ABSTRACT
MY READING OF Elshtain's argument for family reconstructive feminism indicates that feminist accounts of mothering that challenge individualism do not necessarily avoid essential motherhood by avoiding the issues of maternal embodiment and the material aspects of mothering. And because mind/body dualism is fundamental to both individualism and essential motherhood, feminist accounts of mothering must address the issues of maternal embodiment and the material aspects of mothering while also resisting mind/body dualism as strenuously as possible. My analysis of Beauvoir's account of mothering emphasizes a theory of embodied subjectivity implicit in it that may provide this sort of resistance to mind/body dualism. Beauvoir's view that embodied subjectivity is "strangely ambiguous/' and the ways in which maternal embodiment in particular resists Beauvoir's attempts to analyze it in terms of the immanence/transcendence distinction suggest understanding embodied subjectivity in terms of the reciprocal permeability and over-determination of embodiment and subjectivity. A theory of embodied subjectivity along these lines indicates that the experience of embodied subjectivity can be ambiguous,
contradictory, even incoherent. But does such a theory of embodied subjectivity enable feminist theory's resistance to essential motherhood? To address this question, I turn in this chapter to Sara Ruddick's work on mothering. One of the most influential theorists of mothering in contemporary U.S. feminism, Ruddick offers a very comprehensive account of mothering. She strives to include as many different aspects of mothering and as many different kinds of mothering as possible in her analysis. Ruddick's argument for a feminist, maternal peace politics is an instance of difference feminism's deployment of an analysis of women's difference as a paradigm for alternatives to individualism in social theory. So a consideration of Ruddick's work also allows further analysis of this aspect of difference feminism.
