Birth as Labor and Natality

Abstract

While the embodied subject has become a crucial site of theorization in both the study of religion and feminism, the maternal subject has not yet received consideration. As double, divided in bodies and psyches, subject to partial deaths, opaque to itself, continuous and bounded, of double ontological and legal status, perhaps complexly racialized, perhaps complexly sexed and gendered, the maternal subject defies a liberal anthropology. This paper turns to Hannah Arendt’s work and reception as an important path for consideration of the political import of maternality. Arendt perpetuates a strong private/public distinction and locates maternality in the realm of labor and decisively outside the polis. Birth and maternality as apolitical labor drew strong criticism from Arendt’s first generation of interpreters. Yet this also articulates “flesh-and-blood” aspects of maternality in ways that now deserve greater consideration. Arendt’s famous notion of natality as the source of human newness has been received with enthusiasm by many feminists. I show that Arendt, in part because of the theological heritage of her anthropology of the creature, adopts a problematically disembodied notion of birth, one that effaces the maternal subject in the production of the politics of citizens.