The Fluidity of Becoming. The Maternal Body in Feminist Views of Care, Worship and Theology (original) (raw)

2022, Care Ethics, Religion, and Spiritual Traditions

In this chapter care ethicist Inge van Nistelrooij argues for a new turn in care ethics. After the ‘political turn’ of the 1990s, when the majority of care ethicists abandoned the focus on mothering practices in which the works of Gilligan, Noddings, and Ruddick were rooted, Van Nistelrooij argues for a renewed and distinct attention to the subject of maternity. She argues that the experience of maternity – i.e., pregnancy, labor, lactation – is of a particular kind that makes mothers (be they female, male, non-binary, trans- or intersex, or other) still vulnerable to oppression, exploitation, and violence. Then, taking two artworks by Louise Bourgeois as heuristic guides, Van Nistelrooij explores the works of Ruddick (1989), Rich (1986), and Keller (2003) to give a new impetus to thinking about the mother’s body in care, worship, and theology. Surprisingly, religion has not only been detrimental to women’s and mothers’ experiences, but religious representations and (remnants of) texts can also help reinvigorate the meaning of our coming into life through somebody else’s body and of the experience of giving life. Particularly, the elements of fluidity and becoming help explore maternity as politically and morally relevant today and avoid the pitfalls of the pioneering care ethics’ works on maternity. Ultimately, Van Nistelrooij concludes by suggesting a reformulation of Fisher and Tronto’s famous definition of care, one that accounts for maternity in a new way. By including processes of becoming, caring can be viewed as less anthropocentric and less agentic. As such, it can avoid essentializing, naturalizing, or containing maternity to one gender, the private setting, and can gain renewed moral and political relevance.