QUEERING THE MATERNAL?

:
UNHINGING SUPREMACIST
GEOGRAPHIES OF THE MACHINE,
MARKETS, AND RECREATIONAL
PLEASURE
HEIDI J. NAST
H O M E / UNCATEGORIZED / QUEERING THE MATERNAL?: UNHINGING SUPREMACIST GEOGRAPHIES OF THE MACHINE,
MARKETS, AND RECREATIONAL PLEASURE

This essay is part of the forum on Social Reproduction

See Heidi J. Nast’s most recent contribution to Society & Space Where’s the Difference? The Heterosexualization of Alterity in
Henri Lefebvre and Jacques Lacan here.
This paper identifies two geographically uneven economic developments that have
worked to sideline the biological (child-bearing) and social maternal: the industrial
machine (the Machine) and commodity markets. In facilitating mass production, the
Machine has worked to render human labor (and, by reproductive implication, the
biological maternal) redundant, while mass commodity markets have increasingly
assumed dyadic (maternal) care-giving functions. Growing maternal obsolescence is
globally evident, today, not only in declining total fertility rates (TFRs) and smaller
family sizes, but in the considerable reproductive savings that have accrued to those
privileged enough to be freed from the biological family. Most of these savings have been
directed into marketized non-reproductive recreational domains that treat the body to an
array of pleasures. The contradiction, here, is that both evolution and social life depend
on the dyadic care afforded by the maternal. Without it, the human species becomes
extinct, along with the binary sexual difference on which it has depended (see Grosz,
2011).

But there is another contradiction that is geographical in nature and has to do with the fact
that the Machine was initially made the privileged preserve of supremacist industrial
nation-states, as were the majority of mass commodity markets that Machinic waged
labor made possible. In keeping the Machine and markets away from the enslaved and
colonized, Machine-deprived (agrarian) populations were compelled to rely on the
maternal body for the labor needed to survive, this characteristically leading to higher
TFRs in colonial and postcolonial areas. Maternal redundancy has hence taken on
racialized spatial proportions (Nast, 2015).
After the 1973 oil crisis, financial interests sought factor savings by relocating the
Machine to thousands of export processing zones world-wide, taking advantage of those
formerly colonized regions with higher TFRs (or, in the case of China, a large population
created through earlier pro-natalist policies). Much of the labor needed in these zones was
pooled there through structural mechanisms of dispossession, especially the leasing or
purchase of traditional, communal, and common lands through foreign direct investment
(FDI). Foreign direct investors thus came to feed off the reproductive labor of racialized
other-mothers, producing enclaves of racialized hyperexploitation that I refer to as “neo-
industry.” Dispossessed other-mothers and their children sought additional means of
survival by migrating within and across borders to take up reproductive tasks inside
privileged domains, again at highly race-discounted rates. The biologically intact other-
mother in this way became productively and reproductively essential to precisely those
regions and demographies most invested in the maternal’s Machine- and market-led
replacement.

This essay explores the sexed and supremacist geographical-biological implications of

maternal alienation and how its unevenness can be used productively to queer notions of
kinship. I begin by drawing on an unlikely theorist, Friedrich Engels, who in 1883
speculated on how the maternal body has historically operated to ontologize value, partly
owing to its extraordinary power to curate the human. Maternal ontologies of value
obtained for millennia until the sexed-competitive making of patriliny and private
property. I combine his insights with those of Jacques Lacan who pointed out that the
human infant requires far more dyadic care than other species to become independent,
this dyadism having dramatic psychical effects. Much of this care has historically derived
from the maternal body, its biological armature suited evolutionarily to infant and child
survival. Even so, care has also always been social, with potentially anyone able to care-
give. It is in this opening between the biological and social that the queer maternal
emerges as a force of radical kinship and care. The final section looks at how, in order for
this radicality to unfold, the fetishized proportions of the nation-state and self-contained
household need to be un-done. To the degree that the dyadic maternal is necessary to life
and the living, it opposes the death-producing, sexed-competitive tendencies of private
property which has colonized both body and world.
Re-scaling and re-ontologizing conception
conception: from the maternal body to paternity
and the logos of private property

In 1884, only one year after Marx’s death, Engels published, The origins of the family,
private property, and the state (Origins, 1884). Unlike any other work that he or Marx had
written previously, Origins identified and linked the biological abilities of the maternal
body to shifts in political economy. Drawing on Marx’s Ethnological notebooks and an
array of anthropological and historical texts of his time, Engels argued that the sexed and
biological peculiarities of human reproduction made maternity vital to early human life
and that, in the earliest of human contexts where monogamy was absent, it would have
been difficult if not impossible to determine paternity. And with no way to ascertain
paternity, fatherhood as an identity would have held little, if any, value.

Those in Paleolithic and Neolithic contexts expressed the maternal’s importance through
female fertility figures, including fertility dolls, figures that similarly came to populate
settled agrarian societies. The maternal became the focus for a range of vital materialisms
as well as the means of marking lineage. Moreover, matriliny became the first social
medium for territorializing kinship and focusing wealth, a conclusion that has
subsequently been borne out by feminist anthropology scholarship (e.g., Leacock, 1983;
Arunima, 2003; Nongbri, 2010; Wu et al., 2013).
Engels goes on to show that, as kin groups began accumulating greater levels of surplus,
certain violences began to be leveled against the maternal body to both make paternity
more certain and patriliny possible. Techniques for patriliny’s making included female-
only seclusion, veiling, concubinage, monogamy (for women, only), and patriarchal
marriage institutions. Patriliny’s meaning and force could never have taken off, however,
without effecting new means for ontologizing and territorializing value outside the body
of woman. This was accomplished early on through endeavors exacted outside the
territory of a matriline and included such things as slaving (the taking of other-mothers
and their children as a man’s own) and the expropriation of the lands and matrilineally
produced wealth of others. Slavery, raiding, and warfare thereby became instruments for
sexed-competition through which men could lay claim to the wealth-generating
productive effects and reproductive forces of the maternal body. Legitimating the
siphoning off of maternally-generated goods and life required that a new value-ontology
be instituted, one that would de-link the maternal from wealth’s generation. This new
ontology, Engels claims, was private property. Through private property, the maternal
body, as the progenitor of all territorialized labor and value, was subsumed into
abstractions of personal ownership.

Identifying the origins of private property in sexed competition terms allowed Engels to
propose that merchant cities and early states were essentially massive spatial experiments
wherein masculinist patrilineal objectives could be fashioned and intensified in relative
peace, separated from the life-ontologies of the agrarian maternal. New gestational spaces
emerged to energize private property’s progress: bank and treasury; senate chamber and
polis; military tent and university; board room and study; laboratory and factory. Engels’
re-envisioning of political economic change (for instance, the making of mercantilism) as
an effect of sexed competition and, hence, sexual difference can be usefully thought of in
the context of capitalism in terms of the different meanings of capita. At the most basic
level, capita refers to the head, which “crowns” through the maternal body during vaginal
birth. This meaning is reworked through the rationalizing and masculinist logos of capital
to become a mark of abstract ownership (c.f. Irigaray, 2012).
Indeed, it could be argued that this difference points not only to changing ontologies of
value but to changing bodily and social locations of value’s bodily and social conception. In
industrial capitalism, this is partially seen in the enormous emphasis placed on the
racialized generativity of the thinking/abstracting/conceiving head—whether of science,
enterprise, or the state. Such generativity was complemented by rendering the male
working-class body exceptionally productive, even though the Machine would come to
do most of the work (c.f. Foster, 1997; Theweleit, 1987). (See Figure 1).

Figure 1. The bodily migration of conception from the maternal womb to the masculinist head and body, capitalistically
combined. To the left is the famous sculptor, Auguste Rodin, next to his sculpture, Le Penseur (The [Male] Thinker). To
the right, the muscular, bare-chested lieutenant of the capitalist factory owner of Charlie Chaplin’s (1936) Modern Times
whose job it is to adjust various machinic levers. (Sources: The Lamp, vol. XXVIII and Modern Times © Roy Export
S.A.S. Scan.)

The Machine and supremacist geographies of population decline

Colonial areas were used as source areas for industrial raw materials to feed the Machines
of industrial nation-states (except in transatlantic non-waged slave contexts, where the
Machine was very differently deployed). Accordingly, colonized and enslaved
populations benefited little from the Machine’s superior productivity, benefits like the
shorter work day, less arduous kinds of labor, higher wages, and reproductive savings.
Consequently, only “industrial” bodies and nations experienced favorable terms of trade,
higher standards of living, greater leisure time, and superior means of war. Machine
productivity effectively became a celebrated means for racially ranking and ontologizing
nations and bodies.

Figure 2. Global Total Fertility Rate Decline 1950-2050.

By the end of the nineteenth century, industrial nations in the west and in Japan were
st
seeing consistent TFR declines, by the 21 century many rates dropping below 2.1, the
level required to reproduce a nation given stable life expectancy. The ability of the
Machine to create and supply mass markets, and the higher wages that came to Machine
workers, made a big difference to the making of sex, for now waged adults could thrive
with or without procreating a family, the traditional basis of household production. That
is, workers could now purchase what was required. The contradiction in this is that profit
rates depended on the growth of consumer-oriented populations, but now TFRs of these
populations were falling. Hence, marketing became a major industry in-itself, bent on
expanding and intensifying individual consumption rates in domains of recreation (contra
procreation) to make up for shrinking family size. In so doing, the market intensified its
maternal (dyadic) care-giving characteristics, providing for consumer needs and pleasures
while teasing out new ones. Machine and market forces simultaneously invented new
commodity ways and means for experimenting with, and spatially and temporally
incubating, alternative libidinal economies, apart from the procreational household. The
freedom to live outside the confines of procreation worked in tandem with the
homosociality of the factory floor and the two world wars to make and secure gay
identities (see D’Emilio, 1983; e.g., Chauncey, 1994).

Still, until the 1973 oil crisis, the nuclear family that sustained industry pre-dominated,
making recreational sex of limited economic importance. The oil crisis changed this. With
FDI flowing into colonial elsewheres and as supremacy re-organized itself in-place, the
biological binaries that supported Machine life became geographically unhinged.
Geographical supremacies re-established themselves in two intersecting ways: the
procreational lives of racialized other-mothers were mined for industrial and post-
industrial labor, their deeply discounted bodies subsidizing the geographically privileged
“post-industrial” body, which now became the terrain for proliferating niche commodity
pleasure and purchase.

Unhinging geographies of procreation

The global reorganization of biological reproduction has had everything to do with the
oil crisis and the re-location of industry to former racialized colonies where fertility rates
were kept high and labor costs low. The super-profits of racialized (neo-)industry, which
have come from paying workers a fraction of what previously went to their privileged
counterparts, were leveraged by ploughing the surplus into new financial instruments,
including consumer loans and credit cards.

Neo-industry’s deep racial discounts have since been passed along to formerly privileged
industrial subjects in a number of ways, especially: favorable pricing mechanisms; liberal
access to credit; and the making of new marketing and vending channels, such as
megamalls, superstores, multi-store outlets–and, in the mid-1990s, the Internet. Racial
subsidies hence became essential to keeping former industrially-privileged lives intact,
despite de-industrialization and heightened social and economic precarity. Further, they
helped to underwrite a range of new racially privileging service-oriented businesses and
employment and the related making of vernacular entrepreneurialism. Seemingly anyone
with cultural capital and access to an e-commerce site or Internet domain could start an
online business (e.g., eBay or Etsy) or use the Internet to source the cheapest materials
and products internationally (Amazon, TaoBao, Alibaba). The racialized megaprofits that
initially accrued through FDI consequently impelled not only the making of highly
skilled and remunerated tiers of finance-related employment and lesser tiers of service
work; they also provided new cost savings and creative opportunities across a labor
market diversified and drawn together by precarity. Thus, even if the supremacist
equation of “industrial man/nation = Machine” dissolved, supremacy did not. Instead, de-
industrialized nations became re-racialized as superior centers of finance and service, the
industrial Machine moving on to become a racially wounding device.
Another layer of racialized discounts and subsidies was to be found in domains of social
reproduction. In this case, the same land alienations enacted through FDI and (in the case
of the USSR and its satellites in the 1990s) the breakdown of centrally planned socialist
states, caused many other-mothers and their children to migrate nationally and
internationally in search of remunerative work. Rendered surplus and “illegal” through
various nation-state means, these subjects found work carrying out reproductive tasks,
whether in elder care, sexed care, child care, housekeeping, landscaping, construction, or
garbage picking. Their presence has forever changed the labor market, dramatically
expanding what has been on reproductive offer. The magnitude of these racialized
discounts made a range of reproductive goods and services newly affordable to many, the
discounts adding further to the reproductive savings of those in former industrial nation-
states. Such gains have allowed the market to cultivate desires for recreational pursuits
further and the means by which to pursue new research terrains for maternal
retrenchment, especially in the gendered field of reproductive robotics.

Neoliberal feeding on regions with high TFRs therefore effected a new international
division of maternal labor. The racial contours involved are not at all dissimilar from those
that operated prior to 1807 when African women were relied on to remain in situ to
procreate the children over which transatlantic slave owners would lay claim (Since slave
owners considered reproductive costs a dead loss, the purchase price of African slave
women and girls was discounted. It was only after the 1807 ban on slave trading, when
slave owners decided to focus on growing their slave stock reproductively, that slave
women and girls assumed a greater market value than slave men). Similarly today, it is in
situ maternal discounts that sustain privileged “post” industrial lives, including those of
privileged children who increasingly serve little to no (productive) purpose and whose
biological value lies largely in the market.
That said, the mother-child dyad is not becoming obsolete only because the Machine has
been re-located elsewhere (the need for children as factory labor in de-industrialized
contexts has diminished) or because the initial shocks of de-industrialization and
unemployment caused many to stop having children altogether: It has had also to do with
the fact that the job of privileged populations is now to consume what is being cheaply
produced elsewhere. Given declining fertility rates such consuming tasks have become
more difficult to carry out. Markets have had to work even harder to intensify
consumption, which they have done through maternalizing means that are profoundly
infantilizing.

Big Babies: the racialized infantilization of consumption and the geographical

unhinging of the market and Machine

Just as the market came to assume the maternal function in industrial and, especially,
financialized (post-industrial) contexts, so racially privileged populations have come to
occupy the position of the child. In this sense, the dyadic intimacies of mother and child
have been replaced by intimacies borne by the market-and-me. Marketing forces now
strain to anticipate, serve, and create bodily needs and pleasures, deploying a range of
infantilizing practices to do so. At the same time, the market is responding to the
emotional needs of those most disaffected by de-industrialization, especially racially
privileged men who have had the most to lose (for the US, see Case and Deaton, 2015
and 2017). The latter’s alienation has become the basis of scholarly work variably framed
as “crises of [white] masculinity” and of new interdisciplinary fields of academic study,
especially Masculinity Studies.

Market intimacies have become commonplace, luring us with promises of love and care.
To wit, hotels and resorts, airlines and bus lines, and “foodie” and fast food restaurants
that assure consumers that they are special, speaking through imaginaries of (maternal)
recognition, comfort, investment, and attention (c.f. Tompkins, 2012). All these
endeavors have depended on the racialized discounts discussed above, provided for
instance, by the minoritized maids who turn down hotel bedsheets (and who are often
made to leave a special little pillow note) and menialized kitchen and janitorial staff.
New popular cultural practices have crystallized privileged affective need further. One of
the most dramatic of these is cuddle therapy, a western phenomenon involving privileged
city dwellers (mostly, but by no means entirely, white men) who want to be held in
nonsexual ways. The first cuddle group emerged in Manhattan in 2004, the facilitators
holding other cuddle parties later that year in Los Angeles and Washington DC (Gilstrap,
2004). Cuddling has since become popular across the US, Canada, Britain, South Africa,
Australia, and most European nations (for a partial list of countries, see cuddleparty.com,
cuddliest.com, and cuddleuptome.com; see also Cox, 2016). A tier of cuddling
entrepreneurs and professionals have come into existence through medicalizing
cuddling’s effects and by rationalizing its procedures. Within an extraordinarily short
period of time, cuddling has become accepted amongst many as a natural means of
producing oxytocin (the “hug” hormone) and as a kind of social work in which trained
professionals (some of whom are social workers) lead workshops, offer certification and,
most recently, organize cuddle conventions. Similar kinds of paid cuddling phenomena
exist for Japanese men in Japan.

The commodity infantilization aimed at either “spoiling” the customer and/or addressing
the “real” emotional needs effected by atomized life, now striates the identities of most
racially and economically privileged subjects: personalized nail salons, colonics, massage
“therapy,” flotation tanks, adult Snuggie blankets, spanking and domination in
“dungeons.” Infantilization is arguably behind the rise of one of the most interesting new
fields within academia, Cuteness Studies (Dale et al. 2016).
To the extent that infantilization perverts the aims of the heteronormative, it could be
seen as radical or “queer.” What could be queerer than cuddling with a stranger, being
fed a bottle (or suckling on a real breast) in an adult nursing relationship, or being
coddled by cute (kawaii) Japanese “maids” in Japanese “maid cafes” made to look like
children’s spaces. This question is a crucial one. For as Butler (2009) enjoins us, non-
procreative lives to some degree disrupt the heteronormativity of capitalism and are part
of a “queer art of failure.” But what happens when the non-procreative has become
mainstream and when markets thrive off perversity? When potentially everyone in de-
industrializing supremacist contexts has to varying degrees been freed from the child.
The “real” queer becomes hard to identify. This dilemma is partly evident in the
lengthening of the representative acronym of queer identities defined by sex: L, G, B, T,
Q, I. Singletons, asexuals, voluntary amputees, and polyamorists (among others) have
similarly claimed stable identities. As a result, a number of advocacy communities, like
UC Davis’ Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual Resource
Center, have taken to publishing lengthy glossaries of identity terms. Science has played
its own capitalizing part in this proliferation, researching and developing possibilities for
rendering the body mechanical (robotic and cyborgic), surgical (breast implants,
labiaplasty, sex change, breast removal), transgenic, and surrogate.

To the degree that widespread freedom from procreation speaks to lives no longer tied to
the economic exigencies of production, it is liberating, the accumulation of reproductive
savings allowing for lives to be creatively spent otherwise. But this freedom, and these
savings, are fundamentally undemocratic, a manifestation of the newest capitalizing tier
of empire-building that relies on trans-nationalizing the procreational powers of
racialized (cheapened) other-mothers. It is in light of this un-freedom that the radical-as-
queer needs to be re-examined. In the following section, I review how the special
evolutionary characteristics of human infancy open the maternal up to queering, the
potential of which is greatest in precisely those non-procreational (perverse) contexts
where maternal alienation is the most advanced.

The maternal and geographically unhinging the a/sexual as queer

The vast majority of dimorphic species reproduction still takes place outside capital
markets and machinic forms of production, despite corporate incursions into everyday
planetary life. The maternal body, which has played a formidable part in the continuation
of almost all dimorphic species, has assumed special biological and social importance for
the human (c.f. Irigaray, 2012): it not only curates and feeds the unborn to which it later
gives birth; it has historically operated as a source of dyadic sustenance and recognition
for years following parturition. This latter is prefigured by biology, not only in terms of
the uterine relationship, but in terms of the way that the maternal body is oriented
towards protecting and sustaining the infant, e.g., the anti-bacterial coating that the
maternal body delivers to the child as it exits the vaginal passage, the antibody-rich breast
milk, the production of which the child can activate through its cries.

This dyadic relation has been enhanced through evolutionary processes. In particular, as
Freud (1926) and, later, Jacques Lacan (1938) emphasized, the human infant is born the
most prematurely of any species and has almost no survivalist instincts. It takes weeks
before its eyes can focus on a face, months for it to lift its head or sit upright, and at least a
decade before it can survive socially on its own. Its utter vulnerability and dependence (or
as Butler might say, its precarity) is there in its first “cries-to” upon birth, cries that hail
the (m)other into existence and into its orbit of care, regardless of whether or not that
(m)other is its biological own or made up of one person or many. It is the importance of
meeting these cries dyadically through swaddling, holding, feeding or playing, that the
vitally and relationally queer nature of life is realized and the child comes to recognize
itself and thrive.
The existential necessity of dyadic care has profound psychical consequences for the
human. For the psyche registers “need” not as a singularity, but as a “call to” the (m)other,
which splits the psyche into two such that need is always haunted by desire–for the
(m)other (here, I am drawing only partly on Lacan’s understanding of the doubly
alienated ego). Regardless of life circumstances (war, famine, agrarian or industrial
contexts, and so on), this “call-to” the (m)other remains–its intransigence asserting not
only the split nature of the unconscious, but the libidinally, queerly open character of the
bodily ego to dyadic recognition and care. Thriving, in this scenario, becomes not about
needs being objectively met but about being recognized and called to life through the
(m)other and about the (m)other allowing herself to be called to life through the child.
Dyadic recognition is what effectuates the vitality of care, not the identity of the care-
giver. (Here, I differ somewhat with Butler’s (2009: 6) assertion that recognition is
necessarily mutual and therefore less useful a term than apprehension. Lacan uses the term
méconnaissance to point to the impossibility of any sort of mutual recognition).

Given the widespread and unevenly deleterious effects of maternal alienation, this
queering today holds special significance. For not only have the Machine and market
infantilized those with the most privilege and siphoned off the procreational energies of
racialized other-mothers for privileged productive and reproductive ends, they have been
mobilized to control the increasingly untenable levels of geographical and social
contradiction. Repressive containment of these contradictions has seen the accelerated
growth of the arms industry, the prison-industrial complex, private and public
surveillance, and the militarized and technologized securitization of assets. Regardless of
location, then, we are all “failing to thrive,” a vague medicalized condition typically
associated with the neglected child and the elderly, even if these failures are differently
maternally inflected. (This thinking about thriving parallels Butler’s (2009) on precarity,
but also departs from it in my emphasis on the dyadic as perhaps the most important
affective psychical element for interpellating that precarity).
My point is that if it is through subsuming the (m)other that the death-producing flows
and financialized abstractions of capital have accelerated, then it is only by queering her
presence dyadically that the planetary human can recover. The resources for maternal
queering are everywhere. One of the most important lies in the spectacular reproductive
savings that privileged lives have accumulated and which the market has largely hijacked.
These savings are essential in that they represent libidinal energies that could be directed
anywhere and (m)otherwise, away from the colonizing forces of the market and
Machine. These savings are important in that they manifest a racialized debt that holds
deeply dyadic proportions.

The nature of this debt is recognizable, however, only if the same maternal queering of
the biological operates on the nation-state, a biologized (supremacist) spatial device that
has purposefully divided the world into fetishized parts. Its biologism is what has partly
allowed the puny nuclear and post-nuclear (non-procreative) family of industry and post-
industry to be celebrated as self-sustaining, which is of course a geographical lie. Today,
the reproduction of the privileged household relies increasingly on the biological and social
labor of racialized other-mothers made distant through the obsessions of the nation-state.
Operating queer-maternally beyond the biologisms of both family and nation pries open
the obsessive foreclosures of their making, allowing a range of new dyadic forms of
recognition and care to be libidinally and geographically released, in this way re-
ontologizing value through the maternal. Maternal queering becomes not only about the
dyadic expending of libidinal energies, then, but about expanding its geographical and
biological reach.

Queering the maternal

The manifold forms of maternal alienation that characterize supremacist reproduction,

today, are most alive in privileged non-procreational contexts wherein life depends on
the racialized procreative labor of other-mothers. The geographical contradictions
involved make it clear that nonheterosexual forms of reproduction in-themselves have
nothing to do with un-doing supremacy’s binaries and everything to do with racialized
geopolitical economic circumstances that have made for very different kinds of lives.
Until we are all replaced with robots and all production is automated, those most
privileged (however that is differentiated in future) will depend on the biology of other-
mothering to create the racially cheapened labor that assembles cars, picks tomatoes and
strawberries, cuts hair, and manicures nails. And until the paternalistic logos of capitalism
is dissolved, non-normative recreational lives—sexual and otherwise—will continue to be
paid-for and subsidized by the procreative labors of other-mothers. Commodity domains
may make it look like the maternal body and biological binaries are irrelevant to late
capitalist life, but this is a geographical lie.

The acceleration of planetary death means that maternal queering is imperative. It, alone,
has the ability to confront the sexed-competition impelling masculinist conceptions of
the Machine, market, and nation-state. Maternal queering does not involve celebrating or
promoting procreation in-itself, nor does it involve only sex. It is, instead, a process of re-
operationalizing the maternal as a device-for care that ensures that planetary life becomes
worth living, a tenet that Marcuse (1964) argues is the basis of all critical theory. This
emphasis is in keeping with Butler’s (2009) argument that it is not life-in-itself that
should be of concern, but the making of favorable conditions of and for life. Given the
horrors of present global circumstances, this will require that supremacist subjects (those
who receive supremacy’s benefits, whether they are asked for or not) engage in de-
privileging forms of masochism that take pleasure in thinking and working to “stay with
the trouble,” as Haraway (2016) has intimated in other species circumstances. Re-
imagining how we might stay geographically with the trouble of caring-for and
recognizing—allows us to think much more radically about who are our kin and the
difference that maternal queering might make (Figure 3).
Figure 3. What should be on the Washington Mall. Queering the maternal means recognizing where the geography-
households of kinship lie, something that requires interrogating masculinist-supremacist divisions of rule. Supremacy is a
sexed-competitive circuitry of desire bent on effacing the maternal (biological and social) and, only secondarily, on
exploiting maternal progeny in domains of production. Its connection to sexed difference means that supremacy is
unconsciously driven and highly affective. There is great pleasure taken in replacing maternal ontologies of fertility with
masculinist ontologies of private property, the pleasure of victory heightened spatially through masculinist elaborations of
the state. This ontological shift is the precondition for replacing life as a site of dyadic value and care (capita) with values
for private property and masculinist profit. In this sense, capitalism is only the most powerful abstractive and elaborate
means of supremacist elaboration (photographic collage by author).

**Postscript
Dyadic recognition and care-giving obviously operates within a highly politicized
Symbolic order, any consideration of which would significantly complicate my
discussion. The politicization of care is evident in Lacan’s (1938) earliest work on
mirroring where he theorizes that the mirror is never about “real” recognition, only
misrecognition (méconnaissance).[1] Over the ensuing decades, Lacan’s ideas about
mirroring changed in ways that complexified the politics at stake. He began to see
mirroring as part of a larger psychical register (psychical way of knowing), which he
called the Imaginary–a realm of the small “o” other, which I refer to in this paper as the
(m)other. The Imaginary, he reasoned, plays across the life course, operating through a
visual economy larger than the dyadism of the mirror and made up as much of images as
it is of (me-oriented) imaginings mediated by various means of signification. He referred
to signification as a separate register, the Symbolic, that imposes itself as a kind of law
(Law) and that helps the subject to articulate demands even if fails to convey desire.
Because the strictures and opacity of the Symbolic can make it appear overwhelmingly
powerful, he also referred to it as the Other.

The changing ways that Lacan thought about mis/recognition over the decades is clearly
relevant to the subject of this essay. His work on the confluence of the Symbolic and
Imaginary, for instance, clearly shapes my discussion on how the market (as an
instrument of the Symbolic, of the Other) has maternalized its goods and services,
creating an Imaginary of belonging and identity dominated by the Other of the Machine
and commodity form. My discussion of commodity-infantilization likewise speaks to the
marketized collapse of the Imaginary into the Symbolic, consumers coming to find
(m)otherness through attachments borne by commodity purchase.
While Lacan’s complications about recognition have theoretical bearing, here, I have
chosen to not thread them through my ideas about the queer maternal. I have done so
partly because of the word limits of this paper, but also strategically in relation to my own
theoretical predilections. For, in the end, this paper asks how to think better about the
sexed competition of private property, which works to dissolve maternal ontologies of
value, replacing them with a masculinist logos of death, the geographical contradictions
of which have crescendoed to unsustainable heights. I accordingly do not dwell on the
fantastical nature of the drives, for instance, but on the social and geographical
contradictions of inequality and scarcity that today threaten planetary (including human)
life.[2]

These threats have made for a completely different kind of infantilization than what I
have described for privileged subjects: for the dispossessed, infantilization is not about a
marketized commodity “fussing over,” but about a social death produced through the
systematic de-recognition of subjects through Symbolic and Imaginary means (See
Oyewumi 2016, 85). In this context, anxieties that one is “falling apart” are primarily
grounded in the material realities of scarcity and the filling of immediate needs, not in
neurotic references to an earlier infantile state. That is, there is an urgency today that
requires direct action through radically queer practices of maternal care-giving and
recognition. Such urgency has inspired numerous persons similarly, but needs greater
scholarly elaboration and focus. It could be argued, for instance, that Harriet Tubman’s
making of the Underground Railway for US slaves involved a queering of dyadic care,
the maternalized activities of recognition and care ripping a hole in the Imaginary-
Symbolic fabric of white supremacy. I would argue that this care-giving had less to do
with the Symbolically laden fantasies of the drives than the biological and evolutionary
realities of maternal care, shaped psychically through sexual dimorphism and infant
prematurity. That is, there is a certain materiality and objectness of maternal recognition
that resists being entirely rerouted through the Symbolic, even if the Symbolic of slavery
produced the scarcities and bare lives involved.
This essay should therefore not be taken as announcing something unusual or
extraordinary or as a naïve universalization of need. What it is saying is that the
reproductive contradictions of Machine and market presently kindling planetary
destruction make a return to the sexed binaries of human evolution and masculinist
competition impossible to avoid. These have in fact created a third binary, one in which
human life is being competitively set up for death. The grounded material realities of
these binaries need greater theoretical credit and parsing before any vigorous queer
maternal love can be made.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to those who read and commented on this work, especially Temi Famodu,
Allison de Fren, and Max Andrucki. Thanks also to the University Research Council of
DePaul for funding the copyright permissions of Figure 1 and to Nikki Vigneau for her
research assistance and map making.

Notes

[1] This is because the mirror image presents a way for the infant to see or imagine itself
egoically as whole and coherent, its recognition of wholeness assuaging anxieties about
its own bodily insufficiencies and dependencies. The bodily egoic process of
identification is narcissistic in that its integrating benefits come at the expense of the
other. That is, it operates by appropriating (misrecognizing) the figure of the other (the
image) as “me”.
[2] Talking about the drives, moreover, would require greater elaboration on how the
confluence of the Imaginary and Symbolic (and the Real—his third register) helps to
meter who is recognized, why, and how. This would, in turn, entail a discussion of
Lacan’s differentiation of need from demand and desire. Demand refers to how the Other
(the Symbolic) formulates and addresses need through linguistic signifiers. The
imposition of the Other on the prelinguistic “demands” of the infant forecloses and bars
from consciousness what it is that the child (or adult) really wants and for which it will
forever long, namely, the undoing of its bodily-spatial alienation from the maternal.
Desire, then, is that surplus affect that remains after demands are met. It is a desire-for that
can never be filled through any Imaginary or Symbolic means. Hence, the subject is
doubly castrated: from the mother (the Imaginary) and through language and/as the law
(the Symbolic). These dual disappointments drive the human into the world, the subject
at one level doomed to forever engage in futile libidinized attempts to fill an existential
emptiness that can never be filled. Lacan makes this emptiness real by considering it as a
kind of negative object, the objet petit a (See Lacan, 1973; Kirschner, 2005; Vanheule,
2011).

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Heidi J. Nast is Full Professor of International Studies. Her
theoretical and empirical interests lie in ontologies of life
and fertility across different cultural and geopolitical
economic contexts. She has worked cross-culturally and
internationally on agrarian, mercantilist, industrial, and
“post-industrial” economies, drawing on critical social
theories that work across categories of the psyche, sexuality,
race, gender, and the animal-human divide.