You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The figure of the postmaternal woman—the mother of an adult child—is often represented in movies as inextricably absorbed in her adult child's life and sometimes as preternaturally powerful and dangerous. This essay tries to explain what factors in 1990s American culture brought forward such depictions and raises the question of what, if anything, they have to do with the Phallic Mother. Throughout, the essay theorizes an alternative figure, located at the same intersection of gender, family-life stage, and age. Pointing out that there are new postmaternal subjects, it emphasizes that these women are performing diverse countercultural identities and activities and asks therapists to coconstruct the figure: the first
Acknowledgment. The essay began as a talk on postmaternal embodiment, given at Pennsylvania State University, Fall 1997, under the auspices of Susan Squier, for a lecture series “Feminists Theorize the Body.” My thanks to editor Carolyn Stack for a reading that was like a long conversation.
Margaret Morganroth Gullette is Resident Scholar in Women's Studies, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts. She has been the recipient of NEH, ACLS, and Bunting fellowships. She is the author of Declining to Decline (1997), which won the 1998 Emily Toth Prize as the best feminist book on American popular culture, copy-right © Margaret Morganroth Gullette.
way is by demythologizing “the Mother” in conjunction with their young adult clients; the second way would be by investigating the psychic transformations that may occur as women-who-mother distance themselves over time from the superheated dyad of maternal discourse. Therapists can study this process either with patients who are postmaternal, or, if they themselves are, through self-reflection.