WorkS in Progress
Motherhood as a Political Identity: Voter Sentiment About Gender and Motherhood
Motherhood has been a political force in American politics from its very origins. Many candidates and elected officials cite their role as a mother or caregiver as one that gives them authority and informs their approach as a legislator. Previous studies have documented motherhood as a force shaping the electorate, but few studies have isolated maternal status from gender as a candidate trait. This study contrasts voters' sentiment towards officials who are mothers from the broader category of women officials and non-mother officials, and examines the relationship between preferences for candidates by gender and parental status. Using original survey data, I evaluate voters' sentiment towards women and mothers and find that voters have more positive sentiment towards the subset of mother officials than the larger category of women officials. Party affiliation plays a significant role in shaping sentiment about gender, but Democrats and Republicans both have positive sentiment about mother officials, in contrast to partisan attitudes about women officials. This suggests motherhood is a unique political identity that functions in a different way than gender, potentially by mediating the negative effects of being a woman, or by functioning as its own unique identity that appeals across partisan lines. Understanding attitudes towards mothers and non-mothers is essential for a more complete picture of women's candidacies for elected office in the United States.
'I grow into their dwelling': Locating the Thinking Maternal Subject in Arendt's Natality
Feminist theorists have critiqued Hannah Arendt's conception of natality for leaving out the maternal subject and the gendered body. Arendt’s focus on the infant and their newness in the world, the critique runs, amounts to a failure to theorize birth. In their important efforts to rehabilitate the mother and bring the female body into philosophical discourse, I argue that previous scholarship has underemphasized the mother as a thinking subject and I propose instead a reading of natality that centers the creation of the mother as one of the central outcomes of birth. The mother is not an abstraction of care, but a thinking political subject in her own right, and marks the creation of a political identity that is enabled by the appearance of the infant, a new human being. By situating Adriana Cavarero’s concept of maternal inclination in Arendt's archive and broader thinking, following Bonnie Honig's focus on the object and materiality, I suggest an expansion of maternal inclination that includes thinking as a dimension of a maternal subject who has the capacity to act.