Introduction: Maternal Bodies

It gives me great pleasure to introduce Hypatia's special issue on maternal bodies. All of the essays in this issue take corporeal, socially embedded, agential maternal bodies as objects of theoretical attention in their own right. The essays bring a dazzling array of theoretical tools to the task, including the texts, methods, and disciplinary training provided by continental and analytic philosophy, clinical medicine, Talmudic scholarship, feminist theory, art history, anthropology, bioethics, and literary theory. Collectively, the essays place no sharp boundaries around which bodies count as 'maternal,' but rather find the embodied maternal in women who are trying to conceive, pregnant and birthing women, adoptive mothers, birthmothers who give their children up for adoption, women who donate and "adopt" gametes, and women who care for infants and children—as well as in works of art, science, and propaganda that attempt to capture, represent, erase or subvert maternal embodiment. While second-wave feminists often organized their critiques around a divide between nature and culture, and feminist philosophers in the 1980s and 1990s carefully challenged and deconstructed this distinction, all of the essays in this volume represent what I see as a healthy and exciting new era in feminist philosophy: they each take for granted that the "natural" body and the culture in which it is embedded are mutually constitutive, and, rather than spending their time hammering this point home, they get down to the business of critically and philosophically interrogating natural, enculturated maternal bodies.

In my view, this is the perfect time to thematize maternal bodies as objects of philosophical attention, for at least two reasons.

First, the focus on maternal bodies brings together two central themes in feminist philosophy. On the one hand, over the last several decades, feminist philosophers (such as Nancy Chodorow, Eva Kittay, Sara Ruddick, and Patrice DiQuinzio) have exposed motherhood and maternality as rich and fertile terrains for ethics, social and political philosophy, and even epistemology and aesthetics. At the same time, a growing number of philosophers—with feminist philosophers at the forefront—have argued for the central importance of the lived, enculturated, material body. Feminist scholars such as Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Elizabeth Grosz, and Susan Bordo have shown us how central philosophical questions about identity, meaning, and value gain depth and clarity when asked as questions about embodied and materially situated agents marked by differences along lines of gender, race, class, sexuality, shape, and capacity; and constrained and formed by skin and flesh, generation and decay. This issue brings these two conversations in feminist philosophy together. Its essays explore maternal bodies as they are positioned in culture; differentiated; represented; valued as appropriate or inappropriate; constituted in relation to the bodies of fetuses, children, women who are not mothers, and the divine; negotiated in relationship to new technologies; sites of distinctive skills and practices; and sites of agency, responsibility, integrity, and vulnerability.

Second, after centuries of near-banishment from the mainstream philosophical landscape, reproduction—a process that is surely as far-reaching and as fundamental to what it means to be human as any, but one that has been scorned by philosophers because of its association with the bodily and with the feminine—has recently become a major focus of philosophical activity and concern. The emergence of bioethics as a flourishing discipline, our deep cultural divisions over reproductive ethics, and dizzying changes in reproductive medicine and technology have all thrust reproduction into the philosophical limelight. However, what is most striking about the flurry of new writing on reproductive ethics, from a feminist point of view, is the extent to which these writings proceed as if reproductive interventions, processes and decisions did not happen in and through women's bodies, and as if the social and material institutions of parenting were irrelevant to the ethical contours of these reproductive events. We see text after text, within philosophical bioethics, on the ethics of abortion, in vitro fertilization, prenatal genetic testing, reproductive cloning, and so forth, with breathtakingly little recognition that these events not only take place in women's bodies, but that they turn—or fail to turn—women into mothers, which is a transformation of extraordinary...