forgetting maternal time
Julia Kristeva against anti-maternalist feminism
[I]t seems obvious — and feminist groups become more aware of this when they attempt to broaden their audience — that the refusal of maternity cannot be a mass policy and that the majority of women today see the possibility for fulfilment, if not entirely at least to a large degree, in bringing a child into the world.
—Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time” (1979)
Just as time is of the utmost importance in all areas of life, time is an ever-present but little-theorised aspect of feminist thought. We discuss the perils of ageing, we push for more maternity leave, we discuss whether premature ejaculation is real — okay not many of us discuss that last point but still, time permeates feminist discourse. Age gap discourse is temporal discourse. Egg freezing discourse is temporal discourse. And so on. Temporal thought in feminism often centres motherhood. Below, I’ll introduce Julia Kristeva’s feminist thoughts on time. Kristeva, as far as I’m aware, is one of those feminists who reject the label.
Too often we seek to replace wombs with machines and metaphors. In the radical feminist tradition, much has been written against the erasure of the maternal body in religion and literature. Creation ex nihilo: wombless, womanless. Nevertheless, many feminists too have sought to eradicate the womb, and this critique has been wrapped up in a capitulation to patriarchal time. That sounds unusual, I’m sure. But I want to look at what exactly we might mean by “maternal time,” as opposed to some other kind of time, through Kristeva. No, this is not about physics, it’s not literally about time, it’s about living through time. Don’t get all Sokal on me.
Julia Kristeva, not a usual go-to thinker for me, mounts a vehement but deft critique of a lot of anti-maternal feminists of her time and earlier. She points out in her famous 1977 essay, “Stabat Mater,” that feminists have rightly criticised idealised images of motherhood, but have gone too far and conflated motherhood with the idealised image and tossed them both out together. “The result? — A negation of motherhood by some avant-garde feminist groups.” Kristeva does admit that it can be easy for totalitarians to use motherly concerns for their own aims, but that “it is not enough to ‘declaim against’ the reactionary role of mothers in the service of ‘male dominating power.’” Rather:
One would need to examine to what extent that role corresponds to the bio-symbolic latencies of motherhood and, on that basis, to try to understand… how their surge lays women open to the most fearsome manipulations, not to mention blinding, or pure and simple rejection by progressive activists who refuse to take a close look.
There’s a lot going on in this passage. What she’s getting at is relatively simple. She’s asking us to ask questions: What is it about maternal experience that makes women seem vulnerable to a reactionary turn? What biological and psychosocial aspects of maternity might lead women to act seemingly against their own interests, and thus lead progressive activists to ditch them? To put it in more concrete terms, perhaps the complicated maternal experiences that Kristeva outlines powerfully in her essay, of dignified dependence and vulnerability, lead to a greater desire for social safety. Biological and social necessities may align to make fascism seem a little more appealing than an unsafe metro car. Or maybe reactionaries are the only ones left who valorise mums. Who knows? Kristeva was writing at a different time and probably had other examples on her mind. Nevertheless it remains important to keep in mind that feminism has to offer mothers a clearly superior option to the Far Right. Setting aside my inability to think of many examples, the idea that we need to examine maternal life per se, its inherent biological and psychological influences, when considering its impact on politics has been useful for me.
In Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (1977), Kristeva writes of the experience of time in maternal life: “Heraclitus’ flux, Epicurus’ atoms, the whirling of dust in cabalic, Arab, and Indian mystics, and the stippled drawings of psychedelics — all seem better metaphors than the theories of Being, the logos, and its laws.” Kristeva is here pushing back against the idea that maternal experience is ordinarily, philosophically legible. It’s more legible in mystical or religious terms, as she discusses in a number of places. She is emphasising that maternal time is messy, not linear, not divisible into seconds on a clock. And she ties maternal time to deep time, the monumental time of species or cosmos rather than of the workday.
One of the reasons that some feminists rejected motherhood was its obfuscation of linear time. Kristeva writes, in “Women’s Time” (1979), that female life is associated with two kinds of time: cyclical time and monumental time, “repetition and eternity.” Monumental time is the deep or cosmic kind of time, “without cleavage or escape, which has so little to do with linear time (which passes) that the very word ‘temporality’ hardly fits[.]” Perhaps this could be clarified by a description in “Stabat Mater”: “an eternal flow that constitutes a carbon copy of the maternal receptacle…” Grasping what Kristeva means by monumental time is not necessary here, but if you feel like you’re picking up what she’s putting down vibes-wise you’ve likely got it. Whereas cyclical time is more ordinary, as she writes in “Women’s Time”: “cycles, gestation, the eternal recurrence of a biological rhythm that conforms to that of nature…” Kristeva isn’t just talking about menstruation and pregnancy; it would be awfully boring to say “the experience of menstruation is like a cycle, wow. Gestation takes like 9 months dude. And you can do it more than once. Crazy.” Nevertheless cyclical time is indubitably a maternal kind of time for her, even if not always so precisely attached to a biological clock, as she expresses in her metaphorical but interesting way. One might also think about women’s time through the lens of male vs. female orgasm. Sorry to bring that up but her generation of theorists rarely fail to.
There are the times of cycles and eternity, and there is a time of busy workdays; this split is of paramount importance, because “female subjectivity as it gives itself up to intuition becomes a problem with respect to a certain conception of time: time as project, teleology, linear and prospective unfolding: time as departure, progression and arrival — in other words, the time of history.” Mary Daly and Mary Harrington would disagree that teleology is un-female. Nevertheless, Kristeva’s point is clear. Time conceived of as working toward an end goal rather than looping back on itself or interpenetrating epochs is not very maternal, in her framework. Women’s time or maternal time are not so efficient in business terms. That produces a clash. Feminists must decide what to do with this clash between maternal time and historical time.
Kristeva identifies “three attitudes on the part of European feminists toward this conception of linear temporality,” the first wave who were pro-linearity, the second wave who were anti-linearity, and the new moderates. However, she acknowledges that the three phases she’s describing actually co-exist. One does not totally replace another.
Europe’s equivalent to the first-wave feminists, the “suffragists and… existential feminists, aspired to gain a place in linear time as the time of project and history.” This is not merely an effort toward girlboss feminism, or toward commie revolution, but both — it is generally integrationist. Instead of embracing women’s time, in all its irreducibility as Kristeva sees it, the first waver wants to get up at the same time in the morning as her husband. Or comrade. She wants to join the male way of life in the male way of time. Such things as maternity do not mesh with male time.
Then came the radical backlash. The feminists of the second wave who wanted to reject the time of normie life would include the likes of Mary Daly, if we permit ourselves to extend our scope to the US. In Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978), Daly writes that “gynocentric time/space is not measurable, bargainable,” and excoriates the “Time Keepers’ Lie,” urging women “to defy the Time Keepers’ schedules.” Daly contrasts tidal time, women’s time, with tidy time: precise, patriarchal, clock time. She’s a good example of the type of thinker Kristeva is referring to, but let’s get back to Europe. Kristeva writes that among the European feminists of the “second phase,” what we might call the second wave, “linear temporality has been almost totally refused…” And: “Such a feminism rejoins, on the one hand, the archaic (mythical) memory and, on the other, the cyclical or monumental temporality of marginal movements.” For the most part, Kristeva is not referring to feminists who critique tidy time as overtly as does Daly. Still, different feminisms imply different relations to time. Time is in fact one of the most important things in feminism.
It might be predictable that the third wave Kristeva identifies (mind you, this is the 1970s, a third wave in our Anglo sense is a decade off) learns from and moderates both prior waves. It is represented in “the mixture of the two attitudes — insertion into history and the radical refusal of the subjective limitations imposed by this history’s time…” The third stage strive for “a more flexible and free discourse,” a feminist discourse to be sure, but not one that binds women to tidal or tidy time so precisely. They comprehend yearning for “the slow, difficult and delightful apprenticeship in attentiveness, gentleness, forgetting oneself” that is motherhood. But they seek “[t]he ability to succeed in this path without masochism and without annihilating one’s affective, intellectual and professional personality — such would seem to be the stakes to be won through guiltless maternity.” In the final analysis, we must not think we can escape either men’s or women’s time fully, nor should we strive to. We must not think tidal time, maternity, has to surrender fully to tidy time, the time of careers. When I read maternalist feminist work today, this is the path I see, Kristeva’s third phase of temporal feminist thought.
Although Kristeva touches on a lot more points in the above works than I could hope to capture in one blog post, I want to finish with her grandest claim in “Women’s Time.” She recalls that “Hegel distinguished between female right (familial and religious) and male law (civil and political).” Then she writes: “if these practices of maternity, among others, were to be generalized, women themselves would be responsible for elaborating the appropriate legislation to check the violence to which, otherwise, both their children and men would be subject. But are they capable of doing so?” We can hope. I’m tempted to make an “all in good time” pun, but seriously — so much of feminist thought can be reimagined as a struggle over/for/against time. Allow Kristeva her grand vision of maternity.
Bergson's durree?