Editors: Amrita Banerjee and Bonnie Mann

New Submission deadline: February 1st, 2014

The last two decades have witnessed growing philosophical scholarship on pregnancy, birth, and mothering – areas in which the discipline of philosophy has hitherto remained largely silent. Scholarship in these areas is philosophically important since it takes women’s embodied experience and maternal practice (a practice that has been historically placed in the realm of ‘feminine’ work) as serious domains of philosophical reflection and, more importantly, recognizes the potential of these domains for generating new knowledge in ethics, epistemology, ontology, etc.

While this work constitutes an important new development in feminist and philosophical inquiry, there are a number of critical gaps in the new literature. While reviewing some recent work on the topic for the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, Shelley M. Park notes the absence of the voices of “non-normative maternal subjects” (Park, 2012), that is, maternal subjects that are not “straight, biological, middle-class, able-bodied, white, western mothers of infants and very young children.” (Park, 2012) Social, cultural, economic, and political arrangements (such as race, nationality, sexual orientation, etc.) that anchor ‘non-normative’ maternal subjectivity, as well as ‘non-hegemonic’ contexts of mothering (such as mothering within non-democratic socio-political regimes, within the realities of developing nations, amidst war and devastation, across international borders and as part of global exchanges, etc.) are largely absent from the new scholarship. In addition, very rarely are resources from ‘non-Western’ philosophies, comparative philosophy, women of color feminist philosophies, and ‘non-Western’ feminism and global feminism, brought to bear on this topic by philosophers engaging it.

The volume we propose seeks to redress these deficits by focusing on ‘non–normative’ maternal subjects and contexts of analyses and/or ‘non-hegemonic’ philosophical traditions in philosophizing about pregnancy, child-bearing, and mothering. We would like to open up a space for philosophical reflections that take the perspective of maternal subjects who are lesbians, ‘non-Western’ women, women of color in the United States, women that find themselves as part of mixed race and multiracial families, migrant women that are part of the global workforce such as nannies and transnational surrogates, mothers with disabilities etc. as their critical points of departure. For the purposes of this volume, therefore, we welcome approaches that not only take maternal subjectivity and maternal experience seriously, but are committed to an ‘intersectional approach’ (that is, ones that approach the issue with sensitivity to multiple axes of oppression and privilege). Essays on any aspect of maternal experience or practice “from the margins,” which contribute to “new philosophical directions” on the topic are welcome.

Papers should be no more than 8000 words, inclusive of notes and bibliography, and accompanied by an abstract of no more than 200 words.

Please submit your paper to elixiramrita@gmail.com. If you have any questions, please email Bonnie Mann at bmann@uoregon.edu or Amrita Banerjee at elixiramrita@gmail.com.

Source: female-l@jku.at