors for this wonderful collection of articles that respond to Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (Baraitser, 2009). Rather than restaging the arguments I made in the book, I attempt... more
I am grateful to the editors and contributors for this wonderful collection of articles that respond to Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (Baraitser, 2009). Rather than restaging the arguments I made in the book, I attempt here to extend my discussion of the maternal subject as a figure that disrupts or interrupts our notions of subjectivity and ethics. Following
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Leyla Navaro and Sharan L. Schwartzberg, in their edited collection, Envy, competition and gender, draw together a wide range of theoretical, clinical and group-orientated perspectives, in order to explore the ways in which gender... more
Leyla Navaro and Sharan L. Schwartzberg, in their edited collection, Envy, competition and gender, draw together a wide range of theoretical, clinical and group-orientated perspectives, in order to explore the ways in which gender operates in relation to envy ...