ABSTRACT
This article provides a considered response to all the contributions in this special issue on ‘Refiguring the Postmaternal’. It reflects on the new possibilities of postmaternalism as advanced and extended by each contributing author. It also attempts to reassert the idea of the postmaternal as a cultural anxiety about care and dependency and the need for ‘maternal thinking’. These are reinforced as important interpretive frames, while at the same time as paying particular attention to the limitations of these conceptions. Some of the recent literature on maternalism is discussed and this in turn raises questions about the widespread feminist discomfort around maternalism and its many historical and contemporary associations. A notion of the maternal as limit is introduced as a possible rich area for further investigation. The article ends with some policy examples of what a re-maternalised public sphere might look like. It calls for a cultural remembering of maternalist activism, alongside striving to develop alternative feminist visions for these postmaternal times.
