Refiguring the postmaternal : feminist responses to the forgetting of motherhood

This book explores the concept of the ‘postmaternal’ as a response to changing cultural, political and economicconditions for motherhood and responds to Julie Stephens’ contention that gender-neutral feminism has led to aforgetting of the maternal within feminist memory. In Confronting Postmaternal Thinking: Feminism, Memory, Care (2011) Stephens identifies a significant cultural anxiety about caregiving, nurturing and human dependency that she calls ‘postmaternal’ thinking. She argues that maternal forms of care have been rejected in the public sphere andmarginalised to the private domain through an elaborate process of cultural forgetting, in turn contributing to the current dominance of a degendered form of feminism.This book argues that refiguring postmaternalism requires opening up the maternal beyond the category of mothers and the nuclear family. The chapters in this edited volume contribute to the field of maternal studies byinvestigating the connections between maternalism, feminism and neoliberalism through diverse feminist theories,cases and methodologies.We challenge Stephens’ diagnosis of the ‘forgetting’ of certain forms of maternal practices from feminism’s history by highlighting the ongoing contested place of the maternal in feminist scholarship and activism for thelast five decades. We argue that the memorialising of the maternal in feminist scholarship needs to reflect its diverse legacies in the analyses of black feminism, socialist feminism and ecofeminism in order to destabilise the association of the maternal with neoliberalism and the depoliticisation of feminism. This book was originally published as a special issue of Australian Feminist Studies. Refiguring postmaternalism requires extending the maternal beyond mothers and heterosexual nuclear families, and the memorialization of the maternal needs to diversify to destabilise associations of the maternal with neoliberalism and the depoliticization of feminism. This book was first published as a special issue of Australian Feminist Studies.