Maternal Impossibility: An Introduction

Late last Fall, as various global and societal crises unfolded, we began to talk about a shared wish to bring new lived and theorized realities of the maternal up against existing thought to address the maternal (again) in these pages. How, we wondered, were conditions of war, racialized violence, climate change, geopolitical upheavals, alongside ongoing assaults on maternal bodies and mothering practices circulating in the clinic, material lived maternals, and in the next wave of scholarship and theory? We considered how to think about the absented and erased mother, where mothers are situated in culture—and psychoanalysis—these days, and what the term “mother” signifies anyway. What family structures, ethical frameworks, forms of resistance, and collective engagements might arise if the maternal were prised from specific gendered, racial, socio-temporal associations? What new imaginaries might emerge as the maternal converses with the nonhuman, the psychically disavowed, the socially projected, the ancestral realm, and speculative futures? What we came upon was the notion of Maternal Impossibility, which we hoped might invoke the tension and struggle in this place where the mother lives.

As we worked, global events impacted the daily lives of some of our contributors, who then generously and generatively brought these experiences into an engagement with us and into their writing. Assembling this issue became an unfolding maternal encounter in itself. And, as impossibility goes, it drew us closer to maternal struggle, to these texts, and to each other, continuously informing our imagination for this issue and the possibilities that emerged through these struggles.

Because Studies in Gender and Sexuality welcomes a nomadic, supradisciplinary assemblage of psychoanalysis, cultural studies, the clinical and the academic, we brought together a group of thinkers across a stunning range of voices and visions to figure, and refigure, the question of Maternal Impossibility.