Book Reviews by Petra Bueskens
Australasian Journal of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, 2023
In the cartoon 'Mummy was busy', renowned Australian cartoonist Michael Leunig depicts a baby who... more In the cartoon 'Mummy was busy', renowned Australian cartoonist Michael Leunig depicts a baby who has fallen out of his pram looking bereft on the sidewalk while his mother stares at her phone. Predictably, his cartoon was met with a riot of objections accusing the cartoonist of 'misogyny' and 'feminist baiting'. My point of departure is somewhat different: the artist has both a right and a duty to reflect the culture back to itself and to ask difficult questions. This paper draws on Winnicott's notion of 'transitional space' to examine the liminal zone of reflection, imagination, play and creativity where both children and artists reside. It asks if this space of reflection is closing in the internet age given the emotional reactivity that smartphone addiction generates.
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Hypatia, 2022
Hypatia (2022), 1–5
doi:10.1017/hyp.2022.29
Book Review
Modern Motherhood and Women’s Dual Ident... more Hypatia (2022), 1–5
doi:10.1017/hyp.2022.29
Book Review
Modern Motherhood and Women’s Dual Identities:
Rewriting the Sexual Contract. Petra Bueskens, New York:
Routledge, 2018 (ISBN 978-1-138-67742-5)
Mary Barbara Walsh
Political Science, Elmhurst University, Elmhurst, IL, USA
Email: walshm@elmhurst.edu
T
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Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, 2020
It has become a truism in much of the contemporary Western world that women suffer from their nee... more It has become a truism in much of the contemporary Western world that women suffer from their need to both work in the paid labor force and care for children. The ‘‘time bind,’’ ‘‘stalled revolution,’’ ‘‘cultural contradictions of motherhood,’’ ‘‘double shift,’’ and ‘‘you can’t have it all!’’ imperative signal in different ways the problematic nature of modern motherhood. What possibly could be added to the considerable literature that already exists on this topic? To my surprise, it turns out a lot. Petra Bueskens’ masterful new book, Modern Motherhood and Women’s Dual Identities, draws on political philosophy, history, sociology, and original, empirical research to cast a fresh eye on this ubiquitous and confounding problem. Through her multidisciplinary approach, Bueskens illuminates the core contradiction that lies at the heart of our contemporary conundrum: ‘‘modernity simultaneously frees women as individuals and constrains them as wives and mothers’’ (p. 86, emphasis in original).
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Studies in the Maternal , 2020
Stephens, J., 2019. Review of Modern Motherhood and Women’s Dual Identities: Rewriting the Sexual... more Stephens, J., 2019. Review of Modern Motherhood and Women’s Dual Identities: Rewriting the Sexual Contract. Studies in the Maternal, 11(1), p.10. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/sim.280
Encounters with scholarly work in the hybrid space that has come to be called ‘motherhood studies’ can be mixed. Empirical research framed within theoretical categories taken from feminism, philosophy, sociology or psychoanalysis is not always an easy fit. While this uneasiness is both a strength and a weakness in an emergent interdisciplinary field of inquiry, the challenge seems to be to develop a different way of theorising the maternal. This would include acknowledging the limits of previous approaches (including feminist ones), building on and extending existing research, traversing disciplinary boundaries and making a distinctive research and theoretical contribution of its own. Petra Bueskens’ Modern Motherhood and Women’s Dual Identities: Rewriting the Sexual Contract (2018) more than meets these challenges in an ambitious, wide-ranging, deeply historical and philosophical analysis of modernity, the liberal-democratic social contract and the paradoxical category of ‘individualised mother’.
Bueskens’ book is not simply about the contradictory roles women play as mothers (as the title may suggest), or just about mothers having a dual conflicting identity between the private and public spheres—even though the text covers these issues in detail. The experience of such familiar incompatibilities differs markedly depending on the class and cultural privilege of particular mothers. In the case of middle-class dual-income households, the unequal division of labour is increasingly outsourced, and the illusion of unencumbered individualised subjectivity can be maintained through ever more privatised and intensified forms of mothering. Instead, Bueskens identifies and theorises a different and more foundational structural duality that has produced two discordant modes of self for mothers.
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Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, 3(1-2), 17, 2019
Price: £105 hardcover Number of Pages: 334 pp. ISBN: 978-1-138-67742-5
Modern Motherhood and Wo... more Price: £105 hardcover Number of Pages: 334 pp. ISBN: 978-1-138-67742-5
Modern Motherhood and Women's Dual Identities: Rewriting the Sexual Contract presents an innovative and necessary intervention into a central dilemma in late modernity: the contradiction between western women's maternal and individualised selves. By identifying and examining the origins of the sexual contract, Petra Bueskens effectively demonstrates that its structural legacy acts to simultaneously constrain and liberate women. The principal insight of the book lies in the author's contention that women's freedom in the contemporary West is implicated in their continued subjugation as mothers under the 'new sexual contract'. This marks a theoretical evolution beyond existing feminist research which has established the existence of the polarity between maternal and autonomous selves as well as the perpetuation of gendered private and public spheres. Through an astute interpretation of sociological history and by conducting interviews with a group of 'revolving mothers', Bueskens is able to put forth a proposal for 'revolutionary change in the social order' (p. 304). The book can be organised into two complimentary approaches: firstly, an historical, theoretical and philosophical investigation and, secondly, a thematic case study of ten working mothers. Bueskens presents a detailed analysis of the birth of the modern social contract and the 'individual': an historical point from which, the author contends, Western society still draws its basic structure. Developed by the classical Western philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries, the foundational principles of social contract theory or classical liberalism dictated that all men are born free; that they are free and equal to each other; and any government should be determined by democratic consent and the rule of law. The establishment of sovereignty for each man marked a departure from traditional, feudal society in which the rule of the father was hierarchically implemented by the domains of the church, state and family. In classical liberalism, the rule of the father was intended to be passed down to the rule of the son, and, thus, the social contract was born. Bueskens builds her theoretical position largely on Carole Pateman's assertion that the social contract from its inception relied upon the existence of the sexual contract and, therefore, the subjection of women as wives and mothers. Although the social contract granted a natural right to egalitarianism for both sexes, it was based on what Pateman terms 'fraternal patriarchy' which continued to perceive the patriarchal family and women's subjection to male rule as the 'natural' order of civilised society. This asymmetry was fixed not just by 'natural laws' but by institutionalised legality as women's subjugation to men was written into property rights and the prohibition of full citizenship, including suffrage. In Bueskens' phrasing:
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Australian Women's Book Review, 2018
Sophia Brock 30 "Revolving Maternal Identities". Review of
Petra Bueskens. Modern Motherhood and ... more Sophia Brock 30 "Revolving Maternal Identities". Review of
Petra Bueskens. Modern Motherhood and Women's Dual Identities: Rewriting the Sexual Contract
Australian Women's Book Review, Volume 28.1 (2018)
Australian Women's Book Review
Editor: Carole Ferrier
ISSN: 1033 9434
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Psychotherapy and Counselling Journal of Australia, 2015
In her introduction, Bueskens demonstrates her formidable capacity for inspiring interdisciplinar... more In her introduction, Bueskens demonstrates her formidable capacity for inspiring interdisciplinary dialogue for she not only sign-posts the key developments in psychoanalysis and maternal studies but also encourages us to be productive readers. She arms us with some of the salient questions we might ask as we move through this text: Who is this subject we name “mother”? How might we unpack some of the fantasies that surround the mother/child dyad-arising both in the psychic and social realms, and how might we move towards a more radical reconceptualisation of the maternal where “the mother” is constituted as “an agent of psychic and social change” (2014, p. 61). As Bueskens asks: “What is the relationship between psychoanalysis and feminism and how does this impact our understanding of mothers? What does it look like – in theory and practice – to centre the mother’s subjectivity?“ (2014, p. 4).
The introduction to Motherhood & Psychoanalysis focuses on the psychic/social dichotomy internal to feminist psychoanalytic theory. Bueskens uses this theoretical tension as a vehicle through which to trace the historical/critical developments in both feminist and psychoanalytic understandings of the maternal as she organises her introductory discussion into a series of productive sub-sections from the early work of Freud through the critique of the neo-Freudians, the developments of Klein and Winnicott and into feminist critiques and theoretical developments in both the second and third waves. These sub-sections tease out nuances of the psychic/social binary within feminist psychoanalytic theory investigating “the acquisition of gender identity, the nucleus of the neuroses, the position of the “the mother” and maternal subjectivity” (2014, p. 4) and, at every turn, Bueskens argues for a re-reading of this relationship as she writes: “for me, neither pole – psyche or social – can be isolated as entirely autonomous from the other” (2014, p. 20). Interested in the intersection between social and symbolic change, Bueskens argues that feminists are invested in both positions and must traverse the line of social construction (of gender and motherhood) and psychic universals.
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The December 2015 (no. 68) edition of the UK based psychoanalytic journal Free Associations has a... more The December 2015 (no. 68) edition of the UK based psychoanalytic journal Free Associations has an excellent, richly descriptive review of my edited book Mothering and Psychoanalysis by Joanna Kellond. Here’s a few choice excerpts from her review:
“This section powerfully elucidates the complex ways in which ideas of subjectivity, attitudes to motherhood and social norms – all imbricated with economic imperatives – potentially collude in maintaining the neoliberal status quo.”
“Collectively, these essays explore both entrenched negative representations of the maternal and other discursive productions which offer new modes and possibilities for maternal signification and symbolisation. They thus play a role in the necessary re-imagining and transformation of the maternal beyond the terms of patriarchy.”
“[This section] continues this work of reimagining and redefinition, not least by foregrounding a move from the ‘infantocentric perspective’ common in much psychoanalytic theorising to a more intersubjective, even ‘maternocentric’, one (344).”
“This acknowledgement of the complex, multifaceted nature of maternal subjectivity provides a necessary redress to a rhetoric of idealisation that can leave mothers feeling inadequate.”
And finally,
“Bueskens is correct that the collection is eclectic, though it’s an eclecticism that works. Across the diverse papers certain themes recur, pulling them together into what feels like an important and timely conversation. The relationship between motherhood and neoliberalism, and the need to create new modes of signifying and symbolising the maternal beyond the terms of patriarchy are central themes that receive sophisticated and compelling exploration. These themes also speak to and feed into the collection’s abiding concern with not only an ethics, but a politics, of care. In this context, the maternal takes centre stage in both the theory and practice of imagining the world otherwise. As such, this collection will be an essential read for anyone concerned with this process of re-imagination, and with bringing the mother from ‘the shadows of our culture’ (Irigaray 1991: 35), into the light.”
You can read the full review here: http://freeassociations.org.uk/FA_New/OJS/index.php/fa/article/view/129
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Books by Petra Bueskens
Modern Motherhood and Women's Dual Identities: Rewriting the Sexual Contract, 2018
Why do women in contemporary western societies experience contradiction between their autonomous ... more Why do women in contemporary western societies experience contradiction between their autonomous and maternal selves? What are the origins of this contradiction and the associated ‘double shift’ that result in widespread calls to either ‘lean in’ or ‘opt out’? How are some mothers subverting these contradictions and finding meaningful ways of reconciling their autonomous and maternal selves?
In Modern Motherhood and Women’s Dual Identities, Petra Bueskens argues that western modernisation consigned women to the home and released them from it in historically unprecedented, yet interconnected, ways. Her ground-breaking formulation is that western women are free as ‘individuals’ and constrained as mothers, with the twist that it is the former that produces the latter.
Bueskens’ theoretical contribution consists of the identification and analysis of modern women’s duality drawing on political philosophy, feminist theory and sociology tracking the changing nature of discourses of women, freedom and motherhood across three centuries. While the current literature points to the pervasiveness of contradiction and double-shifts for mothers, very little attention has been paid to how (some) women are subverting contradiction and ‘rewriting the sexual contract’. Bridging this gap, Bueskens’ interviews ten ‘revolving mothers’ to reveal how periodic absence, exceeding the standard work-day, disrupts the default position assigned to mothers in the home, and in turn disturbs the gendered dynamics of household work.
A provocative and original work, Modern Motherhood and Women’s Dual Identities will appeal to graduate students and researchers interested in fields such as Women and Gender Studies, Sociology of Motherhood and Social and Political Theory.
Endorsements:
Petra Bueskens has been in the forefront of the new, and very welcome field of motherhood studies. In Modern Motherhood and Women's Dual Identities: Rewriting the Sexual Contact [she analyses] the psychic, social, cultural and political challenges posed by the dual identities of mother and citizen, elegantly and capaciously ranges across 400 years of theory, up to the present, that address them, as well as providing psychologically-attuned interview documentation of how women feel and think, daily and throughout their maternal lives.
Nancy J Chodorow
Author, The Reproduction of Mothering, The Power of Feelings, Individualizing Gender and Sexuality, and other works Professor Emerita of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley
This creative and theoretically rich book re-examines the social contradictions and penalties faced by women who want to be both caring mothers and autonomous public individuals. Taking us beyond the logic of the "sexual contract," Bueskens introduces us to the "revolving mothers" who offer a glimpse of the social revolution required to undo the gendered separation of spheres. A fascinating and compelling study.
Dr. Sharon Hays, author of the The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood
In this lucid, timely and important new book, Petra Bueskens takes up the formidable task of investigating the 'new sexual contract' in late modernity that leaves women strung out between the promise of autonomy in the public sphere, and the demands of motherhood that isolate and intensify mothering work in the home, both freeing and constraining women at once. Bueskens brings into view this impossible contradictory duality by producing both a new social theory of dualism, and the empirical evidence to show that it is possible to force changes in the sexual contract at the level of individual family organization. Through tracking a small group of women who both choose to mother and also spend protracted periods of time away from the family, she shows how these women produce radical shifts in the gendered dynamics of the household. Her bold and vital claim is that we can rewrite the sexual contract only if we understand the historical and contemporary double-bind that produces women's liberty as it undermines it, making motherhood still the unfinished business of feminism.
Dr. Lisa Baraitser, Reader in Psychosocial Studies, Birckbeck University, author of Maternal Encounters
Modern Mothers' Dual Identities: Rewriting the Sexual Contract cogently and compellingly elucidates a central debate in motherhood studies and a persistent dilemma in most mothers' lives; namely the contradiction between women's maternal and individualized selves. Through her lucid theoretical ruminations on the 'new sexual contract' in late modernity and by way of an innovative empirical study on 'revolving mothers', Bueskens delivers the needed blueprints to actualize the potential of what she incisively terms 'the individualized mother'.
Dr. Andrea O'Reilly, Professor of Women's Studies, York University, Toronto, Founder and Director of the Motherhood Initiative and author of Matricentric Feminism.
In this engaging and timely book, Petra Bueskens tackles a central challenge of modern life - how to reconcile the contradictory roles of women as citizens, individual workers and mothers. She traces the history through the theoretical views of motherhood, integrating the multiple strands in a sophisticated and fascinating synthesis. She highlights periodic maternal absence as a bridge between individualism and constraint, revealing both the ambiguities and a potential way to progress women's liberation. The book is an absorbing read that makes an invaluable contribution to our understanding of contemporary motherhood.
Dr. Lyn Craig, Professor of Sociology/ARC Future Fellow, The University of Melbourne, author of Contemporary Motherhood.
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Nancy Chodorow and The Reproduction of Mothering Forty Years On, 2020
This book analyzes Nancy Chodorow’s canonical book The Reproduction of Mothering, bringing togeth... more This book analyzes Nancy Chodorow’s canonical book The Reproduction of Mothering, bringing together an original essay from Nancy Chodorow and a host of outstanding international scholars—including Rosemary Balsam, Adrienne Harris, Elizabeth Abel, Madelon Sprengnether, Ilene Philipson, Meg Jay, Daphne de Marneffe, Alison Stone and Petra Bueskens—in a mix of memoir, festschrift, reflection, critical analysis and new directions in Chodorowian scholarship. In the 40 years since its publication, The Reproduction of Mothering has had a profound impact on scholarship across many disciplines including sociology, psychoanalysis, psychology, ethics, literary criticism and women’s and gender studies. Organized as a “reproduction of mothering scholarship”, this volume adopts a generationally differentiated structure weaving personal, political and scholarly essays.
This book will be of interest to scholars across the social sciences and humanities. It will bring Nancy Chodorow and her canonical work to a new generation showcasing classic and contemporary Chodorowian scholarship.
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Australian
Mothering in
Historical and
Contemporary
Perspective
Symposium
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Australian Mothering: Historical and Sociological Perspectives, 2019
This collection defines the field of maternal studies in Australia for the first time. Leading mo... more This collection defines the field of maternal studies in Australia for the first time. Leading motherhood researchers explore how mothering has evolved across Australian history as well as the joys and challenges of being a mother today. The contributors cover pregnancy, birth, relationships, childcare, domestic violence, time use, work, welfare, policy and psychology, from a diverse range of maternal perspectives. Utilising a matricentric feminist framework, Australian Mothering foregrounds the experiences, emotions and perspectives of mothers to better understand how Australian motherhood has developed historically and contemporaneously. Drawing upon their combined sociological and historical expertise, Bueskens and Pascoe Leahy have carefully curated a collection that presents compelling research on past and present perspectives on maternity in Australia, which will be relevant to researchers, advocates and policy makers interested in the changing role of mothers in Australian society.
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Australian Mothering: Historical and Sociological Perspectives, 2020
This collection defines the field of maternal studies in Australia for the first time. Leading mo... more This collection defines the field of maternal studies in Australia for the first time. Leading motherhood researchers explore how mothering has evolved across Australian history as well as the joys and challenges of being a mother today. The contributors cover pregnancy, birth, relationships, childcare, domestic violence, time use, work, welfare, policy and psychology, from a diverse range of maternal perspectives. Utilising a matricentric feminist framework, Australian Mothering foregrounds the experiences, emotions and perspectives of mothers to better understand how Australian motherhood has developed historically and contemporaneously. Drawing upon their combined sociological and historical expertise, Bueskens and Pascoe Leahy have carefully curated a collection that presents compelling research on past and present perspectives on maternity in Australia, which will be relevant to researchers, advocates and policy makers interested in the changing role of mothers in Australian society.
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"The collection of 23 essays provides an exciting snapshot of contemporary theorising on the mate... more "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!"
Assistant Professor Julie Kelso, Department of Philosophy and Literature, Bond University
"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."
Associate Professor Julie Stephens, College of Arts, Victoria University, Australia
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Book chapters by Petra Bueskens
Nancy Chodorow and The Reproduction of Mothering: Forty Years On, 2021
What is it that turns a book from a "product of its time" into a classic and, therefore, in some ... more What is it that turns a book from a "product of its time" into a classic and, therefore, in some important respects, into something timeless? Is it the content or its reception? Is it the author or her readers? In truth, it is a mercurial combination of the two, producing "something more". Not unlike the "analytic third" 1 created between two people in psychotherapy, there is a magic in a classic that exceeds the sum of its parts. It is this relationship between the idea and the audience, between the book and its historical moment, that ignites and endures in a classic. As Victor Hugo memorably put it, "nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come". 2 Nancy Chodorow's The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender is one such book.
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Australian Mothering: Historical and Sociological Perspectives, 2019
This chapter examines former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s withdrawal of welfare ben... more This chapter examines former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s withdrawal of welfare benefits to 150,000 single mothers on the day of her historic ‘misogyny speech’, 9 October 2012. The contrast between the rhetoric of equality and the Fair Incentives to Work Bill was striking because it symbolised the discrepancy between women’s standing as ‘individuals’ in liberal-democratic societies and their standing as mothers. This chapter develops the argument, outlined in the author’s new book, that women are normatively free as ‘individuals’ in liberal-democratic societies, but remain constrained as mothers performing unpaid, invisible, carework. Redefining women actively engaged in mothering as ‘unemployed’ as the Fair Incentives to Work Bill did is a pernicious outcome of unfettered liberalism, which presupposes that all individuals are free to compete on the same terms. In the context of declining marriage and declining welfare, it is argued that this erroneous assumption has produced the problem of women’s poverty.
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Australian Mothering: Historical and Sociological Perspectives, 2019
Theoretical overview of motherhood studies in Australia with discussion of relationship between A... more Theoretical overview of motherhood studies in Australia with discussion of relationship between Australia and international scholarship.
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Dangerous Ideas About Mothers, 2018
Bueskens, P. (2018). Maternal Subjectivity: From Containing to Creating. In C. Nelson & R. Robert... more Bueskens, P. (2018). Maternal Subjectivity: From Containing to Creating. In C. Nelson & R. Robertson (Eds.). Dangerous Ideas about Mothers. Perth: UWA Publishing, pp. 197-211. (Book Chapter)
Maternal subjectivity remains an enigma that is being pieced together from the fundament of myth, theory, experience, analysis, literature, psychotherapy, memoir and everyday life. This chapter will examine maternal subjectivity from within a feminist psychoanalytic framework exploring the shift from mother as object – literally the object in object relations theory – to mothers as subjects in their own right. We focus on recent feminist psychoanalytic analyses in the work of Lisa Baraitser and Alison Stone. Building on this work I develop a psychosocial account of maternal subjectivity that is not only transformative for mothers and infants, but also for civil society more generally. I make the argument that mothers are contiguous, contextual subjects who pose a potent alternative to the disembodied, individualist models of subjectivity founded in the post-Enlightenment, western canon, including in the canon of psychoanalysis. The maternal subject with her intergenerational tentacles, her porous relational orientation, her vulnerability and state of interruption offers a potent alternative to extant models of subjectivity. In this sense, I argue, her fertility is not just biological but also social and political. She possesses what I call a ‘civic fertility’ that is transforming workplace practices, public spaces and social norms.
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This is a forward to Andrea O'Reilly's new book Matricentric Feminism: Theory, Activism, Practice... more This is a forward to Andrea O'Reilly's new book Matricentric Feminism: Theory, Activism, Practice (Demeter Press, 2016)
"Mothers are, O’Reilly contends, the unfinished business of feminism.
Perhaps this is why there is still such ambivalence around the
topic and why motherhood is so often conflated with “essentialism”
and dismissed as the realm of the privileged. Sadly, as O’Reilly
shows, such charges often come from within academic feminism
itself. Could anything be further from the truth? Motherhood is
itself an index of oppression as we can see in the career profiles and
interrupted work histories, income, leisure (or lack thereof), and
domestic inequality of mothers. Indeed, it is on this basis that a
matricentric feminism is needed!"
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Uploads
Book Reviews by Petra Bueskens
doi:10.1017/hyp.2022.29
Book Review
Modern Motherhood and Women’s Dual Identities:
Rewriting the Sexual Contract. Petra Bueskens, New York:
Routledge, 2018 (ISBN 978-1-138-67742-5)
Mary Barbara Walsh
Political Science, Elmhurst University, Elmhurst, IL, USA
Email: walshm@elmhurst.edu
T
Encounters with scholarly work in the hybrid space that has come to be called ‘motherhood studies’ can be mixed. Empirical research framed within theoretical categories taken from feminism, philosophy, sociology or psychoanalysis is not always an easy fit. While this uneasiness is both a strength and a weakness in an emergent interdisciplinary field of inquiry, the challenge seems to be to develop a different way of theorising the maternal. This would include acknowledging the limits of previous approaches (including feminist ones), building on and extending existing research, traversing disciplinary boundaries and making a distinctive research and theoretical contribution of its own. Petra Bueskens’ Modern Motherhood and Women’s Dual Identities: Rewriting the Sexual Contract (2018) more than meets these challenges in an ambitious, wide-ranging, deeply historical and philosophical analysis of modernity, the liberal-democratic social contract and the paradoxical category of ‘individualised mother’.
Bueskens’ book is not simply about the contradictory roles women play as mothers (as the title may suggest), or just about mothers having a dual conflicting identity between the private and public spheres—even though the text covers these issues in detail. The experience of such familiar incompatibilities differs markedly depending on the class and cultural privilege of particular mothers. In the case of middle-class dual-income households, the unequal division of labour is increasingly outsourced, and the illusion of unencumbered individualised subjectivity can be maintained through ever more privatised and intensified forms of mothering. Instead, Bueskens identifies and theorises a different and more foundational structural duality that has produced two discordant modes of self for mothers.
Modern Motherhood and Women's Dual Identities: Rewriting the Sexual Contract presents an innovative and necessary intervention into a central dilemma in late modernity: the contradiction between western women's maternal and individualised selves. By identifying and examining the origins of the sexual contract, Petra Bueskens effectively demonstrates that its structural legacy acts to simultaneously constrain and liberate women. The principal insight of the book lies in the author's contention that women's freedom in the contemporary West is implicated in their continued subjugation as mothers under the 'new sexual contract'. This marks a theoretical evolution beyond existing feminist research which has established the existence of the polarity between maternal and autonomous selves as well as the perpetuation of gendered private and public spheres. Through an astute interpretation of sociological history and by conducting interviews with a group of 'revolving mothers', Bueskens is able to put forth a proposal for 'revolutionary change in the social order' (p. 304). The book can be organised into two complimentary approaches: firstly, an historical, theoretical and philosophical investigation and, secondly, a thematic case study of ten working mothers. Bueskens presents a detailed analysis of the birth of the modern social contract and the 'individual': an historical point from which, the author contends, Western society still draws its basic structure. Developed by the classical Western philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries, the foundational principles of social contract theory or classical liberalism dictated that all men are born free; that they are free and equal to each other; and any government should be determined by democratic consent and the rule of law. The establishment of sovereignty for each man marked a departure from traditional, feudal society in which the rule of the father was hierarchically implemented by the domains of the church, state and family. In classical liberalism, the rule of the father was intended to be passed down to the rule of the son, and, thus, the social contract was born. Bueskens builds her theoretical position largely on Carole Pateman's assertion that the social contract from its inception relied upon the existence of the sexual contract and, therefore, the subjection of women as wives and mothers. Although the social contract granted a natural right to egalitarianism for both sexes, it was based on what Pateman terms 'fraternal patriarchy' which continued to perceive the patriarchal family and women's subjection to male rule as the 'natural' order of civilised society. This asymmetry was fixed not just by 'natural laws' but by institutionalised legality as women's subjugation to men was written into property rights and the prohibition of full citizenship, including suffrage. In Bueskens' phrasing:
Petra Bueskens. Modern Motherhood and Women's Dual Identities: Rewriting the Sexual Contract
Australian Women's Book Review, Volume 28.1 (2018)
Australian Women's Book Review
Editor: Carole Ferrier
ISSN: 1033 9434
The introduction to Motherhood & Psychoanalysis focuses on the psychic/social dichotomy internal to feminist psychoanalytic theory. Bueskens uses this theoretical tension as a vehicle through which to trace the historical/critical developments in both feminist and psychoanalytic understandings of the maternal as she organises her introductory discussion into a series of productive sub-sections from the early work of Freud through the critique of the neo-Freudians, the developments of Klein and Winnicott and into feminist critiques and theoretical developments in both the second and third waves. These sub-sections tease out nuances of the psychic/social binary within feminist psychoanalytic theory investigating “the acquisition of gender identity, the nucleus of the neuroses, the position of the “the mother” and maternal subjectivity” (2014, p. 4) and, at every turn, Bueskens argues for a re-reading of this relationship as she writes: “for me, neither pole – psyche or social – can be isolated as entirely autonomous from the other” (2014, p. 20). Interested in the intersection between social and symbolic change, Bueskens argues that feminists are invested in both positions and must traverse the line of social construction (of gender and motherhood) and psychic universals.
“This section powerfully elucidates the complex ways in which ideas of subjectivity, attitudes to motherhood and social norms – all imbricated with economic imperatives – potentially collude in maintaining the neoliberal status quo.”
“Collectively, these essays explore both entrenched negative representations of the maternal and other discursive productions which offer new modes and possibilities for maternal signification and symbolisation. They thus play a role in the necessary re-imagining and transformation of the maternal beyond the terms of patriarchy.”
“[This section] continues this work of reimagining and redefinition, not least by foregrounding a move from the ‘infantocentric perspective’ common in much psychoanalytic theorising to a more intersubjective, even ‘maternocentric’, one (344).”
“This acknowledgement of the complex, multifaceted nature of maternal subjectivity provides a necessary redress to a rhetoric of idealisation that can leave mothers feeling inadequate.”
And finally,
“Bueskens is correct that the collection is eclectic, though it’s an eclecticism that works. Across the diverse papers certain themes recur, pulling them together into what feels like an important and timely conversation. The relationship between motherhood and neoliberalism, and the need to create new modes of signifying and symbolising the maternal beyond the terms of patriarchy are central themes that receive sophisticated and compelling exploration. These themes also speak to and feed into the collection’s abiding concern with not only an ethics, but a politics, of care. In this context, the maternal takes centre stage in both the theory and practice of imagining the world otherwise. As such, this collection will be an essential read for anyone concerned with this process of re-imagination, and with bringing the mother from ‘the shadows of our culture’ (Irigaray 1991: 35), into the light.”
You can read the full review here: http://freeassociations.org.uk/FA_New/OJS/index.php/fa/article/view/129
Books by Petra Bueskens
In Modern Motherhood and Women’s Dual Identities, Petra Bueskens argues that western modernisation consigned women to the home and released them from it in historically unprecedented, yet interconnected, ways. Her ground-breaking formulation is that western women are free as ‘individuals’ and constrained as mothers, with the twist that it is the former that produces the latter.
Bueskens’ theoretical contribution consists of the identification and analysis of modern women’s duality drawing on political philosophy, feminist theory and sociology tracking the changing nature of discourses of women, freedom and motherhood across three centuries. While the current literature points to the pervasiveness of contradiction and double-shifts for mothers, very little attention has been paid to how (some) women are subverting contradiction and ‘rewriting the sexual contract’. Bridging this gap, Bueskens’ interviews ten ‘revolving mothers’ to reveal how periodic absence, exceeding the standard work-day, disrupts the default position assigned to mothers in the home, and in turn disturbs the gendered dynamics of household work.
A provocative and original work, Modern Motherhood and Women’s Dual Identities will appeal to graduate students and researchers interested in fields such as Women and Gender Studies, Sociology of Motherhood and Social and Political Theory.
Endorsements:
Petra Bueskens has been in the forefront of the new, and very welcome field of motherhood studies. In Modern Motherhood and Women's Dual Identities: Rewriting the Sexual Contact [she analyses] the psychic, social, cultural and political challenges posed by the dual identities of mother and citizen, elegantly and capaciously ranges across 400 years of theory, up to the present, that address them, as well as providing psychologically-attuned interview documentation of how women feel and think, daily and throughout their maternal lives.
Nancy J Chodorow
Author, The Reproduction of Mothering, The Power of Feelings, Individualizing Gender and Sexuality, and other works Professor Emerita of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley
This creative and theoretically rich book re-examines the social contradictions and penalties faced by women who want to be both caring mothers and autonomous public individuals. Taking us beyond the logic of the "sexual contract," Bueskens introduces us to the "revolving mothers" who offer a glimpse of the social revolution required to undo the gendered separation of spheres. A fascinating and compelling study.
Dr. Sharon Hays, author of the The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood
In this lucid, timely and important new book, Petra Bueskens takes up the formidable task of investigating the 'new sexual contract' in late modernity that leaves women strung out between the promise of autonomy in the public sphere, and the demands of motherhood that isolate and intensify mothering work in the home, both freeing and constraining women at once. Bueskens brings into view this impossible contradictory duality by producing both a new social theory of dualism, and the empirical evidence to show that it is possible to force changes in the sexual contract at the level of individual family organization. Through tracking a small group of women who both choose to mother and also spend protracted periods of time away from the family, she shows how these women produce radical shifts in the gendered dynamics of the household. Her bold and vital claim is that we can rewrite the sexual contract only if we understand the historical and contemporary double-bind that produces women's liberty as it undermines it, making motherhood still the unfinished business of feminism.
Dr. Lisa Baraitser, Reader in Psychosocial Studies, Birckbeck University, author of Maternal Encounters
Modern Mothers' Dual Identities: Rewriting the Sexual Contract cogently and compellingly elucidates a central debate in motherhood studies and a persistent dilemma in most mothers' lives; namely the contradiction between women's maternal and individualized selves. Through her lucid theoretical ruminations on the 'new sexual contract' in late modernity and by way of an innovative empirical study on 'revolving mothers', Bueskens delivers the needed blueprints to actualize the potential of what she incisively terms 'the individualized mother'.
Dr. Andrea O'Reilly, Professor of Women's Studies, York University, Toronto, Founder and Director of the Motherhood Initiative and author of Matricentric Feminism.
In this engaging and timely book, Petra Bueskens tackles a central challenge of modern life - how to reconcile the contradictory roles of women as citizens, individual workers and mothers. She traces the history through the theoretical views of motherhood, integrating the multiple strands in a sophisticated and fascinating synthesis. She highlights periodic maternal absence as a bridge between individualism and constraint, revealing both the ambiguities and a potential way to progress women's liberation. The book is an absorbing read that makes an invaluable contribution to our understanding of contemporary motherhood.
Dr. Lyn Craig, Professor of Sociology/ARC Future Fellow, The University of Melbourne, author of Contemporary Motherhood.
This book will be of interest to scholars across the social sciences and humanities. It will bring Nancy Chodorow and her canonical work to a new generation showcasing classic and contemporary Chodorowian scholarship.
Assistant Professor Julie Kelso, Department of Philosophy and Literature, Bond University
"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."
Associate Professor Julie Stephens, College of Arts, Victoria University, Australia
Book chapters by Petra Bueskens
Maternal subjectivity remains an enigma that is being pieced together from the fundament of myth, theory, experience, analysis, literature, psychotherapy, memoir and everyday life. This chapter will examine maternal subjectivity from within a feminist psychoanalytic framework exploring the shift from mother as object – literally the object in object relations theory – to mothers as subjects in their own right. We focus on recent feminist psychoanalytic analyses in the work of Lisa Baraitser and Alison Stone. Building on this work I develop a psychosocial account of maternal subjectivity that is not only transformative for mothers and infants, but also for civil society more generally. I make the argument that mothers are contiguous, contextual subjects who pose a potent alternative to the disembodied, individualist models of subjectivity founded in the post-Enlightenment, western canon, including in the canon of psychoanalysis. The maternal subject with her intergenerational tentacles, her porous relational orientation, her vulnerability and state of interruption offers a potent alternative to extant models of subjectivity. In this sense, I argue, her fertility is not just biological but also social and political. She possesses what I call a ‘civic fertility’ that is transforming workplace practices, public spaces and social norms.
"Mothers are, O’Reilly contends, the unfinished business of feminism.
Perhaps this is why there is still such ambivalence around the
topic and why motherhood is so often conflated with “essentialism”
and dismissed as the realm of the privileged. Sadly, as O’Reilly
shows, such charges often come from within academic feminism
itself. Could anything be further from the truth? Motherhood is
itself an index of oppression as we can see in the career profiles and
interrupted work histories, income, leisure (or lack thereof), and
domestic inequality of mothers. Indeed, it is on this basis that a
matricentric feminism is needed!"
doi:10.1017/hyp.2022.29
Book Review
Modern Motherhood and Women’s Dual Identities:
Rewriting the Sexual Contract. Petra Bueskens, New York:
Routledge, 2018 (ISBN 978-1-138-67742-5)
Mary Barbara Walsh
Political Science, Elmhurst University, Elmhurst, IL, USA
Email: walshm@elmhurst.edu
T
Encounters with scholarly work in the hybrid space that has come to be called ‘motherhood studies’ can be mixed. Empirical research framed within theoretical categories taken from feminism, philosophy, sociology or psychoanalysis is not always an easy fit. While this uneasiness is both a strength and a weakness in an emergent interdisciplinary field of inquiry, the challenge seems to be to develop a different way of theorising the maternal. This would include acknowledging the limits of previous approaches (including feminist ones), building on and extending existing research, traversing disciplinary boundaries and making a distinctive research and theoretical contribution of its own. Petra Bueskens’ Modern Motherhood and Women’s Dual Identities: Rewriting the Sexual Contract (2018) more than meets these challenges in an ambitious, wide-ranging, deeply historical and philosophical analysis of modernity, the liberal-democratic social contract and the paradoxical category of ‘individualised mother’.
Bueskens’ book is not simply about the contradictory roles women play as mothers (as the title may suggest), or just about mothers having a dual conflicting identity between the private and public spheres—even though the text covers these issues in detail. The experience of such familiar incompatibilities differs markedly depending on the class and cultural privilege of particular mothers. In the case of middle-class dual-income households, the unequal division of labour is increasingly outsourced, and the illusion of unencumbered individualised subjectivity can be maintained through ever more privatised and intensified forms of mothering. Instead, Bueskens identifies and theorises a different and more foundational structural duality that has produced two discordant modes of self for mothers.
Modern Motherhood and Women's Dual Identities: Rewriting the Sexual Contract presents an innovative and necessary intervention into a central dilemma in late modernity: the contradiction between western women's maternal and individualised selves. By identifying and examining the origins of the sexual contract, Petra Bueskens effectively demonstrates that its structural legacy acts to simultaneously constrain and liberate women. The principal insight of the book lies in the author's contention that women's freedom in the contemporary West is implicated in their continued subjugation as mothers under the 'new sexual contract'. This marks a theoretical evolution beyond existing feminist research which has established the existence of the polarity between maternal and autonomous selves as well as the perpetuation of gendered private and public spheres. Through an astute interpretation of sociological history and by conducting interviews with a group of 'revolving mothers', Bueskens is able to put forth a proposal for 'revolutionary change in the social order' (p. 304). The book can be organised into two complimentary approaches: firstly, an historical, theoretical and philosophical investigation and, secondly, a thematic case study of ten working mothers. Bueskens presents a detailed analysis of the birth of the modern social contract and the 'individual': an historical point from which, the author contends, Western society still draws its basic structure. Developed by the classical Western philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries, the foundational principles of social contract theory or classical liberalism dictated that all men are born free; that they are free and equal to each other; and any government should be determined by democratic consent and the rule of law. The establishment of sovereignty for each man marked a departure from traditional, feudal society in which the rule of the father was hierarchically implemented by the domains of the church, state and family. In classical liberalism, the rule of the father was intended to be passed down to the rule of the son, and, thus, the social contract was born. Bueskens builds her theoretical position largely on Carole Pateman's assertion that the social contract from its inception relied upon the existence of the sexual contract and, therefore, the subjection of women as wives and mothers. Although the social contract granted a natural right to egalitarianism for both sexes, it was based on what Pateman terms 'fraternal patriarchy' which continued to perceive the patriarchal family and women's subjection to male rule as the 'natural' order of civilised society. This asymmetry was fixed not just by 'natural laws' but by institutionalised legality as women's subjugation to men was written into property rights and the prohibition of full citizenship, including suffrage. In Bueskens' phrasing:
Petra Bueskens. Modern Motherhood and Women's Dual Identities: Rewriting the Sexual Contract
Australian Women's Book Review, Volume 28.1 (2018)
Australian Women's Book Review
Editor: Carole Ferrier
ISSN: 1033 9434
The introduction to Motherhood & Psychoanalysis focuses on the psychic/social dichotomy internal to feminist psychoanalytic theory. Bueskens uses this theoretical tension as a vehicle through which to trace the historical/critical developments in both feminist and psychoanalytic understandings of the maternal as she organises her introductory discussion into a series of productive sub-sections from the early work of Freud through the critique of the neo-Freudians, the developments of Klein and Winnicott and into feminist critiques and theoretical developments in both the second and third waves. These sub-sections tease out nuances of the psychic/social binary within feminist psychoanalytic theory investigating “the acquisition of gender identity, the nucleus of the neuroses, the position of the “the mother” and maternal subjectivity” (2014, p. 4) and, at every turn, Bueskens argues for a re-reading of this relationship as she writes: “for me, neither pole – psyche or social – can be isolated as entirely autonomous from the other” (2014, p. 20). Interested in the intersection between social and symbolic change, Bueskens argues that feminists are invested in both positions and must traverse the line of social construction (of gender and motherhood) and psychic universals.
“This section powerfully elucidates the complex ways in which ideas of subjectivity, attitudes to motherhood and social norms – all imbricated with economic imperatives – potentially collude in maintaining the neoliberal status quo.”
“Collectively, these essays explore both entrenched negative representations of the maternal and other discursive productions which offer new modes and possibilities for maternal signification and symbolisation. They thus play a role in the necessary re-imagining and transformation of the maternal beyond the terms of patriarchy.”
“[This section] continues this work of reimagining and redefinition, not least by foregrounding a move from the ‘infantocentric perspective’ common in much psychoanalytic theorising to a more intersubjective, even ‘maternocentric’, one (344).”
“This acknowledgement of the complex, multifaceted nature of maternal subjectivity provides a necessary redress to a rhetoric of idealisation that can leave mothers feeling inadequate.”
And finally,
“Bueskens is correct that the collection is eclectic, though it’s an eclecticism that works. Across the diverse papers certain themes recur, pulling them together into what feels like an important and timely conversation. The relationship between motherhood and neoliberalism, and the need to create new modes of signifying and symbolising the maternal beyond the terms of patriarchy are central themes that receive sophisticated and compelling exploration. These themes also speak to and feed into the collection’s abiding concern with not only an ethics, but a politics, of care. In this context, the maternal takes centre stage in both the theory and practice of imagining the world otherwise. As such, this collection will be an essential read for anyone concerned with this process of re-imagination, and with bringing the mother from ‘the shadows of our culture’ (Irigaray 1991: 35), into the light.”
You can read the full review here: http://freeassociations.org.uk/FA_New/OJS/index.php/fa/article/view/129
In Modern Motherhood and Women’s Dual Identities, Petra Bueskens argues that western modernisation consigned women to the home and released them from it in historically unprecedented, yet interconnected, ways. Her ground-breaking formulation is that western women are free as ‘individuals’ and constrained as mothers, with the twist that it is the former that produces the latter.
Bueskens’ theoretical contribution consists of the identification and analysis of modern women’s duality drawing on political philosophy, feminist theory and sociology tracking the changing nature of discourses of women, freedom and motherhood across three centuries. While the current literature points to the pervasiveness of contradiction and double-shifts for mothers, very little attention has been paid to how (some) women are subverting contradiction and ‘rewriting the sexual contract’. Bridging this gap, Bueskens’ interviews ten ‘revolving mothers’ to reveal how periodic absence, exceeding the standard work-day, disrupts the default position assigned to mothers in the home, and in turn disturbs the gendered dynamics of household work.
A provocative and original work, Modern Motherhood and Women’s Dual Identities will appeal to graduate students and researchers interested in fields such as Women and Gender Studies, Sociology of Motherhood and Social and Political Theory.
Endorsements:
Petra Bueskens has been in the forefront of the new, and very welcome field of motherhood studies. In Modern Motherhood and Women's Dual Identities: Rewriting the Sexual Contact [she analyses] the psychic, social, cultural and political challenges posed by the dual identities of mother and citizen, elegantly and capaciously ranges across 400 years of theory, up to the present, that address them, as well as providing psychologically-attuned interview documentation of how women feel and think, daily and throughout their maternal lives.
Nancy J Chodorow
Author, The Reproduction of Mothering, The Power of Feelings, Individualizing Gender and Sexuality, and other works Professor Emerita of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley
This creative and theoretically rich book re-examines the social contradictions and penalties faced by women who want to be both caring mothers and autonomous public individuals. Taking us beyond the logic of the "sexual contract," Bueskens introduces us to the "revolving mothers" who offer a glimpse of the social revolution required to undo the gendered separation of spheres. A fascinating and compelling study.
Dr. Sharon Hays, author of the The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood
In this lucid, timely and important new book, Petra Bueskens takes up the formidable task of investigating the 'new sexual contract' in late modernity that leaves women strung out between the promise of autonomy in the public sphere, and the demands of motherhood that isolate and intensify mothering work in the home, both freeing and constraining women at once. Bueskens brings into view this impossible contradictory duality by producing both a new social theory of dualism, and the empirical evidence to show that it is possible to force changes in the sexual contract at the level of individual family organization. Through tracking a small group of women who both choose to mother and also spend protracted periods of time away from the family, she shows how these women produce radical shifts in the gendered dynamics of the household. Her bold and vital claim is that we can rewrite the sexual contract only if we understand the historical and contemporary double-bind that produces women's liberty as it undermines it, making motherhood still the unfinished business of feminism.
Dr. Lisa Baraitser, Reader in Psychosocial Studies, Birckbeck University, author of Maternal Encounters
Modern Mothers' Dual Identities: Rewriting the Sexual Contract cogently and compellingly elucidates a central debate in motherhood studies and a persistent dilemma in most mothers' lives; namely the contradiction between women's maternal and individualized selves. Through her lucid theoretical ruminations on the 'new sexual contract' in late modernity and by way of an innovative empirical study on 'revolving mothers', Bueskens delivers the needed blueprints to actualize the potential of what she incisively terms 'the individualized mother'.
Dr. Andrea O'Reilly, Professor of Women's Studies, York University, Toronto, Founder and Director of the Motherhood Initiative and author of Matricentric Feminism.
In this engaging and timely book, Petra Bueskens tackles a central challenge of modern life - how to reconcile the contradictory roles of women as citizens, individual workers and mothers. She traces the history through the theoretical views of motherhood, integrating the multiple strands in a sophisticated and fascinating synthesis. She highlights periodic maternal absence as a bridge between individualism and constraint, revealing both the ambiguities and a potential way to progress women's liberation. The book is an absorbing read that makes an invaluable contribution to our understanding of contemporary motherhood.
Dr. Lyn Craig, Professor of Sociology/ARC Future Fellow, The University of Melbourne, author of Contemporary Motherhood.
This book will be of interest to scholars across the social sciences and humanities. It will bring Nancy Chodorow and her canonical work to a new generation showcasing classic and contemporary Chodorowian scholarship.
Assistant Professor Julie Kelso, Department of Philosophy and Literature, Bond University
"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."
Associate Professor Julie Stephens, College of Arts, Victoria University, Australia
Maternal subjectivity remains an enigma that is being pieced together from the fundament of myth, theory, experience, analysis, literature, psychotherapy, memoir and everyday life. This chapter will examine maternal subjectivity from within a feminist psychoanalytic framework exploring the shift from mother as object – literally the object in object relations theory – to mothers as subjects in their own right. We focus on recent feminist psychoanalytic analyses in the work of Lisa Baraitser and Alison Stone. Building on this work I develop a psychosocial account of maternal subjectivity that is not only transformative for mothers and infants, but also for civil society more generally. I make the argument that mothers are contiguous, contextual subjects who pose a potent alternative to the disembodied, individualist models of subjectivity founded in the post-Enlightenment, western canon, including in the canon of psychoanalysis. The maternal subject with her intergenerational tentacles, her porous relational orientation, her vulnerability and state of interruption offers a potent alternative to extant models of subjectivity. In this sense, I argue, her fertility is not just biological but also social and political. She possesses what I call a ‘civic fertility’ that is transforming workplace practices, public spaces and social norms.
"Mothers are, O’Reilly contends, the unfinished business of feminism.
Perhaps this is why there is still such ambivalence around the
topic and why motherhood is so often conflated with “essentialism”
and dismissed as the realm of the privileged. Sadly, as O’Reilly
shows, such charges often come from within academic feminism
itself. Could anything be further from the truth? Motherhood is
itself an index of oppression as we can see in the career profiles and
interrupted work histories, income, leisure (or lack thereof), and
domestic inequality of mothers. Indeed, it is on this basis that a
matricentric feminism is needed!"
Although the ideology of identity politics remains hegemonic in the academy and in many social institutions, a growing—and arguably necessary—body of critique has been emerging. These critiques have emanated both from the arbiters of the so-called silent majority and from those on the Left who are concerned by the displacement of class by identity and by the unremitting politics of grievance. It is time to interrogate these important critiques in the context of the woman question.