Philosophy in the Contemporary World

Co-Editors:
Taine Duncan, University of Central Arkansas
José-Antonio Orosco, Oregon State University

Editorial Advisors
Trudy Conway, Mount St. Mary’s University
Joe Frank Jones III, founder (1949-2015)
Lani Roberts, Oregon State University
Andy Fiala, Fresno State University

Editorial Board
Robert M. Baird, Baylor University
Amrita Banerjee, Indian Institute of Technology
Courtney Campbell, Oregon State University
David K. Chan, University of Wisconsin—Stevens Point
R. Paul Churchill, George Washington University
Richard A. Cohen, Univ. of North Carolina, Charlotte
Jeremiah Conway, University of Southern Maine
Janet Donohoe, State University of West Georgia
David Duquette, St. Norbert College
Ralph Ellis, Clark Atlantic University
J.M. Fritzman, Lewis and Clark College
Richard F. Galvin, Texas Christian University
Craig Hanks, Southwest Texas State University
Charles W. Harvey, University of Central Arkansas
Lynn Holt, Mississippi State University
Jeff Jordan, University of Delaware
Michael Krausz, Bryn Mawr College
Robert Metcalf, University of Colorado—Denver
Roger Paden, George Mason University
Stuart Rosenbaum, Baylor University
Ronald Sandler, Northeastern University
Carlos Sanchez, San Jose State University
Sally Scholz, Villanova University
Dane Scott, University of Montana
David E. Schrader, American Philosophical Association
William O. Stephens, Creighton University
Allen Thompson, Oregon State University
Jeremy Wisnewski, Hartwick College
PHILOSOPHY IN THE
CONTEMPORARY WORLD
The Journal of the Society for Philosophy in the Contemporary World

Volume 23 Number 1 Spring 2016

Philosophical Articulations
on “Mothering” and “Care” from the “Margins ............................................... 1
Amrita Banerjee and Bonnie Mann

Stuck on This Side:

Symbolic Dislocation of Motherhood due to Forced Family
Separation in Mexican Women Deported to Tijuana ....................................... 5
Diana Carolina Paláez Rodríguez

Dreaming of Bad Motherhood in the Jungle ................................................... 22

Harrod J. Suarez

Claiming: thoughts of an unconventional older mother ................................. 37

Shirley Glubka

Adoption, Race and Rescue:

Transracial Adoption and Lesbian/Gay Ascendency to Whiteness ............... 56
Bonnie Mann

“When We Handed Out the Crayolas, They Just Stared at Them”:

Deploying Metronormaltivity in the War Against FLDS Mothers................ 71
Shelley M. Park

Arju as “Caring Space, In-Between”:

Philosophical Reflections on “Care” from Ao Naga, India ............................ 91
Amrita Banerjee and Karilemla

Author Bios ....................................................................................................... 106

Mission Statement

Philosophy in the Contemporary World is a peer-reviewed journal committed to the

application of philosophy in understanding and solving contemporary ethical and
conceptual problems. It provides a unique venue for continuing dialogue in applied
philosophy, contemporary ethical issues, philosophy and public policy, philosophy of
the professions, race and gender studies, environmental philosophy, educational
philosophy, and a range of multi-cultural issues.

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encourages submissions that cross disciplinary boundaries.

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and authors will be contacted with a final decision, usually, in around 3 months.
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works cited following the text. Explanatory notes should be used sparingly; citations
should be made in parentheses (author date). Manuscripts should be 3,000-5,000
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Subscription Information at the Philosophy Documentation Center’s website:

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Other Information at the SPCW website: www.spcw.info.

_________________________________

Philosophical Articulations on
“Mothering” and “Care” from the
“Margins”
Amrita Banerjee and Bonnie Mann

Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and University of Oregon

abanerjee.phi@gmail.com and bmann@uoregon.edu

_________________________________
ABSTRACT: PCW Editors’ Comments: In this volume we are privileged to
publish a special edition on mothering from the margins. The guest editors
Amrita Banerjee and Bonnie Mann have collected a range of submissions
representing original and insightful perspectives on motherhood.

“Transnational motherhood in deportation reveals a complex set of power relations that go beyond
geographical borders and national sovereignty. The removal does not only involve one person being
forcedly displaced from one side of the border to the other, but a whole group of affective
relationships that constitutes them.”
--Peláez Rodríguez, “Stuck on This Side: Symbolic Dislocation of Motherhood due to Forced Family
Separation In Mexican women deported to Tijuana.”

“What is striking about the portrayal of diasporic Filipina motherhood in Jessica Hagedorn’s
Dream Jungle is that it delivers a critique of an illegible agency without necessarily making that
agency entirely legible. Instead, it brings readers to the edge of meaning, enabling us to espy the
contours of that which escapes dominant epistemologies.”
--Suarez, “Dreaming of Bad Motherhood in the Jungle.”

“But of course the question—did you raise your child?—is not asked. Not ever. The circumstance in
fact is not imagined.”
--Glubka, “Claiming: Thoughts of an Unconventional Older Mother.”

“… more recent historical developments have significantly altered the cultural landscape in which
we build our families, so that the meanings attached to sexuality and the meanings attached to race
actually work to erode … connections between white same-sex parents and their adopted children of
color…”

Philosophy in the Contemporary World 23:1 (Spring 2016)

2 Amrita Banerjee and Bonnie Mann

--Mann, “Adoption, Race and Rescue: Transracial Adoption and Lesbian/Gay Ascendency to
Whiteness.”

“Our difficulties in hearing the pleas of FLDS women to be reunited with their children as serious
ethical pleas suggest the rural polygamist woman is a subaltern subject. Insofar as the FLDS mother
is culturally, politically, and geographically excluded from hegemonic discourse and power, there is
no intelligible space from which she can speak.”
--Park, “‘When we handed out the Crayolas, they just stared at them:’ Deploying Metronormativity
in the war against FLDS mothers.”

“The concept of ‘Arju’ can … be read as ‘caring space, in between’ that reflects certain goals of an
ethic of care, potentially fuels such an ethic among its residents, and also exists as part of the public
sphere for the Ao tribe. In its latter capacity, it appears to embody certain basic aspirations/visions for a
political sphere modeled along ideals of both care and equality. Acts of caring unfold in the midst of
such complex dynamics … thereby helping to raise a self in community along with an entire community
in its stead.”
--Banerjee & Karilemla, “Arju as ‘Caring Space, in Between:’ Philosophical Reflections on ‘Care’
from Ao Naga, India.”

T HE LAST FEW DECADES HAVE WITNESSED growing philosophical

scholarship on “mothering” and “care”, about which the discipline of philosophy
has hitherto remained silent. Feminist philosophers have placed both women’s
embodied experiences as well as work historically designated as “feminine” such as
“mothering” at the heart of philosophical analysis. Sara Ruddick, Nel Noddings,
Eva Kittay, to name a few, have argued that approaching ethics, epistemology, and
ontology from these marginalized sites has the potential to restructure these areas in
fundamentally new ways.
While feminist philosophical work on “mothering” and “care” constitutes a
significant development in the domain of philosophical inquiry, there are a number
of critical gaps in the new literature. Patricia Hill Collins highlights “Black
women’s relative silences” on motherhood (189) in the context of the “perceived
Whiteness of U.S. feminism” (190) along with “antifamily politics” (190) in some
of its dominant versions. While reviewing some recent work on the topic, Shelley
M. Park (2012) too notes the relative absence of the voices of “non-normative
maternal subjects”, that is, maternal subjects that are not “straight, biological,
middle-class, able-bodied, white, western mothers of infants and very young
children.” The scarcity of voices from outside of these “hegemonic” categories
remains an issue. Social, cultural, economic, and political arrangements that anchor
“non-normative” maternal subjectivity continue to remain under-theorized in
philosophy. Moreover, robust frameworks on the topic from traditions outside of the
“Western” philosophical canon (including “Western” feminist philosophy) are also
few. One could argue that while being an attempt to philosophize from the margins,
philosophical engagements with “mothering” and “care” might have unintentionally
ended up creating their own margins. The collection of essays in “Mothering from
the Margins: Critical Conversations”, emerges against this messy theoretical
landscape.
The volume makes a modest, yet systematic attempt at providing a dedicated
space for philosophizing on “mothering” from its largely neglected margins, and
making sense of what it means to anchor philosophical reflection to such sites of
Philosophical Articulations on “Mothering” and “Care” from the Margins 3

abjection. The essays take their start from mothering in the context of queer
families, multiracial families, rural and polygamous families, transnational
migrations, immigration and deportation, giving up one’s child, and new forms of
institutional practices and spaces. The theoretical innocence of concepts such as
“mother” and “mothering” are problematized in the course of engagement, thus
paving the way for richer and thicker articulations.
“Mothering from the Margins” is not simply an attempt to include philosophical
voices on “mothering” and “care” from the margins along with analysis from the
center, but puts the former at the focus of philosophical analyses. We are grateful to
the journal of “Philosophy in the Contemporary World” for providing us with this
remarkable platform. As with any project of this scope, this is by no means an
exhaustive or extensive representation of all possible marginalities. Neither should
it be read as an attempt to develop ‘a’ philosophy of mothering from the margins.
Rather, the aim is to draw attention to some critical margins so that alternative
centers of theoretical gravity for philosophies of “mothering” and “care” can
emerge. We urge the reader to take the title of the volume in this spirit.
The concept of “margins” is a complex one. “Margins” are material-symbolic
spaces, which are stipulated from dominant frames of intelligibility, and as Butler
would say, “… it is not just that there are laws that govern our intelligibility, but
ways of knowing, modes of truth, that forcibly define intelligibility” (621). “What,
given the contemporary order of being, can I be? And this way of putting the
question … does not quite broach the question of what it is not to be, or what it is to
occupy the place of not-being within the field of being…” (Butler, 621-622). As
imposed by regulatory regimes, “margins” signify invisibility, abjection, social
pathology, and even social death. On the other hand, in the face of struggles, several
marginalized groups continue to enact the subversion of marginalized locations into
powerful sites of resistance. In so far as “margins” are able to turn a critical lens on
normative subjectivities and can potentially resignify new ways of seeing and
thinking, they become an integral part of a politics of resistance.
Different essays in the volume stipulate distinct methodological possibilities for
the “philosophical”. In some essays, the “personal” and the “philosophical” blend to
chart out new philosophical terrains. In others, narratives blend seamlessly with
philosophical inquiry and methodologies. The essays explore several themes of
epistemic, ontological, and ethical significance. Questions include: What kinds of
maternal subjects get construed as “illegitimate”, “abject” and indeed, “absent”?
What does it mean to articulate a philosophy of “mothering” from a position of
“absence” rather than “presence”, that is, in the context of “mothers that are not
meant to be”? What are some conceptual binaries that help write certain maternal
subjectivities into existence while erasing others? What possibilities remain for
reclaiming maternal subject-positions and reconstituting the “matter” of
“motherhood” from these sites of erasure? How might centers of philosophical
gravity and philosophical reflection change when we shift from “hegemonic” to
“abject” and “liminal” maternal subjectivities? What kinds of conceptual resources
can be harnessed from philosophical traditions designated as “non-Western” for
philosophies of “mothering” and “care”?
4 Amrita Banerjee and Bonnie Mann

The theme of “voice” inevitably brings up various quandaries related to

“representation.” Whose voice? Who speaks? Who hears? What can be said and
heard? Different authors find their own ways of negotiating these questions. Despite
various limitations that might plague the possibilities of speaking from the
“margins” and of being heard, the essays in the volume are nevertheless
characterized by a refusal to remain silent. A word of caution would not be untimely
at this point. While analyzing theoretical dissonances between Sara Ruddick’s
universalist approach to “maternal practice” and Patricia Hill Collins’ situated
theorizing on “motherhood” in African-American communities, Bailey in her paper
“Mothering, Diversity, and Peace Politics”, cautions against a mistake sometimes
made within certain Anglo-American feminisms. This is the mistake of recognizing
the unique positions of racial-ethnic peoples, but then negating them by using these
as evidence for more general theories about women, which are often defined on the
basis of experiences and interests of dominant groups (Bailey, 195). The latter
approach, “… often leads to an insulting intellectual “division of labor”: white
middle-class women come up with the theories, leaving women of color to provide
lively narratives and entertaining experiences to support them” (Bailey, 195).
Bailey’s analysis brings to light the problems of normative violence and theoretical
exclusivity that have plagued philosophical discussion on “mothering”. If we are to
prevent philosophical theory-building from becoming a one-sided affair, then we
must resist the urge to fold conceptual categories and theoretical articulations
generated on philosophies of “mothering” from the “margins” into dominant
paradigms, and retranscribe the former into the latter. We therefore, urge the
attentive reader to take the essays of this volume as generating new philosophies of
“mothering” and “care”, subverting certain traditional articulations, and actively
participating in “building” philosophical theory in the process.

Works Cited

Augsburger, David W. 1996. Helping People Forgive. Louisville, KS:

Westminster John Knox Press.
Calhoun, Clare. 1992. “Changing One’s Heart,” Ethics 103: 1, 76-92.
Crocker, David A. 2000. “Truth Commissions, Transitional Justice, and Civil
Society” in Robert I. Rotberg and Dennis Thompson, ed. Truth v. Justice: The
Morality Of Truth Commissions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
_________________________________

Stuck on This Side: Symbolic

Dislocation of Motherhood due to
Forced Family Separation in Mexican
Women Deported to Tijuana
Diana Carolina Peláez Rodríguez

Education Center for Development, in Corporación Universitaria Minuto de Dios

(UNIMINUTO), Bogota
dianakaschoen@gmail.com

_________________________________
ABSTRACT: This paper is about the experience of Mexican women deported to
Tijuana, especially those who are mothers, and how they live the forced
separation from their family. First, the phenomenon of family separation in
migration is explained and then contrasted with the separation due to deportation
and the moral harm produced in mothers in both cases; then there is a closer
look to the meanings deported women give to the separation and finally I will
posit that motherhood as they know it, suffers a fracture, a dislocation that
leaves them with barely no resources to resignify it. A third discussion goes
deeper in their options of family reunification; and finally a characterization of
Transnational Motherhood in Deportation is given, in order to highlight an
understanding of this non-normative mothering perspective. Along the way,
testimonies of some of the women I encountered in my visits will support the
arguments.

F ROM SEPTEMBER 2012 TO DECEMBER 2013 I HAD BEEN VISITING

THE SHELTER for migrant women and children in the border city of Tijuana
called Madre Assunta in a regular basis. My main aim was to understand the
feelings of family separation due to deportation. In the journey I got to listen to
different stories, see many faces and experienced conflicts and even tragedies. The
women there not only needed a place to stay, they needed a place to find peace, a

Philosophy in the Contemporary World 23:1 (Spring 2016)

6 Diana Carolina Peláez Rodríguez

safe environment to just breath, think, cry, talk and relax before continuing their
path. Some come from countries of Central-America in the escape of violence to
find a better life, some are Mexican women who already have their lives in the
United States, but came to pay a last visit to an ill relative –usually the mother- and
are trying to cross back and return to their homes in the United States, and others –a
growing number in the last five years- are women who have been deported.

What has been the hardest? Accepting the situation. Yes, The change. The change! Yes! It´s been
very hard. I got very depressed, very. Yes! It was very hard. […] Listening [at the shelter] to stories
that sometimes are not so nice… I tried to isolate from them, I didn´t want to hear those things,
because they made me feel bad. My head started to think many things. So I don´t like that,
because… because of my kids, because I have my kids and I say: Well, I have to be alright, I have to
be alright, I´m going to see my kids someday and we are going to be alright. Because you carried a
life, you have your life doing your thing: I was at work, and you come from work, and see your
kids… I mean, it’s your life! And suddenly… Boom! It changes in just a moment. For me it was
very strong, very hard… and accepting it makes me… sometimes my mind remembers and it doesn´t
accept it very well! (Aura, pseudonym. Interview October 2012).

Aura is 40 years old. She is from Veracruz, Southern Mexico. Her neighbor married
her when she was 18. Shortly after, he decides that they are going to the United
States. She does not feel comfortable with that decision, but has no other choice.
The family grows in Oceanside, California. Two boys are born there. A third is born
in Mexico in a period they returned, but after a while they are back in California.
She learns sewing and works at a factory. Sometime later she is abandoned by her
husband and assumes the role of the provider, besides the caregiver. The older boy
helps her out with the brothers and they all survive in a relatively calm environment.
One afternoon, she was walking over to her uncle´s where her middle son was
spending the weekend.
On the way, police officers intercept her and ask her for her papers, which she
does not have. They bring her to a detention center and then turn her in to
Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) authorities. She is deported sometime
after that. It has been almost three years after deportation and she has not been able
to find her feet. She still lives at the shelter, where maximum stay is for 15 days.
Between 2009 and 2012, the United States Government has deported around 400
thousand immigrants per year due to the development of strong deportation policies
after 2008, which according to the DHS data (2011, 2012 and 2013) 20% of them
had no criminal convictions, just immigration violations1.
The border city of Tijuana is located in the West Coast and limits with the city
of San Diego, California. Everyday around 170 people arrive in the city after being

1
In the mid 90´s, migration policies changed in the United States. They became more restrictive while
the budget for control and surveillance at the U.S.-Mexico border increased drastically. In 1996, the U.S.
Congress passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), which
expanded the causes for exclusion and deportation of immigrants and it gave the Immigration Officers
the authority to detain and expulse immigrants without due process. It also imposed a prohibition to the
deportees of returning to the country for periods from five years up to all their lives (Hagan Eschbach
and Rodriguez, 2008: 65, Kanstroom; 2012:12). After IIRIRA, deportations from within the country
(removals) experienced a rapid growth. They went from 69,680 in 1996 to 391,953 in 2011 (DHS;
2012a). People from Mexican origin have been particularly affected by deportations. While they
represent 59% of undocumented migrants, they constitute 79% of the total deportees (DHS; 2012a).
Stuck on This Side: Symbolic Dislocation of Motherhood 7

removed by immigration authorities (INM; 2013). Since 2011, about half this figure
had been living in the United States for more than a year; which means the removal
happened from within the country and not the borderlands (El COLEF; 2013)2.
Women represent around the 9% of the people deported to Mexico and the
majority enter the country through the city of Tijuana. The lack of space for women
at detention centers; the fact that usually men are more in the public space where
they run the risk of being detained; and also some of the infractions or crimes are
more commonly committed by men such as DUI or domestic violence could explain
this short figure (París and Peláez, 2014). Also, on the side of policies, ICE as well
as the President Barack Obama have assured that detaining and deporting women
with children is not a priority (ARC, 2011).
The majority of women deported to Tijuana come from Los Angeles County and
it is difficult to find one with no children. Some are “mixed” families, whose
children are either Mexican or American. This fact plays an important role when the
mother has been deported and will be later explained.
When they arrive in the city, the Mexican Government helps them with half of
the bus ticket to return to their place of origin. Some just pay a short visit before
returning to the border to cross over again, because the place they call home is in
the United States. Those who stay in Tijuana do not have a strong network of
friends and family in Mexico, and almost none have acquaintances in city. Some of
them only know the United States, because they were brought as babies; their
contact with Mexico is almost non-existent and they even feel more comfortable
speaking English than Spanish.
For the women who are deported, arriving to Tijuana could represent the
temporal or definite loss of all their most intimate and significant bonds: their work,
their income and above all, their family. In this paper, I would like to discuss the
experience of deportation of women, especially those who are mothers, and how
they live the forced separation from their family.
First, there will be a short introduction to the phenomenon of family separation
in migration and deportation, and a discussion contrasting the moral harm it
produces in mothers in both cases; then I will bring a closer look to the meanings
deported women give to the separation and finally I will posit that motherhood as
they know it, suffers a fracture, a dislocation that leaves them with barely no
resources to resignify it. A third discussion goes deeper in their options of family
reunification; and finally a characterization of Transnational Motherhood in
Deportation is given, in order to highlight an understanding of this non-normative
mothering perspective. Along the way, testimonies of some of the women I
encountered in my visits will support the arguments.

Border Crossing and Family Separation

2
As a contrast, in 2005 less than 6% of deportations were from people living for more than a year in the
United States.
8 Diana Carolina Peláez Rodríguez

Family separation is an intrinsic phenomenon of migration. Until 1980, the

human flux coming from Mexico to the United States was mainly masculine,
temporal and from rural origins (Massey et al; 1987). Today, studies have found
that migration is now undocumented, the whole family is involved and fluxes have
feminized (Leite, Angoa y Rodríguez; 2009)3. In Mexico, women who decide to
migrate to the U.S. without documents usually come from rural regions or marginal
urban areas. The number of motivations goes from independence, to poverty, the
husband´s decision, or security reasons.
Historically, when the migrant left for the United States it was a well-planned
process and previously discussed at home (although not always consensual). The
departure of migrant mothers who leave children at their place of origin comes with
a number of arrangements within their families to guarantee their welfare. Sisters,
aunts, and grandmothers are usually the substitute caregivers (Debry; 2010).
The practice of caring for the offspring with the help of other females through
the distance set by national boundaries is referred to as “transnational motherhood”
(Hondagneu-Sotelo y Ávila, 1997). Although it is a great and painful sacrifice not to
see the children grow up, motherhood can be resignified through the remittances
that could grant them a life with dignity and better education (Ibid.).
In deportation, family separation is forced and unexpected. Even though it is a
constant threat, the family is never ready when it happens. Besides, deportation
usually means the loss of the main income in the household, therefore it tends to
marginate and impoverish not only the deportees, but also their families and their
communities.
The transnational condition of motherhood resulting from both of these cases of
family separation, share something in common: the moral harm left in the person’s
self-respect caused by the fracturing of the central relationships. Nonetheless,
mothering in the distance due to migration differs widely apart from that due to
deportation, and in order to understand the difference, we need to further explore
the nature of the mother-child relationship in these women to see the challenges it
faces in both of these conditions.
The female deportees interviewed at the shelter described women as “the back-
bone of the family” and home as her “natural” place. Such an imaginary suits very
well with the Madresposa (Motherwife) “captivity role” theorized by Mexican
feminist scholar Marcela Lagarde (1993), which refers to the most appreciated and
common possibility of femininity in Mexican culture and whose value is to be vital
caregivers of their husbands, children and any “other” through which she could
define her existence, she is a being-for-others4.

3
The economic reconfiguration at the end of the twenty first century, has constituted a transnational
system of work that produces a regular flux of migration from experts and no experts to support the
powerful networks locating in global cities (Sassen, 2006:315). In such a system migrant women
represent not only a cheaper workforce, but “an advantage to an employer insofar as they can exploit
socially ingrained values of submissiveness” (Kittay, 2010:62).
4
Motherhood and gender identity are closely interrelated. Each element constitutes the other (Glenn,
1994) due to the social interpretation of the division of labor resulting from the reproductive ability
between men and women. The fact that women not only host life in their bodies, but also maintains it
through it once they gave birth, carries a “universal” association that life and its maintenance is the
“natural” duty of females. Firestone (1993) stated that the first division of labor is based on this ability,
Stuck on This Side: Symbolic Dislocation of Motherhood 9

Well, I was very happy [at having her first baby], I wanted to do everything for him, it was all him.
And I remember that I always… well at that time I was 17 and I did give him all my attention. All
was for him. Because before I was partying and everything, but I said: ok, I´m going to be a mother
to my baby. My mom told me I took good care of him, I took him to his doctor´s appointments, I fed
him, I dressed him, and then after I helped my mother-in-law to clean the house, fix something for
dinner… everything was for him [.] From then on my life changed, I couldn´t…how do you say
that? I knew I wouldn´t finish school or anything, I mean, that is how I felt, I don´t know why. I felt
that I couldn´t because I had him, I had my baby…as a family… as a mother! (Olga, Interview,
November 2012).

Motherhood for Olga involves full presence, a complete project that could displace
any other in progress. The feeling Olga cannot describe can be associated with
Bourdieu´s habitus, understood as the naturalized social order, or discourse, that
constructs –or institutionalizes- the sexual difference between biological sexes; a
durable set of dispositions formed in response to objective social conditions
(2000:30). This system rules out other options before they are even considered, so
that people just reproduce and never come to choose (Chambers, 2008:52). Olga
does not need to consciously accept and affirm the contents of motherhood, because
they are already the organizing idea of her consciousness and that is why she cannot
explain it5.
Transnational motherhood seems then to be a contradiction to the “proper” and
“natural” way of mothering, according to the dominant social interpretation exposed
above, where closeness, dedication, and the hands-on care are the values of a
“good” mother. Mothering in a distance set by national boundaries would not fit in
the ideal, and therefore for those whose life conditions make them go through it, it
not only becomes a methodological, but an ontological, and ethical challenge to
overcome.
Motherhood is a deep and intimate affective relationship where the well-being
of the child is critical to the mother´s well-being and it “is what drives the women to
migrate, and that affective relationship remains a powerful force even in the face of
long and continuous absences” (Kittay, 2013:207). Migrant mothers need to
redefine caregiving, as a labor as well as a virtue, and because these women are not
overtly coerced to migrate, the moral harm in the person’s sense of dignity and self-
respect produced by the severance of the relationship between mother and child
could be mended through the help of the other women maintaining the relationship
of care and the remittances she sends home to grant their children a life with dignity
and better education (Kittay, 2010)6.
In such a transaction, it is true that some harm takes place, but it is also true that
some benefits outweigh the harms. For the children left in the place of origin there

which results in their exclusion from the public space and their constrain to domestic realm;
interpretation that has legitimated power asymmetry between genders as “natural.”
5
Although a common way to experience motherhood, it does not mean that young-brought-to-the U.S.
Mexican females have not seen other possibilities of experience. Viviana, grew up in the U.S. since she
was two years old. She is aware of all the methods of birth control, she has chosen the best for her and
she lives in free union with her boyfriend by the time she got deported. Also some of them have
identified themselves as lesbian, another rupture in the sexuality of the traditional set of dispositions for
Mexican femininity.
6
“However, this deployment of the concept requires that we understand the “self” in self-respect to be
relational, that is, a self that views broken relationships as the worst of harms” (Kittay, 2010:55).
10 Diana Carolina Peláez Rodríguez

is a guarantee that they will be able to finish school, and there is no need for them to
start working. For the women, migration constitutes an opportunity for
transformation in gender relations, either when the woman migrates alone, with her
partner or with the whole family.
Migration demands of them new elaboration of meanings from the inherited
traditional feminine identity of the madresposa to one that goes more in accordance
with their new situation. Studies show that gender relations are transformed into a
more relative equity in power relations within the household, because the woman
broadens her spatial influence by accessing the job market, an economic
development that gives her a relative autonomy and more interaction with
institutions at their new places of settlement. This often results in a better ability to
influence the decisions made at the household (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994: 198) and
in a greater sense of agency.
However, a common point that stands out among the women who were
interviewed in the shelter is the normalized violence they live in the household. This
was in some of the cases the reason of abandoning the relationship with their
partner, in other resulted in the cause of deportation. However, in their condition as
solo mothers, most of them managed to find ways to support their children by
themselves; the problem arises when it is them who were deported.
Although migration brings a number of benefits for the individual as well as
their family, it also creates a condition of vulnerability before the laws of the
recipient society that clearly draw a line between the privileges of its citizens and
the limitations of non-citizens (Bustamante, 2011). If the migrant’s residency is not
legally recognized, there is a greater condition of vulnerability, and therefore a
higher risk of deportation. Nonetheless, even with a legal residency, deportation is
always a possibility.
As stated before, family separation has always been linked to migration, but it
constitutes different characteristics when is due to deportation, because it is a forced
process of expulsion performed by the State (Buenrostro, 2014). A report published
by an American organization of civil rights (ARC; 2011) shows that current policies
of massive deportation have shattered families, leading to a childcare crisis and
even household fragmentation or dissolution, and have jeopardized the
psychological integrity of deportees and their children7.
Tania is 24 years old and left Mexico City when she was 18 to live in Anaheim,
CA with her aunt. Her dream was to save enough money to buy her parents a decent
house. In California she meets the father of her daughter, a man who traveled a lot.
When she got arrested she learnt he had another family and was dealing drugs:
A friend took us to get some dippers and we got stopped for no reason by cops dressed as civilians.
They registered the car and the father of my daughter had a bag with drugs. Did you know about
that? The cop asked me. It was a surprise to me; I didn’t know he even trafficked! The cop said I
exposed my child to a danger and he told me: “I’m going to take away your daughter from you! You
are arrested!” But, why? I asked. I had no idea of his affairs; I’m just going to the store! I said. […]

7
If the immigrant was detained at home, he or she must go through the humiliating and violent
experience of immigration officers (ICE) entering their house and have them arrested in front of their
family. If it happened on the streets or at work, they are not able to see their children for the last time or
even communicate with them.
Stuck on This Side: Symbolic Dislocation of Motherhood 11

My daughter was taken to a social worker. I’m glad she was asleep when all this happened. I spent
18 days in an Orange County prison and 7 months in “hold” fighting my case at a detention center.
[...] I got deported yesterday. (Tania, Interview, March 2013).

Even though deportation is a constant threat, the family is never ready when it
happens. The process contains steps such as appearances in court and serving time
at an ICE detention center. People could spend there from a couple of days before
removal up to even a year, if the migrant wants to fight his or her case8. Before
deportation, most of them have a last appearance in court where they are informed
of their temporary prohibition of re-entry into the national territory, which could go
up to 20 years or even life-time depending on the gravity of the offence. If they
violate this prohibition, they could be incarcerated for some years, and then
deported again (Post-deportation human rights project, 2012).
Unlike transnational migrant mothers, whose absence are of necessity lengthy
because of distance and cost, and the mother chooses to better send the money home
instead of spending it in travel expenses (Kittay, 2009:57); the absence of
transnational deported mothers is regulated by the burocracy of the Nation-State and
controlled through its borders.
Kearney (2008) explains migration as a movement through an important border-
line that ends up modifying the identity of the subject. In this process an unequal
exchange of value occurs. This means, that not only the identity of the individual is
transformed, but other types of economic, social, intellectual and symbolic values
are re-signified. Crossing to the other side as a migrant could mean “a better life”,
economic independence, and class mobility when returning voluntarily to the place
of origin. But when criminalized and expelled from the other side, stigmatization
and a sense of failure surround the individual, obscuring his or her arrival in their
homeland.
Once in Mexico, a great long wall becomes the physical evidence of their new
status as deportee and the division between them and their family. The border
becomes the representation of opposite emotions and meanings encountering each
other and producing a state of turmoil: there-home/here-land of origin; then-
Independent/now-dependent; there-elementary family/here-family of origin; and
there-foreign/here-national. Also, that physical line embodies simultaneously the
geopolitical obstacle separating them from their most central and intimate
relationships, but it is also the symbol of the shortest distance of the gap dividing
them, which at the end brings a certain illusion of closeness and a type of relief.
The difference between the two cases of [family] separation is my daughter. For me all my life is in
the U.S. My life is my daughter; they took away a part of me. In Mexico I have my parents and I
would like to see them, but I can’t leave [Tijuana] because I feel that my daughter… that I still have
her a bit close. I feel that if I go back to my place of origin, it’s going to get ugly; it will get very
stressful for me. (Tania, Interview, March 2013).

8
Once in custody of ICE, parents are often denied access to family court hearings, phones and attorneys.
Many do not even know what happened to their children. If lucky, they were able to ask a relative or
even a neighbor to take care of them, in order to avoid that their children are brought to Foster Care.
Usually these detention centers are hours away from home, which makes it difficult to their relatives to
bring them a bag with personal belongings, even money or a last visit from their children to say goodbye.
12 Diana Carolina Peláez Rodríguez

Unlike transnational motherhood due to voluntary migration, the benefits or positive

impacts on deported mothers and families are yet nowhere to be found. Buenrostro
(2014) in her research study found that for the family, it is a chaotic state of
rearrangements to continue with their everyday lives, and each member of the
family must find their own material and emotional resources to overcome such a
state. The children´s age ends up playing an important role in this goal. For mothers,
the experience is lived like a mourning state, because of the loss of what is the most
crucial and integral part them (22). When women at the shelter described women as
“the back-bone” of the family, they also mentioned feeling displaced and collapsing
without it.

Dislocation of Motherhood Due to Deportation

I’m trying to get home, my home is over there. My home is not here.
I’m here because I have to be here, but not because it’s my home!
(Patricia, interview, 2012).

Individuals occupy places and places make part of the social world. Among
other dimensions, they constitute what we are as subjects at the same time that we
construct their meaning. Deportation has different levels of complexity depending
on the subject experiencing it. The support they have from the family on both sides;
the mental, physical and psychological strength; and the economic and symbolic
resources they have, are key elements for them to overcome the turbulence –which
is directly proportional to the time spent in the expelling country.
Settlement in a new place requires many decisions and energy in order to
materialize the illusion of a place you can call home. In that journey, relationships
are also places, some more meaningful than others. Parreñas (2001) studied the
different dislocations Filipina immigrant workers experience with the displacement
of leaving the Philippines in Rome and in Los Angeles in the domestic realm. She
defines dislocations as the “challenges that Filipina domestic workers encounter as
they navigate through the social process of migration. They are the segmentations
embodying their daily practices in migration and settlement” (197). She identified
four types of dislocations: partial citizenship, the pain of family separation, the
experience of contradictory class mobility, and nonbelonging; and discusses the
ways they resist and negotiate the effects of those dislocations in their everyday life.
Women experiencing deportation also encounter challenges as they transit from
the condition of immigrant to repatriated. The discussion here concentrates in the
ways these women give meaning to the displacement they live in relation to family
separation, especially from their children; a simultaneous act they perform as they
give meaning to their own self in the “new place”- although their homeland, not
really lived as their home.
Eva Kittay (2013) has carefully analyzed the experience of migrant workers as
transnational mothers. The main argument consists in understanding the body to
whom one gives care as a place and in that way, it constitutes a here for the
caregiver; “it is the bodily here for the caregiver qua caregiver” (208). She comes to
this idea after seeing that women express that feeling even when they are in the new
Stuck on This Side: Symbolic Dislocation of Motherhood 13

country, like if they had remained in their original place: “it is the body of the cared
for that situates the caregiver in a here, then she locates her here through that other
body. A migrant mother whose here is the body of her children –ones who live in
the place that she leaves- leaves her here in the sense of the ‘here of [her] body
proper’ as well as in the sense of ‘here in part’”9 (209).
To think care as a place helps us understand why mothers who have been
deported and whose children stay in the United States do not feel at home in their
homeland, cannot make sense of their new condition and feel an urge to return to
their “natural” environment. These women have not only been displaced across
borders, but were forced to leave the place that is more familiar to them and the
relationships it indwells. Identity is relational, and our well-being is linked to the
meaningful relationships we have formed. As stated before, the moral harm that
exists when a mother is forced to leave her children, either for migration or
deportation, lies in how deep is the break-up of the relationships. Absence threatens
to unpick the ties, and both migrant and deported mothers feel uncomfortable by not
being able to mend the damage.
For the women at the shelter, deportation is an alienating experience and family
separation is perceived as a rupture, a torn apart. They cannot distinguish this
condition from an act of abandonment. When they realize that the symbolic
framework of motherhood does not fit their reality, another displacement occurs.
With the physical dislocation of deportation, comes a symbolic dislocation as well:
the positive value of motherhood, based on performing caregiving, nurturing and
upbringing through their presence; turns into its negative, which is defined by
oppositional meanings and where distance equals abandonment.
With the border between the relationships, efforts and strategies develop in a
way to conserve their place at home. Telephone, social networks and video calls
become their connection to their here as a caregiver, assuring control and the non-
interruption of the everyday life.
I speak to my mom on the phone every morning, and also in the afternoon. And I talk to my
youngest girl, she is three years old. The others are older. She is always looking for me, always,
always. I remind her: “the girl has a dentist appointment”, or “she needs her vaccines now”, things
like that. It´s different for her [for the girl] to be with her mother, than with my mom (Olga,
Interview, November 2012).

As we have seen before, migrant women are able to redefine caregiving because it
means more than the “hands-on care”. It is a virtue, an attitude where the subject
understands that the affective relationship is a powerful force that could represent a
sense of well-being for both the cared and the caregiver. The feeling of not fulfilling
the expected role in a partial o full way could be described as guilt, but with the
remittances as the strategic element that helps them negotiate the conflict and the
contradiction due to this dislocation the moral harm can be mended.

9
Kittay describes different dimensions of the category “Body as Place” in: Here in Part, when our
bodies are interpreted as a form of extension differentiated into parts; Here of my Body Proper, when the
body locates itself in a place; Here of my By-body, when the body as place is in movement; and the
Regional Here, when the here “is the expanse constituted by the various paths we can pursue as a body”
(210).
14 Diana Carolina Peláez Rodríguez

Unlike them, deported women are unable to resignify caregiving with this
strategy. They barely find jobs that would help them to survive in dignity and
usually have to receive money from their relatives in the other side. The notions of
the “moral economy” (Contreras y Griffith; 2012: 52) that sustain the reasons to
migrate severe with deportation and physical distance and transnational motherhood
lacks meaning. Nonetheless, they understand they have to bring this self-rupturing
back to normality and the impulse of their habitus provokes the possibilities of
soothing that emptiness: they either cross back over the border or bring their
children to Mexico.

Family Reunification

Both projects require a whole set of material, personal and psychological resources.
The first option, a result from the impulse of bringing back the relationship as it was
before and produce a minor harm in their children, is returning home. At the shelter,
they are given legal counseling where they learn more about the risks and
consequences of undocumented crossing.
If I hadn’t my children there, I wouldn’t go back to tell you the truth. The two months I was here in
Mexico I was very happy with my brothers. […] but my kids need my support, I want to continue
supporting them so they could continue studying (Alma, Interview October, 2012).

Alma experiences a common reality for the women who want to cross back.
Although their kids have grown enough to take care of themselves in their basic
needs, she is the provider of the family and without their support, they would have
to start working, drop out of school, and that would increase their vulnerability for
deportation for those who are not U.S. citizens. Other common reason is about the
medical attention their kids receive in the United States, especially for those with
crucial health conditions.
Angela goes to therapies, a lot of them. She receives help for her hearing, a lot of tests. She is having
a surgery on her face for the 26th of this month, and later a second one. I left her with my sister in-
law ‘cause she has a green card, she could take care of them. She tells me how Angela is evolving
and everything, but just imagine, since she is a baby, she even needed a tube where I could feed her
with and stuff like this. How could you detach from somebody that is so… it’s like if they had
chopped off my hand! I need to go back! (Norma, Interview, October 2012).

Forced by migratory policies to the world of illegality, their only options are the
networks of undocumented crossing of the border. They would have to pay high
fees for the coyotes, put their lives at risk or personal integrity. If they make it
home, they would have to live a life in permanent fear of being detained again and
put in jail. Unlike male deportees, over one half of the females plan to remain at the
border.
As depicted in the interviews, the reasons go from a temporary to a permanent
stay. The first one responds to either their set-up to cross back into the U.S. without
documents, or because they are going through the legal struggle of bringing their
children with them if they are in Foster Care. The mothers of children who
remained with family or friends in the other side have better chances to receive
Stuck on This Side: Symbolic Dislocation of Motherhood 15

visits from them at the border and even spend the weekend with them. For them,
their stay in a border city like Tijuana becomes permanent10.
For deported parents whose children are in custody of the State, bringing their
kids to Mexico is a long process of two years minimum with the support of the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of both countries and it consists of three appearances in
court where the mother should prove that every requirement has been met11.
In prison I was asked what I would plan to do if I got deported, and I said: move all over, go directly
to DIF [Mexican Institution for the Integral Development of Family], to the Embassy, wherever I
need to go. I need my girl back! I’ll take every class they want me to. I was assigned parenthood
classes, Alcoholics Anonymous, narcotics, therapy, and other three classes. I was supposed to take
those while in detention, but us undocumented migrants did not have access to them. I could have
taken them while locked those seven months, but I couldn’t. […] I’m not crossing back again! They
would give me federal time if they catch me. I’m ready to have my daughter back, not to lose her
again. (Tania, interview, March 2013).

Deported parents are represented with an attorney in court, and if the verdict at the
end of the process is negative, they could appeal. If they fail again the kids go for
adoption. Unfortunately, the biggest challenge is not the process itself, but
convincing the children to come and live in Mexico with them. If children are
American citizens and have grown a bit older to be independent, mothers know they
can get a good education and even the chance to go to college. They don´t want
them to lose their culture or stop speaking English; besides adaptation would be
very difficult for them. If the children are Mexican, they would like them to stay
there to learn English, stay in school and later work.
They tell me that I could go to jail [if she gets caught], but … it is worth it. I have to try it, because I
have my children. And they don´t want to be here in Michoacán. The older boy doesn´t like it, he
says that it´s ugly. He doesn´t like it. They are all in school [in the U.S.], and they are learning fine.
They don´t want to come. They tell me: why don´t you just come here? We don´t want to be there.
They are little. The girl is three years old and she doesn´t want to. She tells me: I don´t want to go
there! So it is hard [crossing the border], but I will try it! (Rosaura, interview, October 2012).

Family reunification in Mexico is not a popular choice among deportees whose

children are being taken care of by family or friends. Crossing back again seems to
be the first choice, but they could fail many times, or choose not to risk it. In order
to perform the motherhood of proximity, presence and closeness that they know,

10
Deported women who remain in Tijuana and other border cities face very limited job opportunities: the
majority of them do not have national documents in Mexico, just as it happened in the U.S., and the
procedures to obtain them may take over three months. Also, they usually do not have proof of a labor
record or academic background. Therefore, their chances of entering into the formal labor market in
Mexico are minimal. The most common source of employment is in the informal market or domestic
work: persons wishing to hire their services by the day or by the hour do so directly through the shelter.
For women with a certain educational level who speak good English, call centers could be an
employment opportunity, which does not generally require previous labor experience or identity
documents.
11
The process starts by finding the file and the foster home where the kid is at, which could take up to
four weeks. During this period the high state of uncertainty is very hard for them. In order to receive the
instructions of the procedure, the mother needs to find herself a stable place where they could be reached
and find a job, because the children are U.S. citizens, and the State needs to assure that the kids will be
guaranteed the same quality of life they had.
16 Diana Carolina Peláez Rodríguez

they have only these two choices. At this point of contingency, decisions should be
made. Those with children with the privilege of enjoying a U.S. citizenship know
they would have a hard time getting into school in Mexico, and would not feel
comfortable with the language, nor the privations at their mother’s place of origin;
so if they are with family or friends, bringing them is out of the question.
In the case of Mayra, she didn´t feel confident to leave her girls with relatives
due to a kidney transplant Nancy, her 12 year-old daughter, needed urgently. With
her absence, her only choice was to leave Nancy in the care of the Government for
the medical treatment she was assured. Now they are asking her to waive her
parental rights. It has been more than three years since deportation and Mayra is still
fighting her case, so she could get a visa to see her children again, but she was given
a 20-year no return sentence. Nothing has worked and she just waits in Tijuana for a
miracle, maybe until her older daughter, American citizen, is 21 so she could be
granted forgiveness and start a new process that might give her the chance to come
back.
There is always the choice to go to their places of origin, but for the women who
grew up in the United States this does not make sense; their place of origin is the
other side. For the women with family in Mexico it might be easier, but some would
not like that. It would mean failure and there would be social prejudice if they return
without their children. They would be thought as “bad mothers” for abandoning
them: “Yes, it has come to mind that I go there [to her parent’s in Veracruz], but my
children are here and I don´t want to go by myself. I´m going to feel bad arriving
there without my children” (Aura, Interview, November 2012).
In extreme cases, some women just feel paralyzed and sunk into the unbearable
emptiness of meaning and possibilities, which make them incapable to take a
decision about their future or even leave the shelter. This is Aura’s case. Afraid to
cross the border, after failing to convince her children to come to Mexico, unable to
go to her place of origin, and without symbolic resources to reconstruct her most
intimate relationships in the distance, she develops a deep depression. Her kids
cannot visit her12, but staying in Tijuana is the only resource she has left to bear the
pain of her absence. In the meantime, she imagines their everyday lives, how they
are growing up, talks to them on the phone, and waits for the day they will meet
again.

Transnational Motherhood in Deportation

“I don’t want them to lose those benefits, because they are from there.
I don’t want them paying for something I did.
I will settle here, in Ensenada, somewhere close.”
(Cecilia, November, 2012.)

Transnational motherhood in deportation reveals a complex set of power relations

that go beyond geographical borders and national sovereignty. The removal does

12 As minors they need both parents’ permission to obtain a passport and leave the country. They
lost contact with the father.
Stuck on This Side: Symbolic Dislocation of Motherhood 17

not only involve one person being forcedly displaced from one side of the border to
the other, but a whole group of affective relationships that constitutes them.
Deportation dislocates the subject in space and in time, and it brings out to light all
the resources a person has to overcome such state: the economic and emotional
support from the family on both sides; the ability of networking and decision
making; the management of crossing-back or settlement options; physical, mental,
emotional and psychological health; and symbolic resources to redefine the new
reality.
Such a drastic and violent change obstructs the identification process and makes
it difficult for these women to reconstruct their feminine identity, especially in the
dimension of motherhood. Their everyday life, their habits, and their relationships
get suspended and a survival-like challenge starts, which main aim is to bring this
self-rupturing back to normality.
Hegemonic notions of womanhood influence the emotions the women express
after deportation. Most of them state that proximity is fundamental in the
upbringing in order to assure good care and education. When forced apart, they can
only express feelings of sadness and guilt. With only the distance between them and
without the chance of providing for them, they lose a basic bond and it questions
their role as mothers. We have seen that mothers experiment a symbolic dislocation
as well, because they fall on the negative side of the value scale for motherhood,
that one that represents abandonment. Therefore, impulse by their habitus the only
solution they see to heal the damage is to be present again in the lives of their
children, no matter if they risk their lives trying.
Bringing the children back to Mexico is another option to bring back their role as
mothers to stability, but many variables come into play for that decision: the age of
the children, their citizenship, if they are being taken care of by known people or by
the Government, the health of the child, and their own decision making on whether
or not going to Mexico. If the mother decides not to risk her life or receive a greater
punishment due to the violation of the temporary prohibition of re-entry by crossing
back again, and decides not to bring her children to be with her in Mexico supported
by the ideology of the Unites States being “a better place” for them; she is forced to
give up her right to care, and her agency to mother the way she knows it requires a
reformulation. Here is where the machinery of resources come in handy, especially
the symbolic ones.
According to Marcela Lagarde, societies where the positive paradigm of
femininity is to have a reproductive sexuality and a relation of vital dependency of
and for others through motherhood, produce beings where the possibility of building
an individual desire, a personal world, a self for themselves has been annulated
(1993:19). Elizabeth Maier supports this idea and complements it by saying that this
lack of individual desire –a desire that would lead her into having vital projects of
her own, autonomous of their children and partner-, obstructs the subjectivity
process of the mother as an integrated person (2001:89-90). Transnational
motherhood in deportation could be thought as a rupture in the system, and a couple
of questions arise: Could the fracture of such an intimate relationship forged
through dependency and the moral harm it produces be mended in any way? And if
18 Diana Carolina Peláez Rodríguez

so, could it provoke in the mother the possibility to build and execute a vital project
of her own?
Deportation brings out some discontinuities in the process of identification, but
also continuities simultaneously appear. In the need to bring back personal stability
to place, the habitus of altruism pushes forward and a sense of relief heals the harm
in her self-respect. The positive representation of motherhood as a place of self-
sacrifice and suffering inherited by the Christian Marianismo13, helps her to accept
the decision of having voluntarily extended the separation from her children for
their own sake. Self-sacrifice brings a sense of fairness in the weigh scale of harms,
where she takes for herself all the punishment. The interesting part here is that even
under this discourse, she will be facing re-elaboration of her agency to mother in
another way, not as a being-for-others perhaps, but slowly as a being-for-herself.
It is in the limits of this research only to see this emergent possibility and accept
the rushing flow of the questions popping-up that will remain unanswered. Deeper
studies inquiring this condition of transnational motherhood in deportation would
have to complete the task. New possibilities or obstacles of family reunification,
active actions from the community that seek to change current migration policies on
both sides, and a feminist approach to think and develop a discussion on the right to
care of these women also need to be encouraged and documented.

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13
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_________________________________

Dreaming of Bad Motherhood in the

Jungle
Harrod J. Suarez

Oberlin College
harrod.suarez@oberlin.edu

_________________________________
ABSTRACT: This essay explores different versions of motherhood in Jessica
Hagedorn’s Dream Jungle, in which the protagonist, Lina, is exposed to,
influenced by, and recruited into arguably nationalist and global forms as she
navigates the fictionalized filming of Apocalypse Now in the 1970s Philippines.
But upon deciding to leave the film set and the nation to go to the U.S., Lina
derives insight from alternative sources that enable her to reimagine a diasporic
maternal position, one that negotiates her relationship to her child and the
Philippines while placing nationalist and global motherhood under erasure.

A CATEGORY DECADES IN THE MAKING, overseas Filipina/o workers

(OFWs) currently number more than ten million, which is equivalent to roughly one
tenth of the Philippine population. This category is distinct from immigrants,
including balikbayans who may eventually return to the Philippines; in contrast,
OFWs generally maintain their Philippine citizenship and return intermittently to
the Philippines. With the Philippines’s GDP at approximately $200B USD, the
$20B earned abroad and remitted home by OFWs constitutes a tenth of the
economy (POEA Stats, 2010). That amount helps explain the institutionalized
“brokering” of OFWs, 60% of whom are women, whose remittances stabilize not
only family units, but also the nation itself. Remittances are not a secondary source
of financing; they are crucial to the nation’s economic solvency, shrinking debt and
relieving unemployment such that the “state’s promise of jobs to its citizens and,
perhaps more importantly, the remittances migrants send home, have helped the
Philippines avert a major social catastrophe” (Rodriguez, 142).
While overseas employment existed even before Ferdinand Marcos, it was
institutionalized under the terms of Presidential Decree 442 (1974) for the same

Philosophy in the Contemporary World 23:1 (Spring 2016)

Dreaming of Bad Motherhood in the Jungle 23

reasons that martial law was declared.1 The mandate not only served as a reaction to
leftist and student mobilizing that Marcos framed as resulting from severe
unemployment, it also sought to take advantage of a global service-oriented
economy focused primarily on women of color. An entire bureaucratic apparatus—
including the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration and the Overseas
Workers Welfare Administration—was organized to manage the recruitment,
training, and preparation of workers. In 1983, Marcos signed Executive Order 857,
which required remittances to be sent via Philippine banks, an example of the
economic logic structuring overseas employment. More recently, near the beginning
of her presidency in 2001, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo suggested OFWs be renamed
OFIs, or overseas Filipina/o investors, once more emphasizing their economic roles
and obfuscating their labor (Rodriguez, 88).
Much of the current scholarship on women OFWs has focused on Filipinas
working in domestic industries such as nursing and maidservice.2 Rhacel Salazar
Parrenas’s work documents the experiences of women OFWs in different cities in
Europe and the US. Robyn Magalit Rodriguez and Anna Romina Guevarra show
how women OFWs are disciplined to facilitate their brokering for domestic work.
Mandatory training sessions that all OFWs attend before departing overseas
demonstrate just how exhaustive the efforts are to discipline them into being
nurturing and submissive, which often takes a gendered form. Trainers routinely
pontificate about the lack of virtue among Filipinas, which must be rectified so that
when they go abroad, they not only will not encourage sexual violence, they will
also represent the Philippines as an informal ambassador for the nation. They are
reminded that their actions determine whether they will experience sexual violence
and that the Philippines has no jurisdiction to provide any legal protections for them
abroad. They are expected to do more diplomatic work for the nation while the
nation withdraws from any efforts to work on their behalf (by providing legal
recourse, channels of support, etc.). What overseas employers see as the naturally
traditional, family-oriented qualities of women OFWs is the result not of cultural
mores, but intense preparation at the behest of the nation recognizing how best to
promote its workers for overseas labor. That most of them speak fluent English,
which remains a national language in the Philippines, only increases their
employment opportunities abroad. For the Orientalist frameworks that continue to
shape dominant perspectives in the global north, training sessions are ignored in
favor of assuming this is their natural condition.
The moral emphasis that is part of the training process must be emphasized.
While the Philippines has thriving sex work industries both within the nation and in
tourist locales elsewhere, it is critical for the nation to distinguish its women OFWs
from sex workers. Depending on the specific kind of job for which they are hired,
women OFWs are likely to develop varying degrees of intimacy with their
employers, living in their homes, cooking for them, raising their children, and
caring for older people. Women OFWs must therefore project more than diligence
and responsibility; they must be regarded as honest and moral. These qualities are

1
For work on overseas Filipina/o labor before Marcos, see Catherine Ceniza Choy.
2
Recent work, especially by Kale Fajardo, is helping us to understand in what ways Filipino masculinity
is structured by the state and negotiated by overseas Filipinos working in shipping and manufacturing.
24 Harrod J. Suarez

highlighted during their training because women OFWs are not just working, they
are also promoting Philippine culture through their moral behavior, performing a
kind of informal diplomacy.
In this way, their work—as nurturers, as informal, moral diplomats—means
women OFWs are cast in specifically maternal ways, even as Guevarra notes that
nearly half of them do not identify as mothers (81). Ambivalence about their
maternal labor ends up circulating throughout the nation. Since their labor takes
them overseas, the nation must make up for this moral and maternal absence,
reflecting a concern that the Philippines has been abandoned, even orphaned, for the
sake of economic relief. Given that they are prized specifically for their maternal
attributes, it appears that women OFWs become bad mothers at home in order to
become good maternal figures abroad. Maternal influence, it seems, is a zero-sum
economy. The construction of women OFWs spans the entire range of possibilities,
from hero to scapegoat, moral to depraved, lionized to lambasted.3 She can be an
abnormal subject in need of disciplinary training, a subject whose traditional
normativity facilitates the nation’s economic dependency on global capital, and a
subject whose traditional moral influence on the family is disrupted by global
capital, rendering the Philippine family dysfunctional.4
In this essay, which comes out of a broader project seeking alternative ways of
understanding the figure of the diasporic Filipina mother, I generate an analysis of a
different kind of overseas motherhood that is not legible within narratives of
globalization and nationalism. What is striking about the portrayal of diasporic
Filipina motherhood in Jessica Hagedorn’s Dream Jungle is that it delivers a
critique of an illegible agency without necessarily making that agency entirely
legible. Instead, it brings readers to the edge of meaning, enabling us to espy the
contours of that which escapes dominant epistemologies. Specifically, Lina, the
diasporic maternal character, refuses the opportunity to become legible and visible
either through an imperialist feminism or a nationalist feminism. Alongside this
risky strategy, she may also be understood as a bad mother—these two, I would
suggest, are related. She is a bad subject—one who refuses to become visible and
legible—through the performance of what many of us might be tempted to read as a
bad mother. While good maternal qualities have made Filipinas highly visible as the
ideal subjects of global labor, Lina takes an alternative approach.
From her vantage point, one that does not automatically valorize the visibility of
a normative motherhood, we may obtain insights on an alternative motherhood.
Reading Lina against a global, imperialist feminism and a nationalist response
shows that she refuses to make her diasporic maternal identity contingent on either
option. It is imperative to underscore how the choices she makes disidentify with
the consensual dreams that constitute the jungle even as they emerge from it, and to
consider more seriously the significance of her illegible position. She becomes a
different kind of mother, one not assimilable to dominant paradigms of motherhood.

3
For an expansive and insightful study on how moral discourses framed different iterations of overseas
Filipinas, see Denise Cruz.
4
These maternal characteristics are not uniquely ascribed to women OFWs. Domestic workers from
Mexico and Latin America are often framed in similar terms. See, for instance, Pierrette Hondagneu-
Sotelo.
Dreaming of Bad Motherhood in the Jungle 25

Lina’s maternal transformation might otherwise appear illegible without a sense of

what I will suggest is a catachrestic maneuvering.

1.

In the early 1970s, news spread across the scientific community that an
undiscovered tribe had been identified in the remote jungles of the southern
Philippines. It sparked worldwide popular attention: Charles Lindbergh and other
celebrities visited the group, expressing a paternalist concern to protect the tribe
against environmental threats such as deforestation and logging. But after several
years, reports emerged suggesting it was an elaborate, publicity-driven hoax: the
Tasaday were a rural group, to be sure, but of whom many surrounding, “modern”
communities were well aware.5 In hindsight, it appears that the supposed discovery
was only part of a public relations racket—which included a Miss Universe pageant,
the famed “Thrilla in Manila” boxing match, and the production of Francis Ford
Coppola’s Apocalypse Now—engineered by Marcos to bring attention to the
fledgling nation while distracting audiences from his repressive regime.
Both the Tasaday tribe and Apocalypse Now are fictionally reimagined in
Hagedorn’s novel. With Hagedorn’s penchant for tongue-in-cheek humor, the
Tasaday are renamed the Taobo—a mistranslation of a Tagalog response to who
they are: “Tao, po” (“People, sir/ma’am”), hinting at their falsified, mistranslated
creation. The organization invested in protecting them is the Philippine Indigenous
Minority Peoples Foundation, shortened into PIMPF. Apocalypse Now is renamed
Napalm Sunset. The novel is bifurcated historically, according to these events: the
first half is set in the early seventies and focuses on the Taobo’s discovery, while
the second half focuses on the film production at the end of the decade.
Nevertheless, there are direct and indirect connections between the two events.
Rizalina Cayabyab, for instance, works as a servant in the household of Zamora
Lopez de Legazpi, the man managing PIMPF, but runs away and re-emerges as
Lina, a catering employee on the film set who cares for her infant and enters into a
sexual relationship with one of the white actors. By the end of the novel, she is in
the US, living in the apartment of the actor, having left her infant in the care of an
older woman in the Philippines.
Rizalina proves to be one of the most important characters in the novel. Her
name change signals as much: Her given name, Rizalina, invokes the “first Filipino”
national hero José Rizal and suggests a kind of submission to his legacy insofar as
“ina” is a sign of deference (i.e., a child born Samuel might be called “Samuelito”
until he matures into adulthood) and gender difference (“ina” not “ino”). The
excision of the heroic and patrilineal inheritance leaves only “Lina,” the suffixal
trace of gendered diminution. All that is left, that is, is the supplement marking her
difference; it is all she will have to work with. By letting the heroic name go, the
neg(oti)ation of her identity does not derive from any essentially non-Western,
autochtonous knowledges, a rebuke of anticolonial and cultural nationalisms.

5
For an analysis of the controversy, see Robin Hemley.
26 Harrod J. Suarez

While Lina encounters several men who act with sexual aggression toward her
(moments that she transforms, catachrestically, into moments of illegible subject
formation), it is her negotiations with potential maternal influences that play a more
critical role in her development. There is her mother, who works as a maid in the
Legazpi estate in Manila. Lina is reunited with her after being the lone survivor of a
typhoon that sunk a boat on which she, her father, and brothers traveled to visit her
mother. Lina “love[s her] mother and always will” (15). But while they end up
working together as servants in Legazpi’s estate, there is surprisingly little
interaction documented between them in the novel. Lina’s mother “believed that
[Legazpi] was more important than the president” (38) and her subservience
reflected that belief. In one scene, Legazpi orders Lina to carry buckets of warm
water for his bath, which her mother understands as having the potential for him to
commit sexual abuse on her daughter. “‘They think they can do anything,’” she
mutters to Lina. But her next line conveys her subordination: “‘Well, don’t just
stand there’” (46). Lina asks her, “‘What if I don’t want to go?’” an important
question that her mother ignores. Both for her recognition of Legazpi’s importance
and for her realizing her subordinate status, her mother does little to protect or
advise Lina. Her mother is structurally prevented from doing as such insofar as her
status as a worker forecloses such opportunities.
Along with this failed potential for her mother to serve as a maternal guide,
another viable option that ends up failing is a universalist feminism represented by
Janet Pierce, the wife of the American film director. While Lina interacts minimally
with Janet on the film set, Hagedorn’s inclusion of excerpts of Pierce’s diary signals
a specific and unique role in the novel. Pierce is there, after all, not just to support
her husband and watch her children, but also to make a documentary of the film. As
the lone white woman who appears and like her real-life counterpart, Eleanor
Coppola, she is simultaneously subordinate according to her gender status and
superordinate given her whiteness. It is not that she occupies a liminal, interstitial,
or hybrid status, but that she must negotiate a role that deals at once with sexism
and racial privilege.
Her passages in the text are brief enough to seem inconsequential but illuminate
her negotiations as a white woman. For instance, her first appearance establishes the
consternation her presence creates for her husband: “Long days passed. Pierce was
short tempered. ‘Will you please take that fucking camera out of my face?’ Pierce
whirled around to confront his wife, Janet. She had been following him around with
a sixteen-millimeter camera since the first day of read-throughs. Everything
stopped. ‘I’m sorry, Jan—’ Pierce called out, groaning as his wife stormed away”
(177). She refers to her husband, secretly, as “Tony God” (186) and finances the
documentary with her own money; the lack of investment affects how she is treated
on the set: “No one paid attention to the smiling, unobtrusive woman and her
discreet crew of two. Wife of director. Mother of director’s sons. Who was she,
really—and why should anyone on the set care? They were all too busy, too
preoccupied with the immense task of pleasing her husband” (187). She is
subordinated to her status as wife and mother, enabling the crew to overlook her.
For the most part, Janet works in the background, but it is still possible to tease
out a certain assertiveness that she inhabits as a white woman on the set. She
Dreaming of Bad Motherhood in the Jungle 27

continues to resent her husband and all the attention he craves and receives. Over
dinner and wine, some of that resentment comes out, with Lina, working as a caterer
on the set, within earshot. While Lina’s mother did little to prevent what she
interpreted as Legazpi’s sexual advances, Janet reproaches Vincent Moody for his
interest in Lina: “‘A bit young for you, isn’t she?’” (201). Later, Janet “glanced at
Lina with friendly curiosity,” and Lina “was relieved to see Janet Pierce return”
upon being accosted by the local mayor (266). The only interaction they have is
brief but telling insofar as it provides Lina an emergent model of universal
feminism that can disavow the history of empire: “Janet Pierce smiled at Lina.
‘How are you?’ ‘Fine, ma’am.’ ‘Not “ma’am.” Please. Call me Janet’” (267).

2.

While Janet appears only sporadically in the novel, turning to her real-life
counterpart’s diary enables us to tease out the problems with the emergent
universalist feminism Janet espouses, underscoring its imperialist design. Published
as Notes, Coppola’s diary details her experience as part of the production of
Apocalypse Now. While the diary would seem to be just a footnote in the film’s
production, it provides revealing insights into the very terms by which Ellie
understands both her work in the Philippines and her husband’s. Specifically, Ellie
articulates her ambitions through a teleology grounded in race, gender, and
sexuality, which form the core of an implicit argument attempting to make sense of
and even justify the film production. In this way, the identity she idealizes and
imagines for herself must be understood as produced within and responding to not
only her marriage and the ambitious film production, but also the Philippine setting
made invisible. The diary argues for the establishment of an idealized heterosexual
marriage by a white couple doing what she calls the “most pertinent artwork.”
White femininity finds itself behind the lens of a camera and a Philippine setting,
both of which eventually force her into their frames. The Coppolas’ racialized
authority is established via the realization of their dreamy, Philippine-based
marriage. In the diary, it succeeds through the production of an ambitious narrative
that depends on the Philippine setting in ways Ellie does not recognize, and it is this
intersection between the authority the Coppolas exercise that imperialism in its
feminist version emerges.
For starters, the Philippines acts only as a formality insofar as it provides certain
opportunities without bearing any apparent significance itself; it is also a formality
since it provides the formal elements necessary for depicting the war in Southeast
Asia. As Ellie explains in the introduction, “the Philippines was chosen as the
location because of the similarity of the terrain to Vietnam, the fact that the
Philippine Government was willing to rent its American-made helicopters and
military equipment to the production and that building and labor costs were
generally low” (17). Notice that she begins with a passive construction (“was
chosen”) but not as if there were any doubt about who made the decision and why—
the reasons for the choice occupy the rest of the sentence. What it does suggest is an
unwillingness to acknowledge this accountability. It also means grammatically that
the Philippines, the direct object, slips into the space reserved for the subject. The
28 Harrod J. Suarez

Philippines becomes a subject at the moment of its subjection, an ambivalence the

passive voice underscores. Indeed, this ambivalence will mark the role of the
Philippines for the rest of the text. The three reasons Ellie mentions—verisimilitude,
government complicity and cost-effectiveness—attempt to stabilize this
indeterminacy, producing and also refuting its accountability.
Since the Philippines does not matter, and since it materializes as something
other than itself, it is that much easier to disavow the consequences.6 Ellie spends
much time agonizing over how to balance her filmic aspirations with her maternal
duties. She has almost no previous filmmaking experience and wonders “if [Francis]
is just trying to keep me busy or if he wants to avoid the addition of a professional
team on an already overloaded production. Maybe both” (24). Women’s entry into
the public sphere is always already cast in doubt. From the start of the production,
her role is questionable and, left unanswered, persistently ambivalent and
potentially worthless. It is not as if she has nothing to do, since she is watching over
their three children for what would amount to more than a year of filming. This
double (or triple) duty as mother (and wife) and filmmaker creates a crisis for her.
She worries about which should take priority: “I am the mother of these children,
the wife of the director of this multimillion-dollar production, and I hadn’t given a
thought to my family this morning. … Riding along in the car I began going through
my wife/mother versus artist argument in my head for about the five hundredth
time.”
Once more, her identity crisis is both articulated and temporarily resolved amid
the film production in the Philippines. When she thinks back to the production once
they have returned to the US, she notes that “[t]here is part of me that wants to
work. There I was those nine months in the Philippines, working every day on the
documentary. It was stimulating and full of insights for me, … the first time in our
married life that my work part and my marriage part were integrated” (174). In the
Philippines, that is, she comes to terms with her dilemma, although these terms have
been revised. She implies that the artist (and more generally, worker) is neither an
identity competing with the wife/mother nor one that is separable from her identity,
but that these are different “parts” that can be “integrated.” It is a pregnant moment
for her, delivering her an emboldened identity that marries wedlock with labor. She
goes so far as to claim that it was a singular moment, one that had apparently never
before materialized in the marriage.
But this narrative is abstracted from and forgets one of its conditions of
possibility: its setting in the Philippines, former colony of the US yet still entangled
with it, especially as the US formally backed the Marcos regime, even during its
installation of martial law. What Ellie obscures, then, is an imperialist discourse that
aids and abets not just the film production, but her opportunity to work outside of
the home. Without these narratives, she can only describe the uncanny difference
she feels back in the US. For instance, when she has to return to San Francisco
ahead of the others to prepare for the holidays, she is “mad that I was back with this

6
See Amy Kaplan’s introductory essay to The Cultures of US Imperialism argues that US exceptionalism
depends precisely on excising the unsavory narratives of conquest from the historical record; the essay
ends with a brief consideration of Coppola’s diary as also exemplary of this amnesia. Also see Oscar
Campomanes’s important critique.
Dreaming of Bad Motherhood in the Jungle 29

mountain of household responsibilities. … And I was the wife sent home to get the
house in order for a family Christmas. I was mad and confused, irritated, stumbling
over this big house in my life once again” (169). She identifies herself not as
Francis’s wife, but as “the” wife, the definitive article dissolving her particularity
into a generic narrative—“the” wife is preparing “the” house, as if she does not
participate in it except to fulfill her duty not to her family, but to “the family,” in
service of “the” imperialist nation. Disavowing imperialism allows her to
universalize her gendered position and oppression, and vice versa, just as the
abstracted universalization of “the” woman enables the forgetting of empire.
Notably, her grammar breaks down as she is “confused, irritated, stumbling over”—
and here is a brief return to an intimate, particular narrative—“this big house in my
life.” Arriving at the end of this passage, it feels forced, as if she is consigned to
claim a personal investment in it to be recognized as a citizen, at once victim of and
complicit with the nation.
Most startlingly, perhaps, is the paradox she articulates. While the San Francisco
setting is familiar, language troubles her: “I felt like I was in a familiar place but
didn’t speak the language” (Ibid.). Even in anticipation of the Christmas holiday
that is among the most cherished in the US for bringing families together, the
language of being a wife/mother proves inadequate for Ellie. What is the catalyst for
this aphasia, and what language could have replaced it? The language she learns
abroad is neither Tagalog nor Filipino, to be certain; unbeknownst to her, it is the
language of imperialism, with which she had been complicit yet to which as a
wife/mother she also had been oblivious, despite how it structures her filmmaking.
Imperialism is marked in the diary by its absence, by a language Ellie cannot (not)
speak. The imperialist role allows her to blend gender roles, to blend family and
work duties, in the Philippines. Within US borders, her gendered duties are most
pronounced, whereas abroad her feminine difference is positioned in a way that it
can incorporate her multiple duties. In the empire, Ellie, like Francis, learns to
integrate “life” and “art”; at “home,” she is reminded that a woman is not a man.
Unable to speak that language, she has lost her (wife/)mother tongue.
As a documentary filmmaker, Ellie remains unable to recognize herself in the
lens. The distance she claims here is a space of comfort; as merely an observer (of
creative filmmaking and of empire), her racialization is a disembodied, feminized
whiteness lurking behind the camera. She does not realize that in yoking her
wife/mother and artistic roles, she has slipped into a kind of masculine discourse
that also slips her into the camera’s frame. The imperialist agency on which her
liberation depends is becoming revealed, the amnesiac distance coming undone.
Reflecting on the dilemma after filming has concluded and during a long period of
editing and production, Ellie finally notices that even as the documentarist, she is
not outside the camera lens: “I was watching from the point of view of the observer,
not realizing that I was on that journey, too. Now I am at a place, I don’t know quite
how I got here. It feels strange and foreign” (212). Despite devoting much space to
describing the Philippines as precisely “strange and foreign,” she draws no
connections between the landscape and her interiority, keeping in place the imposed
gap, the sanctioned ignorance, between setting and self.
30 Harrod J. Suarez

But once she discovers herself in front of the camera, she makes a startling
comment which all of a sudden leaps from the abstract to, it would seem, “history”:
“I can’t go back to the way it was. Neither can Francis, neither can Willard [a
character in the film], neither can the United States” (Ibid.). The realization enables
her to recognize the roles that fact and fiction play in the production of meaning—
but only to recognize both, not to blur or undo the boundaries separating them. The
camera analogy overwhelms her attempt to make sense of both the development and
unraveling of their multiple projects, yoking together not just the two films, but
their marriage, their Willard- and Kurtz-derived/inspired journeys, her historical
outlook, and US imperialism: “All along I have been talking about Francis’s
conflicts, mirroring the conflicts of Willard. The contradictions of the peace-loving
U.S.A. making a bloody war. I’ve been standing back, as if looking through a wide-
angle lens, seeing the big picture. Now I have found myself with a close-up lens. It
brings into focus my contradictions. I am laughing and crying my heart out (229
ff.).” From wide-angle to close-up, she realizes that contradictions not only plague
Francis, Willard, and the US, but herself as well. Previously laughing at how
picture-perfect the film production was for their marriage, the laughter here differs
significantly. By recognizing herself in the frame, reality and history are
denaturalized for the documentarist: “How I thought I was the innocent bystander,
just recording some snapshots about the making of Apocalypse, as if it didn’t
pertain to me. I had a belief system that took the world literally. I chose to only see
the rational, the literal, and deny the illusion. … I am emerging from my tunnel
vision. I am in a clearing where I can see more, see the literal and the illusion both
at the same time (Ibid.).” Documentary distance is exposed as fiction, illusion, and
creation. But Ellie can effect no radical epistemological break. While she admits to
previously having “den[ied] the illusion,” her epiphany is limited to admitting the
presence of illusion. Even as she refers to such characters as “Willard,” “Francis,”
“the US” and herself interchangeably (the Philippines remains unthinkable here)—
which suggests that the “literal and the illusion” are indistinguishable from each
other and mutually constitutive—she maintains a division between them, accepting
only that she can recognize “both at the same time.” Now, watching herself in front
of the camera, as well as within the plot of Francis’s film, she believes “that big,
two-headed stone temple at Kurtz Compound represented marriage. The basic
structure of beliefs that my life was based on. It exploded. I wept and ached and
tried to put back the stones, hold up the walls and patch it together as it crumbled.
Finally I gave up” (247). A sentence fragment is followed by two short words. The
grammar of imperialism is exhausted with logic and meaning; the Philippines,
having slipped into the subject via the passive voice, is the agent of this catachresis
in Ellie’s life. The Philippines, that is, “explodes” her identity.

3.

For Jacques Derrida, catachresis is an inherent part of constructing meaning (66).

Taking seriously, for instance, the way that metaphor necessarily shapes meaning—
not relegating it as secondary and unnecessary, but as foundational in producing
meaning—one must accept and engage with the catachresis that metaphor performs
Dreaming of Bad Motherhood in the Jungle 31

on the concepts and ideas we assume it only embellishes upon. That which is
supposed only to supplement is constitutive. Catachresis means that the use of
metaphor “does not go outside the language, does not create new signs, does not
enrich the code; yet it transforms its functioning: it produces, with the same
material, new rules of exchange, new meanings” (59). One might say that metaphor
and its catachrestic process draws out the meanings already residing within any
concept.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak develops these concerns within the historical
specificity of postcolonial feminism. For her, catachresis allows for the possibility
of political and cultural difference: “[T]he supposedly authoritative [narratives] of
the production of which was written elsewhere, in the social formations of Western
Europe… are being reclaimed, indeed claimed, as concept-metaphors for which no
historically adequate referent may be advanced from postcolonial space, yet that
does not make the claims less important. A concept-metaphor without an adequate
referent is a catachresis” (60). The absence of an “adequate referent” is the result of
colonial violence. The concepts that originate in Europe are not simply transported
to the colonies in their original form and with their original meaning, as if context
were not an issue. Instead, they take on new meanings, new significations, such that
their prior referent becomes inadequate. In this way, colonialism thus opens up
possibilities for alternative modes of production and meaning, even within the
intertwined systems of language, epistemology, capital, and power that structure it.
Postcolonial culture is not simply derivative, parasitic, and imitative of the west; the
very inadequacy of representational systems means that postcolonial cultural and
knowledge production inevitably transforms colonial concepts and narratives.
When colonial mimicry fails, as it must, failure marks alternative possibilities.
For Spivak, the category of the postcolonial woman shows just how unstable
concepts across colonial time, space, and difference are:
It is the disenfranchised who teaches us most often by saying: I do not recognize myself in the object
of your benevolence. I do not recognize my share in your naming. Although the vocabulary is not
that of high theory, she tells us that if we care to hear (without identifying our onto/epistemological
subjectivity with her anxiety for the subjectship of ethics and the agency of the political) that she is
not the literal referent for our frenzied naming of woman in the scramble for legitimacy in the house
of theory. She reminds us that the name of “woman,” however political, is, like any other name, a
catachresis. (152)

Such a claim thwarts any attempts to construct a feminist politics without

experiencing and working through the disruption generated by history. But this
claim does not mean politics is impossible or that we left without political
alternatives. It does not weaken a political program that attends to gender and
colonialism. Indeed, the very critical thrust of catachresis is its emphasis on
alternatives that we must not disregard given their critical potential.
Catachresis is vital to rethinking identity and agency, and Lina’s actions
underscore the need for us not to align the formation of her diasporic motherhood
with those proposed by her mother or Janet. Were we to inscribe her within the very
dominant logics of motherhood that structure OFWs for globalization and
nationalism, we would miss out on her most potent intervention. Saba Mahmood
urges us not to identify, posit, and narrate agency from the unexamined categories
32 Harrod J. Suarez

that we inhabit and which structure our vantage points, which only “reinscribe[s] a
familiar way of being human that a particular narrative of personhood and politics
has made available to us,” which “forc[es] the aporetic multiplicity of commitments
and projects to fit into this exhausted narrative mold” (155). Intent instead on
identifying the narrow limits of our dominant epistemologies, Mahmood seeks “to
redress the profound inability within current feminist political thought to envision
valuable forms of human flourishing outside the bounds of a liberal progressive
imaginary” (Ibid.). Catachrestic thinking requires recognizing that what we thought
we were interpreting was only the result of how we were trained to interpret it, and
that what may actually be happening is taking a form we don’t (yet) know how to
recognize, much less interpret and write about. As we will see, Dream Jungle
accomplishes the dual task of suggesting that, first, there are other forms of
diasporic motherhood that do not align with any “exhausted narrative mold” and,
second, these forms will not need to be posited or announced for our sakes, given
that the point is not to provide empirical verifiability but to underscore the edges of
a privileged but always already partial epistemology and politics.
Toward the end of the novel, Fritz Magbantay, the mayor of the town near
where the film is being shot, sees Lina taking a walk on her own, and he and his
chauffeur trap her. In this isolated area, she is the potential victim of more sexual
violence. But Aling Belén, an older woman in the area, whom Lina knows as an
“old hag” from her youth, appears and the mayor’s advances are thwarted—he
knows better than to challenge the matriarch (18). At a nearby cemetery, Belén
advises Lina to “‘get away from here. I’ll take care of Yeye [her infant], but I can’t
help you anymore’” (260). As they continue to walk, she asks Lina, “‘Why were
you in that man’s car?’ ‘I don’t know,’ Lina said. After a pause Lina continued, ‘I
keep dreaming about a tiger. What does my dream mean, Aling Belén?’ ‘I don’t
know,’ Aling Belén said, chewing” (261). The old woman has nothing to say about
it, leaving Lina without an answer. While the moment passes, it is intriguing that
Belén can only deliver partial support for Lina; she cannot supply Lina with a
political program or identity to inhabit.
Thus, among the multiple figures of gendered influence available to Lina,
ranging from her mother to Janet (and by extension, Ellie) to Belén, Lina will
choose none of the above. She opts for the tiger instead, which exists in her dreams
but also in reality. One of the most sensational events of the films—both
Apocalypse Now and Napalm Sunset—is the arrival of a tiger whose name in the
novel is “Shiva, after the Hindu god of destruction” (263). It appears in one scene,
as two GIs disappear into the jungle. The tiger draws the attention of everyone—
“like the Vietnam war movie, [it] made life seem less slow, petty, and provincial”—
and Pierce orders the set closed except for the crew as well as a few invited guests.
Lina implores Vincent to get permission for her to be there. He assumes she has the
same curiosity as everyone else, but there are more significant reasons she does not
disclose. Her observation is not limited to sheer excitement:
Lina stared at the tiger, riveted. She was looking for a sign. Anything at all, to explain all those
dreams. To point her in the right direction. Shiva was a god—Vincent had said so. Gods knew the
way, could help her make a decision. To stay or to go? To leave Yeye behind or take her along? The
tiger gazed back at Lina, languid, indifferent. His work was done. … The tiger blinked its amazing
eyes and roared. As if to say, Yes, yes. It’s about time! Will you feed me? Lina felt a great joy. (270)
Dreaming of Bad Motherhood in the Jungle 33

What is a thrill and a threat for others is a solution for Lina. The solution that Shiva
provides encourages Lina to go to the US, without Yeye, which Belén had already
suggested but which was insufficient for Lina—hence the need for Shiva to confirm
it. Lina does not just accept and obey Belén. The solution to the dilemma this young
woman faces is derived from multiple sources, not least of which is a tiger. It comes
from Lina’s own engagement with the terms of her mother, Belén, Janet,
Hollywood film culture, US empire, and the tiger itself.
The tiger continues to haunt Lina—she scrawls a stick-figure version of it on her
palms and refuses to show it to Moody, claiming her power to control its meaning
for her. She seduces Moody, and during sex he declares his love for her. “But she
could not hear him, lost as she was in her nightmare of tigers dreams” (272). The
seeming fulfillment of Moody’s desire, marked as it is by his white, masculine
wealth that seeks access to and possession of a Filipina body, is revised,
catachrestically, into a description that reveals her productivity. Sex enables her to
further explore the significance of the tiger.

Tigers danced on the walls and ceiling, on the bed of tangled sheets on which she and Moody
thrashed and moaned. Pagodas of tigers, floating islands of tigers. Pouncing, roaming, prowling. Out
of a sea of tigers rose her tiger-faced mother, father, and twin brothers. Rose a glaring Zamora Lopez
de Legazpi. As hard as she tried to distract herself, Lina was unable to shake her mind free of its
multiplying visions. Tigers in trees, trees of tigers. Tigers within tigers. (Ibid.)

Moody’s authority is wholly absent, and his proclamations of love ignored. Instead,
she sees tigers that transform her memories of her family and past. The proliferating
tigers signify a proliferation of meaning, so many catachreses, and give her the
epistemological means to make sense of her situation and guide her through its
negotiation. Soon after, she leaves the Philippines and leaves Yeye in Belén’s care.
A single, brief chapter that Lina narrates is devoted to her and her daughter. She
notes Belén’s resentment of the film production, blaming the “movie people” for
Yeye’s illness while accusing Lina of forgetting native folk songs to sing to her
daughter: “‘What a shame you don’t know these songs,’ the old witch sighs. But I
do my best” (250). She recounts conceiving Yeye through her first sexual
experience outside of the violent episodes she had encountered with her father and
with Legazpi. Lina expresses regret in leaving Yeye behind—“Will you miss me
one day as I miss my mother? Mama, Nanay, Candelaria. I miss Sputnik. I miss
[Legazpi]. Why, I don’t know” (Ibid.). Her range of influences stretches wide to
include her friend and coworker, as well as her boss. Her words to Yeye take on a
sobering, unfiltered form: “Look! No more shitty days. The sun is out. Monkeys
screech in the trees, pigs grunt in their pens, the fool rooster chases after the nasty,
obstinate hens. Look—he’s caught one! Climbed on her, fucked her. It is over in a
second. He hops off, clucking and preening. Fool rooster. Fool hens” (251). These
are not the words of wisdom of an overprotective mother, but the insights of a
woman who treats her daughter, even as an infant, as someone who must know
these truths of being a Filipina subject of empire. For whatever misgivings others
have about her naiveté or immaturity, Lina appears mature in such revelations to her
daughter. She expresses concern and vigilance, not careless and reckless
abandonment.
34 Harrod J. Suarez

It is not unlike the situation that many OFWs find themselves in, making
possible interpretations significant beyond gaining insight into the text. According
to one narrative that conditions OFW discourse, for instance, it is possible to claim
that Lina abandons both child and nation—that she gives up any literal and
symbolic positions as a maternal resource for the Philippines. Worse yet, she
abandons it all to live in the cushy accommodations of a Hollywood actor, having
moved into Moody’s place in Santa Monica. Such a reading would mark her as a
bad mother and bad subject, neglecting her identity, culture, and family in favor of
assimilation and accumulation. But to pursue such an interpretation misses out on
Lina’s catachrestic work. In the last glimpse readers have of her before the novel’s
end, she meets Sonny Limahan, formerly a bodyguard from the estate she ran away
from, at an art gallery in Los Angeles. She stands before a painting, evoking the
work of Manuel Ocampo, “of a gaunt Jesus carrying a massive wooden cross. Near
Christ were a crowing rooster and a pile of skulls. Four corners of the canvas were
decorated, as if in afterthought, by sloppily rendered swastikas” (Ibid.). After she
tells him the artist is Filipino, he scoffs at the painting. But the scene helps us
understand Lina’s generally illegible maternity. He warns her that her mother is sick
and wants to see her. Lina interrupts him, insisting she must go. “‘You came to tell
me [Legazpi] was dead. That my nanay is sick. Nevertheless—’ She gathered her
things. ‘I must go now’” (311). He pleads with her to stay longer, but to no avail.
He asks if she has what she needs; she tells him she is working. “She was
mysterious about the job; she refused to tell him exactly where she lived. ‘I stay
near the beach,’ was all she said. ‘I am happy now. I want to stay happy’” (312).
That is all she permits Limahan to know, before she leaves him, without looking
back. Lina refuses his pleas and proclaims her happiness. Limahan represents the
last vestiges of the intensely repressive global heteronationalism of the Marcos
regime in the 1970s, of which the discovery of the tribe played a feature role. His
attempt to reclaim Lina as the bearer of future generations seems to mark a final
nationalist effort, one last attempt to recruit her into a form of nationalist
motherhood.
Lina’s response does not mean she has abandoned anything whatsoever, or that
her happiness is dependent on leaving the Philippines to toil in the ruins of martial
law while she basks in the afterglow of Hollywood. Instead, while Limahan’s
waning nationalism finds the painting “ugly” and “profane,” Lina studies it. She
does not simply celebrate the art for its Philippine origins, but neither does she
dismiss it. She stands critically in front of it, weighing its significance, seeking its
insights—which is in sharp contrast not only to Limahan, but Ellie, whose marital
and professional ideals fail to recognize the role the Philippines plays in her own
narrative. It is worth noting that at every effort made to write the Philippines out of
the story—to deliberately forget about empire in favor of the culmination of white
feminism, marriage, and art; to reject its culture, as Limahan does, in order to forget
the failings of nationalism—the archipelago, like Lina, disidentifies with its
marginalization. She inhabits a catachrestic subjectivity. As a diasporic mother,
Lina cannot be reduced to the available narratives conditioning how we understand
OFWs and other Filipinas in the diaspora. In this way, Lina does not abandon Yeye
or the Philippines—or perhaps, she only does if readers cannot distance ourselves
Dreaming of Bad Motherhood in the Jungle 35

from the norms that structure our understandings of motherhood, gender, and
imperialism.

Works Cited

Campomanes, Oscar. 1995. “The New Empire’s Forgetful and Forgotten Citizens:
Unrepresentability and Unassimilability in Filipino-American Postcolonialities.”
Critical Mass 2:2, 145-200.

Choy, Catherine Ceniza. 2003. Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino
American History Durham: Duke UP.

Coppola, Eleanor. 1980. Notes: On the Making of Apocalypse Now. New York:
Simon and Schuster.

Cruz, Denise. 2012. Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina.
Durham: Duke UP.

Derrida, Jacques. 1974. “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy.”

F.C.T. Moore, trans. New Literary History 6:1, 5-74.

Fajardo, Kale Bantigue. 2011. Filipino Crosscurrents: Oceanographies of

Seafaring, Masculinities, and Globalization. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P.

Guevarra, Anna Romina. 2009. Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes: The

Transnational Labor Brokering of Filipino Heroes. New Brunswick: Rutgers
UP.

Hagedorn, Jessica. 2004. Dream Jungle. New York: Penguin.

Hemley, Robin. 2007. Invented Eden: The Elusive, Disputed History of the
Tasaday. Lincoln: Bison Books.

Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette. 2007. Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and

Caring in the Shadows of Affluence. Berkeley: U of California P.

Kaplan, Amy. 1993.“Left Alone with America: The Absence of Empire in the Study
of American Culture” in Kaplan and Donald Pease, eds. Cultures of U.S.
Imperialism. Durham: Duke UP, 3-21.

Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist
Subject. Princeton: Princeton UP.

http://www.poea.gov.ph/stats/2008_stats.pdf. Accessed January 6, 2010.

36 Harrod J. Suarez

Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar. 2001. Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and

Domestic Work Palo Alto: Stanford UP.

Rodriguez, Robyn Magalit. 2010. Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State
Brokers Labor to the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1993.Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York:

Routledge.
Claiming: thoughts of an unconventional
older mother
Shirley Glubka
saglubka@gmail.com

___________________________________
ABSTRACT: The author is a lesbian poet, novelist, and essayist who chose to
give up the daily parenting of her three-year-old son in 1973 and who has written
about the experience over the decades. She is also a woman who reads philosophy.
Now, from the perspective of her older years and in the light of philosophy, she
once again considers her relationship to motherhood. This is a personal essay:
descriptive, meditative, and creative.

He was in me—I
stretched—
pushed him out—
he was still
bloody—I
held him—he
drank from me.

Arriving,
he ripped me.
I fed him.

He was born on the old kitchen table.

He had a plain and decent start.
Three years we were entwined.

The women before me birthed

baby after baby.

Raised them.

I must learn to understand the act of giving up my child.

—from "Old Milk, Blue-white, Merciful" (Glubka 2012a, 11)

Philosophy in the Contemporary World 23:1 (Spring 2016)

38 Shirley Glubka

Koan (Zen Buddhism):

"A riddle without a solution used to
demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning
and provoke sudden enlightenment."
—The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary

The experience of being a mother—or becoming a mother, for it is a never-finished, ever-shifting

condition—has been my koan. I'm not a Buddhist, and the thought of "sudden enlightenment" unsettles
me, but the word—koan—has been for decades one of my words. It fits so well in the hand somehow.
When my son Kevin was three years old his day care teacher came to me. He was very angry, this
beautiful boy—a biter, a bit of a problem, though a charismatic one. How she loved him! She herself
could not achieve a pregnancy, a sorrow in her life. We talked and talked. He went to live with her, his
new mother. I became a shadow mother, a visitor, a sometime babysitter. I felt unsuited for the long work
of daily parenting, though exactly what "unsuited" meant was, and still is, more mystery than
explanation.
I keep working my koan, this thing in my hand, this rock, this solidity not yet worn away. I'm seventy
years old. It's a bit embarrassing, not to be finished. But, as I indicated, I don't seem to believe in
sudden—or even not-so-sudden—enlightenment.
—from the Preface to my chapbook,
All the Difference: poems of unconventional Motherhood

F EELING MY WAY TOWARD A FORM for this essay, I produce—as

quickly as possible—a list of words that leap and shimmer for me, not just at this
moment, but through the decades of my maturity and perhaps further back than that.
Impossible, this bit about "the decades." How on earth would I remember?
Nevertheless, words tumble out:
being
ground
void
chaos
fracture
radiance
clarity
intensity
calm
call
pull
tensile
steel
light
dark
star
water
shift
stretch
yield
I fall in love with this list. I want to say, "This is who I am, a person who loves
this list of twenty words." Next comes a surge of (irrational) desire. I want my list to
explain, to express, to reveal—me. When I write about my experience with
Claiming: thoughts of an unconventional older mother 39

motherhood, I want the reader to listen, and look back at this list. And understand
everything.
Of course I myself don't understand everything. Poet George Oppen's last public
statement was "My happiness is the knowledge of all we do not know" (Rudolf,
n.p.). Oppen is so frequently my inspiration; my comfort
–––––––
I am not a philosopher, not a scholar, not a teacher. I read philosophy. I use it for
my mind, my heart, my meaning-making, my writing. In poetry, fiction, and
discursive prose: Benedict Spinoza slips in; Friedrich Nietzsche; Gilles Deleuze;
Simone Weil; Iris Murdoch. Again and again, I welcome them.
–––––––
On Being Unusual
(for example, as a mother)
1) If one lives outside the norm, it is easy to slide into complaint, victimhood,
pleading: don't hurt me! make room for me! see me!
2) Living outside the norm: the very fact forces thought; presses the spirit; is a
privilege.
I hope to write from stance #2.
–––––––
Threads of mystery glint and pull inside the phenomenon of motherhood. They
are visible or invisible, depending on the light of the moment. They make a pattern,
then curl to chaos. No matter how she manages it, undergoes it, overcomes it, wades
through it, dances upon it: at the heart of each mother's experience and radiating
through the days and nights is something inexplicable.
For the biological mother. What is this that grows in her womb? And then
emerges! And through the hours, days, months, years: a miniature human growing
larger; change and challenge; gift and surprise. Here is a being strangely "hers." No
matter what choices she makes, no matter where her motherhood leads: this actual
human being, somehow strangely "hers." And not.
For other mothers, various as they are. What is this that comes to her (or to him,
for men can mother) by a path perhaps even more puzzling than her/his body: this,
small human being, a person, now amazingly, mysteriously, somehow "hers" or
"his." And not.
What are we to make of this? I mean: in action, daily. I mean: in thought, when
thought is possible.
–––––––
John Keats famously describes those with Negative Capability as "capable of
being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact &
reason" (Keats, 768). He was writing about a core aspect of the Man of
Achievement, Shakespeare for example, but I suspect a bit of Negative Capability is
a necessary part of the thinking person's equipment these days, even if she
isn't...well...a genius of the male gender. Our access ramp to "fact & reason" has
been in somewhat broken condition for a long time now. (Which circumstance can
be grounds for joy. Is joy on my list of words? No, I see that it isn't. Perhaps it's a
tag-along—too recent to warrant inclusion.)
40 Shirley Glubka

Keats was a poet determined to embrace the variety of the world. He thought
Coleridge cut experience short, molding it to preconception. We do so love
"answers," we humans, even in these postmodern times. We readily leap to the
brittle ground of preconception, of premature conclusion. If boisterous Reality rises
up (I see a big, muscled, laughing woman shouldering up from beneath) that ground
will crack. Let us be cautious, then, for motherhood is a topic muscled with
Reality—and permeated with Mystery, which can, yes, erupt as joy in response to
the very depth, the wonder, the radical impossibility; or curdle to confusion, even to
terror. We will need our own little portion of Negative Capability.
–––––––
Some questions from the venerable categories of epistemology, ontology, ethics:
• What kinds of "knowing" might we use to grasp what this is, this being-a-
mother? And then this being-a-mother in a way so far outside the norm
that the very idea of claiming the label can be questioned? Where to
enter—with what sort of violence, or gentleness—to access the depths,
the innards? How much to trust such "knowing"?
• What is real here? Is there a "ground of being" a mother can stand on—
any mother? Does a radical difference in choices cut away any such
ground?
• Is anything about the motherhood experience determined? By what?
God? Nature? Culture? Family? Character?
• Is anything about motherhood free? What is freedom? Where does choice
enter in? How real is the mother's felt sense of being in charge, shaping
her days, her years; how grounded her feeling of not being in charge, not
shaping? How do these questions shift and slip if we focus on the mother
who "gives up" her child?
• Is there, and should there be, an ethics of motherhood? How valid or
various would such an ethics be? How essentially sorrowful or joyful?
Questions which I will refrain from trying to "answer." However, they will hover.
–––––––
We enter my novel, Return to a Meadow. Petra Kalinowski and her daughter
Anya are living in San Francisco in the early 1970s.
Anya had a ready smile and a ready temper. No one trampled her. Petra
thought of her as shine, as essence. Then came toilet training. Girls were
supposed to be easier, but Anya wasn't easier. At two-and-a-half she was
not yet trained. Also, she had started to talk. Petra was passionate about
words. She wrote regularly, striving for clarity, for evocative images. She
had expected to feel delight when her little girl acquired language but
Anya's long slow process of learning to speak got tangled up with toilet
training, with rages on the part of mother and daughter, with a caged
feeling Petra was sure they both experienced. Anya liked to talk, wanted to
talk constantly. Petra found herself shamefully bored. She wanted her own
thoughts and couldn't find them. Her mind was the center of herself, she
needed to feel it working. Unfocused, pulled this way and that by the
demands of a toddler, her mind lost tone, a muscle weakened by disuse.
Claiming: thoughts of an unconventional older mother 41

Frustrated by interruptions, Petra stopped reading, stopped writing. After

several months of this she was terrified. She went to secondhand
bookstores, purchased old paperbacks: Henry James, Ezra Pound. The
more difficult the better. She sat with pen in hand, read, took notes, tried to
write. Her thoughts were dull and scattered, but she persisted. One day,
interrupted for the fifth time in half an hour—she was counting—Petra
learned what it was like to feel murderous, to want someone obliterated.
Her daughter. This was more terrifying than the decay of her mind. She
stopped reading and writing and turned to her will. If she could just
strengthen her will, they might be all right. But she couldn't control her
irritability. It spread to housemates. She lost tolerance for the changes, the
new habits of each incoming person, the fluctuations in household
cleanliness, the decibel level. She thought the order and predictability of
living alone with Anya might be better. She moved to the Mission district
where she could afford a small apartment for herself and Anya. The move
made parenting no easier.
The dread she'd felt inside marriage was back, the suffocation. Loving
Anya was not enough. She started to meditate and attend yoga classes. She
could breathe, felt hope. Anya turned three. In fifteen years the child would
be old enough, on her own. Petra made it a mantra. Fifteen more years,
fifteen more. Time slowed, but it didn't stop. She ripped pages from the
calendar. May, gone. June, gone. July, finally gone. She could survive this
thing she never should have started (Glubka 2012r, 17-19).
–––––––
Though Petra is not simply a stand-in for me, she is at this moment a mother
with challenges, needs, and "solutions" that closely parallel those I experienced.
The mind of the mother—how it is challenged, stretched, inspired, cramped; the
fact that mothers have minds, and not just hearts and hands (and wombs and
breasts)—all of this has been acknowledged in recent decades, publicly and
privately, by mothers and others. We do know: being a mother can be hard on a
woman, hard on her mind, and just plain pervasively difficult. But most mothers
don't choose to turn daily parenting over to someone else. If they do, it's likely to be
fathers who take that role, or, lacking willing or able fathers, children might be
raised by grandparents, aunts, uncles: family. Not the case for Petra. Not for me.
Here is the moment in the novel when the crucial decision is made. Petra is with
Anya's babysitter:
Marian, fanning herself with an ad from the day's mail, confided that
she had desperately wanted a child of her own but her tubes were clogged.
Her uterus was not in great shape either. The two women, mother and
babysitter, had never disclosed personal anguish. Petra felt a tremor.
Precursor to earthquake. Imagined. Emotional in origin. As she well knew.
Once started, Marian kept going. Pelvic Inflammatory Disease, she
explained, a bad case of it. She had tried and tried to get pregnant, one man
after another, blaming the guys. Finally she listened to her doctor and gave
up hope. She told herself life was better without children, but the day she
42 Shirley Glubka

met Petra and Anya two years ago—two years!—she had gone home and
cried. "That little girl broke into my heart. Made me want." It was a version
of love at first sight. She was sorry she had pretended nonchalance when
Petra asked her to babysit. She was so grateful. She cried, telling the story.
...Marian's tears, Marian's deep green eyes, the unexpected emotion and
the strange heat of this San Francisco day coalesced. Here was fecundity,
possibility. "Marian," Petra said, "I have to tell you about Anya and me."
She told how she had set herself for the years of motherhood ahead as if
she were a workhorse put into traces—the long furrows, the hot sun,
plowing, plowing, interminable plowing—but she was not a workhorse,
not bred for the job. If she had to choose again, she wouldn't have a child.
It was her mind. She had failed to find a way to have a child and a mind
both, could Marian understand that? Marian reached out, gathered her up.
Tears came to Petra. Because it's so warm, she thought crazily. She'd been
cold in San Francisco where the borderline climate did not demand central
heating. By the end of the conversation she and Marian had made a
decision neither could have anticipated. Anya would live with Marian.
Petra would stay in her daughter's life, part-time caretaker. Like a divorced
father. The child was three-and-a-half years old when she moved in with
her new mother. Marian (Glubka 2012r, 19-20.)
–––––––
For Petra and for me: the 1970s, the West Coast, counter-culture, second wave
of feminism, revolution in the air. An intensity of permission saturated the days.
Radical choices could be made; were made. The question: would this voluntary
transfer of a child (my protagonist's, mine) from the care of the biological mother to
that of another woman have taken place outside this cultural context? I doubt it. But
even then, even there, most mothers raised their own children, conventionally or
unconventionally. How is it that Petra made this unusual choice? How is it that I
did?
Petra feels she is "not bred for the job." This echoes my own statement: "I felt
unsuited for the long work of daily parenting."
"Unsuited." Has Petra explained this sufficiently? Have I? Can we?
I could turn to psychology. I could tell you that a friend recently asked what
Myers-Briggs type I am. "INTJ," said I. "No wonder parenting was so hard on you,"
said my friend.
Well, maybe. It was a kind thing to say and made me feel "seen" for a couple of
days. I suppose it's possible that an introverted, intellectually inclined woman with a
passion for writing might have a "harder" time parenting. Harder than any other
type, though? Was parenting more difficult for me than for other mothers? I have no
answer to this question. I doubt if such a question can be answered. I even, and
perhaps importantly, doubt its relevance.
I do not, however, doubt this: motherhood holds at its core some of the deepest
challenges of human existence. They are there, alive, threatening, wonder-laden—
like strange gods of the psyche—whether ignored by a culture or not; whether
ignored by a mother or not.
Claiming: thoughts of an unconventional older mother 43

–––––––
But—the question cannot be ignored—how can a woman, a mother, do what I
did? How could I? And oh, how very many answers have come to me, often in the
middle of the night.
The self-excoriating group. I'm a narcissist, perhaps with a core of sociopathy,
certainly selfish, and probably numb to opportunities for empathy. Essentially
fragile, weak at the core. Unable to persist. Never mind that the rest of my life does
not support such explanations.
The grandiose group. I was smart enough, independent enough, courageous
enough, responsible enough to buck all internal and external pressures and find a
better mother for Kevin. But wait: "find"? It was serendipity, this meeting of
Kevin's second mother. Wasn't it?
The philosophical answer. It must have been Fate. But I don't believe in Fate. Or
do I? What would that even mean?
Did Petra say it all? "It was her mind. She had failed to find a way to have a
child and a mind…"
Perhaps I found a genuine nugget years ago when I wrote this: "I have often
wondered at least half-seriously if my simple inability to pay attention to two things
at once might lie at the core of my problems with mothering" (1983, 226). And I
surely thought I had something here: "I left the mother role because in a radical way
I did not like the job of being a mother; and because I believed that Kevin would be
better off if he were raised by someone who wanted to do that kind of work; and
because, by some miracle, that person appeared in my life" (1983, 225).
–––––––
It is the late 1970s and I'm working on my masters thesis in psychology. I've
been reading Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born (1976, passim) and will rely heavily
on Rich's complex and groundbreaking concept of the Institution of Motherhood,
but I need something more. One day it comes: Aha! Motherhood has three aspects.
1) The Institution: I feel knowledgeable about this aspect courtesy of Rich's
work and my own radical political/cultural context. The "institution of motherhood"
explains why I got pregnant and gave birth to a child. I don't think it explains why
I'm not raising him. Certainly not.
2) The mother/child relationship: I love and even like Kevin. He seems to feel
the same about me. I think we're compatible human beings, which matters. I'm
hearing about mother-child incompatibility in the group I've organized for women
who have left the conventional mother role. The guilt and pain that come with such
incompatibility are intense. I am oh-so-grateful I don't have that to contend with.
3) The work. There it is. There's my problem. I can now explain my radical
parenting decision. It is rooted in the "work" aspect of motherhood.
It was a pretty good thesis, useful to me and to others
(Starkweather/Glubka1978, passim).
But now, examining my thoughts one more time, I realize how excessively clear
that "insight" was. The frame cracks. I did not simply have a problem with a job. I
did not simply leave the "work" of "daily parenting." I caused an earthquake in the
entire mother-child gestalt.
44 Shirley Glubka

Living together: it's so much. All those details, all that time...
Kevin and I stay in contact. There has never been a break in that, though the
frequency has varied rather wildly. I think our relationship is still a good one. If he
thinks otherwise, he doesn't tell me. But he didn't grow up with me. It's a big fact.
–––––––
More from my novel:
Petra experienced the separation physically, as if it were surgery on a
battlefield, a part of herself cut away without anesthesia, but pain did not
blur basic clarity, not then. Her pain was clear and her sense of release was
equally clear. If Marian, godsent, had not come into their lives, she would
have raised Anya, but Marian had come, and a painful choice had been
made. In an agony of freedom, agreeing to what she believed was best for
her daughter and herself, she survived. A long ropey scar remained—
spiritual, real—evidence of severed connection, evidence of ordeal. Years
later, clarity did blur. Youthful certainty crumbled. How could she have
given up her child? But that was later.
Who could see into Anya? She adopted the name of the black cat,
Marian's queenly Fire. "My name is Fire," said young Anya. They called
her that for six months, until she said "My name is Anya, call me Anya." It
seemed she had come to terms. She was still bright and spunky. Shining.
The two women were concerned, but hopeful. They leaned into one truth:
the child was wanted now without reservation (2012r, 20-21).
In these paragraphs, Petra and I are almost one person. Anya and Kevin are not
too far removed from each other either, though there is, not insignificantly, a shift in
the child's gender. How tolerant Kevin is, that he makes no objection to such a
move, or any other, on the part of his first mother: "It's your writing." He's a good
person.
–––––––
For years—maybe for decades—I had bouts of sobbing. I didn't give these to
Petra. The novel moves into a more firmly fictional mode: decades after Anya goes
to live with Marian, Petra finds herself presented with a baby, to raise or not to
raise. (It is the novelist's right: to torment her protagonist.)
–––––––
A year after Kevin went to live with his second mother, I wrote this poem:

Kevin, Four-and-a-half

This child insists on growing.

He is a measure for me still,
stern as a ruler by mere fact of being.
Beyond fact is the shining.

Boy bewitched by magic,

master of tricks when I visit,
composer of jokes, counter to ten, adder up,
Claiming: thoughts of an unconventional older mother 45

he laughs, then runs to mother his brood,

his Larry, his Hari, his Tigger, his Elephant;
does not need me.

The cord's almost cut clean.

The still unsevered bit of need is mine.
Without him I'd spill time absently
like lukewarm tea (2012a, 10.)

Such clarity I felt then: "does not need me." The appeal of clarity is strong for
me. I visit these lines from George Oppen's "Route" again and again:
Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful
thing in the world,

A limited, limiting clarity (Oppen 2008, 193)

I ponder that last line. A limited, limiting clarity. Which is beautiful. I think: "a
lot of philosophy there." I wonder, though, if I even know what I mean by that.
When Oppen writes "limited, limiting," the words are so lovely, so reassuring. The
word itself, clarity, can carry me to a calm center within, pool-like, and to the
sensation of "knowing." I remind myself to add a dash of Negative Capability,
necessary element, to my instinctive attraction to Oppen's most beautiful thing in
the world.
–––––––
When Kevin was turning twenty-one, I wrote this:

Coming of Age

I have been thinking of strings

and how you will soon turn 21.
I have been thinking of packages
and how they come undone.
Inside, the surprise—
more string
and strong after all.

You were an odd package,

pushed out like a pup
and tied to me,
full of firm flesh, yelling well.
I had no worry about deficit of being.
You were enough. I could feel that with my fingers.
Perhaps you should know: such an imprint lingers.

The umbilical cord has no nerves.

46 Shirley Glubka

Not mother nor child feels the cut.

It happened while I was distracted
by the form of your lovely left foot.
Down, down goes the root
of your lovely left foot.

One foot follows the other.

You had in fact two feet.
I also had two feet.
We had our roads to walk.
I set you on your separate path.
You had not come of age.
A child at three is not yet come of age.

Separation is always a gamble.

Who will fly into which universe?

Imagine a pattern of knots and holes

stretching from planet to planet,
a cosmic macramé,
a web sprung into being
almost by accident,
the design not discernible
to those who walk on one spun filament
each toward the other
like clowns on a tightrope.
They meet in the middle
as if by accident.
They stumble but they do not fall.
The crowd cheers—
luck holds—

we
do not fall
after all (Glubka 2012a, 16-17).
–––––––
Five years later:
Husk

There is a dried-stalk texture to this day before your

birthday
as if autumn intervened in summer's time.
You are finally angry with me, fire child,
but it is husk only you hand me.
It is over the phone and across the country.
Claiming: thoughts of an unconventional older mother 47

You are a gentleman opening a metaphorical door into

modified rage,
bowing slightly as I cross the portal, lifting my long
lady's skirt.

But I haven't worn a skirt since that job interview in

1973.
Come on, kid, let's duke it out. You think I damaged
you? I did.
I chose a troubled father for you. That was error number
one. Left him.
Then left you.
Don't know how I did that. Don't know why.

I could tell you the tale of the time

and how it would be good for you.
That seems unfair inside this fight.
Hurt you by taking myself away, did I?
Then give it to me on the jaw,
dislocate the place my words pour from.
Draw blood. Crack bone.

I threw you up and thought you were well caught.

I believed you'd fly, the two of you.
She was like a goddess of the air,
elemental, green and lively in her eyes.
I thought a goddess caught you.
Expanse of air did not scare your second mother, son.
I was all eyes, but filming through my own bent lens.
I failed to follow as she flew with you
and failed to see you struggle free and fall.

"I'm sorry" doesn't cut it, I know that.

And you won't be the one to break the place my words
come from.
I'll crack my own tight jaw some day
and chew whatever husk of rage you hand to me (Glubka
2012a, 22-23).
–––––––
One of my most recently written motherhood poems:

In the Imperative

i.
How authentically sourced were the tears
48 Shirley Glubka

from the eyes of the mother I was and was not?

How valid the sobbing

after movies with vivid and fictional children?

Genuine, though, was the strict prohibition:

take no pleasure in the offspring of others.

The rule held: irrational, useless, necessary.

Then was sanely abandoned. My son was long grown.

But the years of strange discipline find their purpose.

They speak to me: idiosyncratic woman, you were not
blithe.

ii.
When the matter of human existence is bent toward
gravity,
allowed to fall unrepentant, sober, relieved

into its own chance-driven destiny like the apparently

ugly
and deeply decided (joy-seeded) (distorted) (beautiful)

triptychs of Francis Bacon, pushing itself into the psyche

like a determined and violent god, the watcher attends.

iii.
Blithe we are not, who crawl, leap, fly
elsewhere.

See how the thought has striven and then stepped aside.
Deny not the difference.

iv.
When I go there
I don't know I'm there.

Essential not to know

to know not to know.

Emerge afterward, though. Claim (Glubka 2012a, 30-

31).
–––––––
Claiming: thoughts of an unconventional older mother 49

Reflections: the work of self-portrait

When Francis Bacon, the twentieth century painter, spoke in an interview

about his numerous self-portraits, he claimed that he didn't actually like his
face but it was convenient, always there. I suspect this was sidestepping,
dodging a question he couldn't, or didn't choose to, answer—or felt he had
answered in the art. Whether he liked his face or not, he was willing to
look at it. To look as an artist looks. And then to work with it. Push and
pull at it, distort it, invite the ugly, dare the astonishing, the
unconventional, the uniquely beautiful.
Bacon's self-portrait of 1971 pushes the nose to the side; pulls the lips out
of synch with the rest of the face, somehow both downward and upward;
saddens the shape of the features; saddens the entire countenance, and yet
brightens it; intensifies his own face with luminous white and deeply
opaque black—and vivid unexpected colors. I have learned to love this
portrait.
But is it Francis Bacon? The basic dimensions roughly match: the width of
the head, the length. I imagine him standing back, looking at this painting,
knowing it as one attempt—flawed, even dishonest in ways only he can
see. He nods, accepting: there it is.
The poems in All the Difference make a composite self-portrait of sorts,
partial, contradictory, layered by time. The work is flawed, as slices of
perception and the efforts of language tend to be. With elements of
sidestepping, shards of truth, and swaths of distortion: there it is.
I was brought up to be a nice girl, a good girl, a fine student—ordinary and
wholesome as white bread from the Sunbeam bakery a short walk from our
house along the cement sidewalks of small town Minnesota. It was the
1940s, the 1950s. I had a mother and a father and four siblings. I went to
church and to Catholic school. I entered the convent and stayed for six
years, until it seemed a more authentic life might be lived "in the world."
As it turned out, I "gave up" my child; and, by the way, I am a lesbian. I
am aware that both of these facts can cause some people to feel like
vomiting. Not everyone, of course. But even some of my family and
friends who most love (and respect) me, who have no problem with
lesbianism, no problem with unconventional paths in general, are on some
level appalled that I made the decision not to continue the daily parenting
of my little boy. They don't condemn me, not at all, but in some way—
perhaps viscerally, perhaps cognitively—they are appalled. Decades after
the fact, a few have told me.
I happened upon the work of Francis Bacon late in life. I have been
unpredictably and powerfully attracted to what has also repulsed me. I
have learned to look at a piece of hung meat in one panel of a triptych
(Bacon 1962) that offers in another panel two bloodied distorted naked
bodies (coupling? cuddling?) on a splayed piece of furniture—red, orange,
white, black; a single thin strip of vertical green. The third panel (I read
50 Shirley Glubka

them from right to left) has a pair of witnessing figures; one seems to me to
be the painter himself. I have developed a need to see what I was not raised
to see: the violence of the beauty; the force, the vitality of matter; of flesh.
Guided by philosopher Gilles Deleuze's work on Bacon, I can sometimes
sense a metaphysical fecundity in these paintings—with matter, flesh, meat
at the heart (Deleuze 2005, passim).
To cut into the guts of reality, and see: bloody flesh undivided from
beauty, which can be contemplated. Is this what an artist like Bacon, or an
aesthetically inclined surgeon, or even an alert butcher in back of a chain
grocery store, does? (While the rest of us might feel like running to
vomit?)
The astonishing fact of flesh: is it ever comprehended? Think: every
human starts—tiny; so tiny—inside the body of another. We are so deeply
animal. Appallingly; wondrously.
There is a whirl of strangeness, incomprehensibility, and just plain good
sense at center of my radical parenting decision. I try to look. Despite all
vacillations, at the age of seventy I find I am neither complacent nor
horrified (Glubka 2012a, 33-34).
–––––––
I direct my mind to the question of social stigmata. Immediately, an internal
voice suggests I am entering "tarred territory." Tarred? I close my eyes. Brer Rabbit
is punching the Tar-Baby because he can't get a friendly response to his morning
greeting. His hand sticks fast to the tar.1 He punches with the other fist, with
predictable results. He tries kicking, no longer needing a friendly response, needing
only release: "en de Brer Rabbit lose de use er his feet in de same way." His
remaining weapon is his head, which of course gets stuck in tar (Harris 1881, n.p.).
Ah, yes. If we need the world to give us a friendly response—we who "deviate,"
whether as mothers or as sexual beings—we might just get ourselves uncomfortably
stuck to, or in, that "world." But perhaps I can refrain from punching. Perhaps I can
peer with a certain delicacy and walk on down the road. *
I'm thinking of that moment when I'm on the phone with the scheduler at the
hospital where I will have my mammogram. I am asked, as some form is being
filled out, if I'm married (amazingly, I am). Next comes the inevitable request for
the name of my husband. I do say it: "Actually, I'm a lesbian." Easier than it used to
be, but far from comfortable. Even now, when the wave of gay marriage rolls across

1
I'm aware that any reference to the Tar-Baby can be linked to a racist gestalt, which is certainly not my
intention. The image itself, the Tar-Baby to which one can get stuck, seems mythic to me, with
resonances broad and deep and far from racist. My research has led to the controversy over whether or
not the very use of the term Tar-Baby is racist, a question which is real and important and very much
alive, but also to the roots of the tale in West African folklore, to possible connections to Native
American tales such as the Cherokee "Tar Wolf," and to stories of a rabbit and tar-baby in indigenous
Meso-American and South American cultures. See, for example, "Relationship between Anansi and Br'er
Rabbit" at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anansi. Because this process has been so interesting and has,
frankly, led me to deeper and deeper respect for the actual old tale, I have decided to use the image here.
I do hope this is not offensive.
Claiming: thoughts of an unconventional older mother 51

our country gathering speed and force, when youth culture sometimes seems to us
oldsters downright blasé about sexual orientation, it takes a deep breath and a dose
of courage for me to say those words.
Shift things a bit. It is the same phone call, the form is still being filled out. I am
asked if I have children. That's comfortable enough. I have the proper response,
"One son." Next I am asked if I raised him. What? I freeze, struggle to get my
breath, force the words out: "Only until he was three years old." Caught by surprise,
I am radically unprepared to "come out" in this way.
But of course the question—did you raise your child?—is not asked. Not ever.
The circumstance in fact is not imagined.
Conclusion: stigma greater in the area of motherhood than in the area of
sexuality.
On the other hand: many have been beaten—or murdered—because their sexual
orientation was considered "weird," "monstrous," "evil." I know of no mother who
left the traditional mother role and got physically attacked or killed as a result.
Conclusion: stigma greater in the area of sexuality; or at least more dangerous.
There is an old saying: Comparisons are odious.
–––––––
A new day arrives. I consider again the question of social stigmata. I still have
the Tar-Baby in mind. I'm cautious. Nevertheless: in a daily way, putting aside for a
moment the issue of physical attack, of murder, is motherhood more firmly held to
the social norm than sexuality? I know of no research that looks at the question.
I raise the issue with my partner (now spouse) of 35 years. Ginny is a
psychotherapist and has worked with mothers and children for decades. Her first
thought is that every mother for at least ten minutes, at least once, desperately wants
out: an unacceptable desire, deeply threatening. In contrast, says Ginny, not all
straight women go through ten minutes of desperately wishing they were lesbians.
We laugh. All right. So that's a thought.
Ginny's next idea takes us to the brain chemistry of motherhood, oxytocin,
bonding. she thinks of Darwinism, the continuation of the species. We need
motherhood, as a species. Not the same when it comes to needing lesbians. So: a
possible biological/evolutionary basis for considering the non-normative mother
more abhorrent than the person who is non-normative sexually. I see the depth of
the idea. But I wonder: doesn't variety aid the survival of the species?
I add my own thought. We young Catholics were firmly taught: it is against the
Sixth Commandment to do much of anything sexual. Exception: intercourse with
husband. If you sin against the sixth commandment, you confess your "sin of
impurity" on Saturday afternoon, receive your penance and walk out clean-souled,
forgiven. The idea of confessing to a "motherhood sin" and being forgiven is a
strange one indeed. What commandment would be violated? If giving up daily
parenting were a sin, it would be a sin without a name.
And I think: "Back to invisibility. Unthinkability. Only the worst..."
And I think: "But gay people get murdered..."
Enough. I wonder if I've got all four appendages, and my head, stuck in the tar.
Does it matter which stigma is more severe?
52 Shirley Glubka

–––––––
More important than social stigma: ethics. Let us turn briefly to Immanuel Kant
and his much-maligned Categorical Imperative which would have us act only
according to maxims we would be happy to declare Universal Law (Kant 1993, 30).
My first impulse is to join the maligners. I would not say to the mothers of the
world, "Act as I have acted." That the world would work, the human world, if we all
made only the ethical decisions we'd want everyone else to make: ridiculous. What
about variety? What about reality?
But I have second thoughts. I think of Simone Weil, levels of ontology, levels of
ethics (Weil 1972, passim). A person can't stand on one level and achieve a full
range of experiences, of perspectives. Nor, from a single level, can she make all
decisions.
–––––––
I contemplate levels. If I take myself to the deepest level, find the route, and
then the root, will ethics and ontology meet and join?
I believe Benedict Spinoza did that (Spinoza 1992, passim).
I'm not Spinoza.
Nevertheless. If I take my ethics to the most profound ontological level available
to me, use everything I've been given, from within and without, and then, in a
radical gesture, throw it all out, and stand naked before my own reality—
If we all did that—
Could this be at the heart what Kant meant? But I confess: it's been too many
years since I read Kant.
–––––––
Deleuze dismantles Plato's hierarchy wherein the Idea is the pinnacle, the
mundane "real" a flawed copy. Deleuzian "difference"—expressed in the vast array
of the ever-emerging multitude of things—is not derivative, not secondary, not
striving to match an Ideal (Deleuze 1994, passim). The implications for a mother
like me are many and amazing. Perhaps, though, for any mother?
–––––––
Spinoza insists that regret—a "sad passion," passive in nature—is useless, even
harmful. It cannot take us to the Third Way of Knowing, the Intellectual Love of
God—a goal attainable only through nurturing "active passions," i.e. emotions that
lead to an increase, not a decrease, in our power/reality/being. Joy, for example
(Spinoza 1992, passim, but see especially Ethics Part IV, Proposition 54).
Nietzsche also was anti-regret. Here is his amor fati: "that one wants nothing to
be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is
necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is
necessary—but love it" Nietzsche 2000, 714).
I, too, am not inclined toward regret. Even my bouts of sobbing were never
about regret. Pain, yes. Doubt, yes. Sorrow and apology for any distress I caused
Kevin, yes. But regret, no.
–––––––
I ask my doubting self: "How could you know, at any stage of this long process,
whether Kevin would have been better off if you'd raised him?" A strong grounding
Claiming: thoughts of an unconventional older mother 53

in Negative Capability is what I ask of this self. Hard for her to attain. But the
complexities are enormous: one entire complicated real life vs. a presumably
equally complicated hypothetical life. Impossible to compare the two.
And, it comes to me now, none of my business.
The mother's cliché: "They have their own lives to live." Oft said. How often
believed?
–––––––
When we mothers look back, judging ourselves—a thing we both must and must
not do—might "how the child turns out" be an irrelevant consideration? Even for
those of us who chose to let go of the usual mother role? If Kevin had become, say,
a serial killer, I might not dare to ask such a question. But I am lucky, Kevin has
done nothing beyond the pale, and I do ask such a question.
–––––––
Iris Murdoch: "Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other
than oneself is real" (Murdoch 1999, 203). Not the usual take on motherly love—or
any other kind of love. But if we can grasp that our children exist as entire persons,
with as much being as we experience in ourselves (and, by the way, if we are
beyond blaming—or crediting—our own mothers for how our lives are going) there
is a next logical step: what the child does with her/his life is neither the mother's
fault nor her glory.
I think of the individual life, how it emerges from that place where the
phenomenon of existence itself bubbles: out of the creativity of Spinoza's God,
perhaps: "Spinoza's dry God who doesn't gush, / who simply exists / yet can't resist
incessant creativity" (Glubka 2013, 44).
That direct connection—to existence. The radical fact: that we exist. A fact each
of us owns, down to the tiniest fiber of her body/mind/heart/soul/being. In some
way, we are, all of us, no one else's business, and motherhood doesn't change that.
Of course everything is paradoxical and we are all—every existent, past,
present, and future—part of the web. The butterfly's wing can probably change the
path of the tornado on the other side of the world. We are radically Individual and
radically One: "A single and same voice for the whole thousand-voiced multiple, a
single and same Ocean for all the drops, a single clamour of Being for all beings…"
(Deleuze 1994, 304).
–––––––
From my journal:
An infinite/eternal where the lines from being to being are all alive and
where the mother knows: she is there, and her child is there also, and in
such good shape, connected into that same place at the roots of existence, a
place which is, without contradiction, a radically separate one for each—is
this at the heart of my own "motherhood philosophy"?
–––––––

Works Cited

Bacon, Francis. 1962 painting. Triptych, Three Studies for a Crucifixion.

54 Shirley Glubka

Bacon, Francis. 1971 painting. Self-portrait.

Brown, Lesley, ed. 1993. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary: on historical
principles. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 2005. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. (Daniel W. Smith
trans., intro. and afterward by Tom Conley.) Minneapolis, Minnesota:
University of Minnesota Press.
Glubka, Shirley. 2012. All the Difference: poems of unconventional motherhood.
Prospect, Maine: Blade of Grass Press.
Glubka, Shirley. 2013. Echoes and Links. Prospect, Maine: Blade of Grass Press.
Glubka, Shirley. 1983. "Out of the Stream: an Essay on Unconventional
Motherhood," first published 1983 in Feminist Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2;
subsequently in 1994 in Rosie Jackson ed. Mothers Who Leave: behind the myth
of women without their children, London: Pandora, imprint of Harper Collins;
and in 1998 in Lucinda Joy Peach ed. Women in Culture: a Women's Studies
Anthology, Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers.
Glubka, Shirley. 2012. Return to a Meadow. Prospect, Maine: Blade of Grass Press.
Harris, Joel Chandler. 1881. "The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story" in Uncle Remus:
Legends of the Old Plantation. (Courtesy of
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~UG97/remus/tar-baby.html.)
Kant, Immanuel. 1993. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (James W.
Ellington trans.) Third edition. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co.
Keats, John. 1973. Letter to his brothers December 21/27, 1817 in Harold Bloom
and Lionel Trilling eds. The Oxford Anthology of English Literature: Romantic
Poetry and Prose. New York: Oxford University Press.
Murdoch, Iris. 1999. "The Sublime and the Good" in Existentialists and Mystics:
Writings on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Penguin Books.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2000. "Ecce Homo" in Walter Kaufman, ed. Basic Writings of
Nietzsche. (Peter Gay trans. and intro.) New York: The Modern Library.
Oppen, George. 2008. "Route" in Michael Davidson ed. George Oppen: New
Collected Poems. (Preface by Eliot Weinberger.) New York: New Directions
Publishing.
Rich, Adrienne. 1976. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution.
New York: Norton.
Rudolf, Anthony. 2008. "George Oppen Centennial Symposium: the Shape of
Disclosure" at http://www.bigbridge.org/BB14/OP-RUD.HTM.
Spinoza, Baruch. 1992. Seymour Feldman ed. Ethics, Treatise on the Emendation of
the Intellect, and Selected Letters. (Samuel Shirley trans.) Indianapolis: Hackett
Publishing Company.
Claiming: thoughts of an unconventional older mother 55

Starkweather, Shirley. (Married name of Shirley Glubka—first marriage.) 1978.

"Leaving the Mother Role: a Study in Choices." Masters Thesis, unpublished.
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Weil, Simone. 1972. Gravity and Grace. (Gustave Thibon trans. and intro.) London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
_________________________________

Adoption, Race, and Rescue:

Transracial Adoption and
Lesbian/Gay Ascendency to Whiteness
Bonnie Mann
University of Oregon
bmann@uoregon.edu

_________________________________
ABSTRACT: In this article, I examine transracial adoption in which the parents
are white and gay or lesbian in the context of an America coming to tolerate, accept,
embrace, and even celebrate gay family life, while increasingly retreating from
basic aspirations to race-based equality and fairness. It is about the narratives of
whiteness that accompany transracial adoption, and that claim families in ways that
cause harm. It is also about patriotic nationalism in post 9/11 USA, and the story of
sexual progressiveness that has infused our national imaginary in complex and
paradoxical ways over the last decade. We are called on to account for the costs of
allowing our commitments to justice in relation to race and sexuality to become
fragmented.

I BEGAN WRITING THIS ESSAY after a momentous June (2013). The

Supreme Court of the United States overturned DOMA (the federal Defense of
Marriage Act), opening the way to full marriage equality and federal benefits for
married gay and lesbian couples. It restored marriage rights to same sex couples in
California, as well. The newspapers were full of heartwarming stories about the
impact of the court decisions on regular people in love: those on the brink of having
to leave the country because one partner was not a U.S. citizen, those whose
inheritance rights had been restored, those whose marriages suddenly mattered
legally, those whose relationships to their children-not-birthed-or-sired-by-them had
been in legal question. “It’s great to be queer in America today!” was the rallying
cry of the post-decision gay pride celebrations around the country (Ehren, 2013). An

Philosophy in the Contemporary World 23:1 (Spring 2016)

Adoption, Race and Rescue 57

image of two gay men, wrapped up together in an American flag in a sea of

celebrants, beaming triumphantly, seemed to capture the moment; it accompanied a
Reuters’ news article describing the polls that showed nearly twice as many
Americans supported the court’s decisions as disagreed with them (Hurley, 2013).
In the tide of celebration, it was easy for some of us to forget that these
decisions were handed down by a court that leaned right, the same court that in the
very same June gutted the Voting Rights Act, created stronger barriers to
affirmative action, and made it much harder for individual citizens to stand up to
corporate power in cases of retaliation and discrimination. If being gay was in,
being a person of color was apparently out—which meant being a gay person of
color put one in a position of having one’s life both affirmed and spat on by the
highest court in the land.
Things have only intensified since then. Rights for same-sex couples have
gone mainstream, culminating in the Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v.
Hodges that granted such couples full marriage equality nationally. At the same
time, the killing of unarmed black people with impunity by police has again gained
national attention, sparking the Black Lives Matter movement, and a primarily
African American community has been subjected to the wanton lead poisoning of
an entire generation of children through government mendacity and racialized
indifference. The 2016 Republican presidential primary has spawned a circus of
misogyny and self-assured racism, while the candidates reiterated opposition to
same-sex marriage has become a kind of paltry gesture that no one seems to take
seriously and that gets almost no media attention.
What is this rending of race from sexuality in matters of equity and justice? How
is it that markedly positive developments are accompanied by such
repressive/digressive legislation? We gay and lesbian folks (colors washed out)
have become, it seems, the new model minority. America finally wants us; wants us
to be happy, wants us to be secure, wants our relationships to flourish. What did we
do to deserve this?
Of course the question is too simple for the phenomenon. Any such cultural
and political shift is complex, multifaceted, and coalesces forces at work on
multiple levels of existence. It is never simply an accomplishment of skillful, hard-
working activists, fighting across the decades, though it is also that. After all, the
anti-racist activists (some of whom are the same people in the same organizations)
have been working just as hard, only to see the most basic and fundamental
structures of equity related to race, however inadequate, further eroded.
These developments and counter-developments mark a social world in
which the politics of race and sexuality come together in deeply troubling ways in
transracial adoption by same sex couples, particularly (but not exclusively) when
the adoptive parents are white. This is an article about transracial adoption in the
context of an America coming to tolerate, accept, embrace, and even celebrate gay
family life, while increasingly retreating from basic aspirations to race-based
equality and fairness. It is about how becoming an adoptive lesbian Mom made me,
58 Bonnie Mann

already white, but as a lesbian not so white, whiter—and also straighter.1 It is about
the narratives of whiteness that accompany transracial adoption, and that claim
families in ways that cause harm. It is also, perhaps surprisingly, about patriotic
nationalism in post 9/11 USA, and the story of sexual progressiveness that has
infused our national imaginary in complex and paradoxical ways over the last
decade. While I don’t presume to finally answer the big questions about the state of
race and sexuality discrimination in the United States, I do think that the experience
of transracial adoption opens a number of such questions. It allows us to understand,
particularly poignantly, what the costs are when our commitments to justice become
fragmented.

Decision

In the late 1990s, my partner and I decided, as so many lesbians of our

generation did, that we wanted children. I understand such decisions to be deeply
personal at the same time that they are historically implicated, a reflection of
psychological, social, political and economic forces that are not fully transparent to
the individual decision makers who participate in them. What is tangible and close
to the agents of such decisions is their most personal desires: nostalgia for or
aspirations to family life; a desire to participate in the social life of the extended
family and the community, which centers in important ways on the lives of children
and their parents; a desire to have one’s love for one’s partner expand to include
another; a fantasy of being loved intensely and perfectly through one’s middle-age,
old age and death. At the same time the seemingly personal desires which mark
such deep shifts in the cultural landscape as the lesbian/gay baby boom, are every
bit as shaped by broader forces as was the post-World-War-II heterosexual baby
boom, though it takes a bit of historical distance to analyze these forces.
In our particular case, having made the decision, the question we faced was the
usual one for same-sex parents: how? We considered our options and, in keeping
with our long-held political commitments decided that, for us, adoption was the first
choice—since both of us felt an ethical responsibility not to make babies to parent
when there were plenty of babies needing parenting already. We quickly put the
international adoption option off the table. While we understood that the politics of
any adoption are complex, and far exceed the individuals involved, we wanted to at
least have some hope of understanding what those politics were. It seemed strange
to us that a precondition for us parenting should be removing a child from his or her
homeland. Having spent years of our lives doing activist and community work in
the U.S., we thought we had a better chance of understanding and grappling with
the vexed circumstances through which children become available for adoption here
at home. We also chose not to pursue private adoption, since so many people do,
and the newborns and young infants that are adopted through that system seemed to
us to have very good chances compared with children in the state foster care system.

1
The “straightening” of the lesbian mother was the subject of another of my essays,
“The Lesbian June Cleaver: Heterosexism and Lesbian Mothering” (see
bibliography).
Adoption, Race and Rescue 59

We understood children in the state foster care system to be the ones most in need.
They were also closest to home, since they came from the very communities in
which we lived and worked. Not only that, but I had a nephew who had landed in
state foster care years before, then been adopted with a very positive outcome,
which served as an encouraging example for us.
As we made our way through the multi-layered, multi-step process of adopting
from the state foster care system—which involved classes, more than 100 pages of
paperwork, multiple interviews, a home inspection, and the roller-coaster of the
“matching” process—there were literally hundreds of questions to consider in
relation to the children we would adopt. We had to choose an age range, answer
questions about sex and gender identity, face the question of adopting multiple
siblings or one child, consider the types of abuse and neglect experiences we
thought we would be able to cope with, contend with questions about disability and
illness, and respond to various possible scenarios of drug and alcohol exposure both
in utero and out. In each case, we tried to “stretch” as much as possible, to make
ourselves as available and open as we could without so overreaching our limits we
would set ourselves up for failure.
From the very beginning, one of the questions that loomed the largest was the
question of race. There were endless, deeply ethically and politically challenging
discussions. In a better world than ours, birth families who wanted to keep their
children, to have them remain in their communities, would receive every possible
social support to enable them to do so. In a better world than ours, children of color
who had to be removed from their homes would be placed in families whose
cultural world most closely matched the one in which the children started their lives.
So should we, two white lesbians, say we would only adopt white children?
Knowing that white children are, statistically, the easiest to place? Our work for
social justice made us acutely aware that the circumstances in which children of
color come into foster care involve a long history of institutionalized, systematized
racism (see below). Any decision we made would inevitably be complicit with that
history, including, of course, the decision to opt for white children only, or a
decision to back out of the adoption process altogether and find a sperm donor. In
the end, we left the question of race open, knowing that this meant that we would
almost inevitably be matched with Latino children —given the demographics of our
community, and given that both of us speak Spanish, had strong ties to the Latino
community, had spent time in various Latin American countries, and lived in the
Mission District in San Francisco.
We were. Our first three daughters came to us all at once, birth siblings ages
21/2, 4, and 51/2, Mexican American. Several years later we adopted another girl,
31/2 years old, the daughter of Portuguese immigrants. We were two white lesbians
with four daughters, three visibly Latina, one whose skin color matched ours, trying
to build a family in the context of the history and politics of our time and place. We
faced remarkable odds from multiple directions of course, given our own personal
histories, our daughters’ histories of trauma, the complexly interwoven extended
multiple birth, adoptive and foster family connections we were called on to sustain.
60 Bonnie Mann

Many stories could be told about our family. This one is about the historically
burdened social meanings in relation to race that impinged on us at every turn. It is
about the recent “ascendency to whiteness” that gay and lesbian Americans seem to
be experiencing, the retraction of even minimal efforts at leveling the playing field
for Americans of color, and the relation between the two as it plays itself out in
transracial adoptions like ours. My own understanding of the social meanings at
play in our adoption story is necessarily partial, of course. Any account that I give
of those meanings is an effort to describe those aspects that have become visible to
me, and necessarily leaves out layers of meaning that I am not in a position to see,
or not yet.

History/Justification

I begin with a short review of a certain account of American history, for which I
am here indebted to Julian Carter who traces the entanglement of aspirational ideals
of sexuality and race through an important period of U.S. history. 2 It is Carter’s
contention that ideals of heterosexuality and aspirations to whiteness were “sutured
together” in the interwar period in a particularly poignant way (Carter, 16). Carter’s
review of various artifacts of popular culture, including marriage advice manuals
and sex education programs, reveals the “mutual construction of whiteness and
heterosexuality” through which “racial and sexual meanings directly produce one
another” (159). He argues that the idealization of certain forms of heterosexual
intimacy, namely “emotionally intimate monogamous marriage between gender-
polarized opposite-sex adults” became a key vehicle through which racial meanings
were both expressed and evaded or covered over (153). White Americans imagined
themselves to be especially capable, especially tender, as a race, when it came to
heterosexual, married family life. Whiteness was able to occlude its investment in
power and celebrate is supposed natural superiority through “race evasive
depictions of marital love,” which “worked to construct and communicate power-
evasive meanings of normal, modern whiteness” (36). In other words, by talking a
great deal about sexual normalcy and very little about race (98), the implicitly white
standard of heterosexual normalcy became the very “core racial essence that defined
authentic American whiteness” (33), while avoiding explicit acknowledgment of
investments in racialized injustice.

2
Gail Bederman’s work on the entanglement of race and gender was very important
to my own in the context of my most recent book, Sovereign Masculinity: Gender
Lessons from the War on Terror. There, I closely follow her account of the
racialized transformations in aspirational ideals of masculinity in the U.S. during the
progressive era. It is my view, in agreement with the philosopher Maria Lugones,
that gender and sexuality have operated as modes of racialization for a much longer
period and in a much broader historical context than the historians are able to treat
in individual works, even as they have also been many other things, and even as
racialization has been a mode of gendering/sexualization. Lugones’s description of
the “colonial modern gender system,” its “light side” and its “dark side,” is in the
background of, though not explicitly thematized in my work here.
Adoption, Race and Rescue 61

What Carter describes is a process of justification that relies on an idealized

heterosexual intimacy to legitimize racial dominance while making it appear as the
inevitable result of naturalized racial difference. The operation of justification is, in
this case, completely fused with evolutionary claims about the superiority of certain
races and racial practices over others. As Carter puts it, “because evolutionary
thought emphasizes reproduction as the vector for inheritance and therefore as the
primary mechanism for racial development or degeneration an evolutionist
perspective on civilization drew attention to the importance of a specifically sexual
fitness among modern whites” (Carter, 5). There is a “natural fit” between
evolutionary theory and racialized idealizations of heterosexuality, then—
heterosexual intimacy is the very core mechanism through which evolutionary
dominance is to be established—it is no wonder that certain forms of heterosexual
desire come to be seen as expressions of that dominance as well. “Throughout the
period 1880 to 1940, a generally evolutionist, biologistic perspective dominated
print discourses of both race and sexuality in the United States,” Carter writes, “and
helped suture them together” (16).
Carter traces a transition in American cultural discourse in the interwar
period. Here, fears about the “breakdown of marriage” recalled the frontier period,
in which the “iconic frontier couple” established their bond through laboring
together to tame the wilderness (Carter, 82). The progressive dominance of white
Americans across the continent and the removal of indigenous people from their
lands through genocide and displacement, were presented as intimately connected to
the idealized heterosexuality of the agents of the settler state. In this later period,
however, the frontier had already been conquered, and the rise of cities and the
mechanization of the (gendered male) workplace had stripped the couple of the
mutual labor through which their original bond was established—intensifying
gender difference. Marriage advice manuals of the period depicted sexual intimacy
as the evolutionarily advanced substitute for laboring in the wilderness (90), pages
and pages of instruction encouraged men and women to eroticize their polarized
gender differences while communicating across them.
Previous fears about the proclivity of the over-civilized white subject to
weakness and neurasthenia, were converted to an idealization of white tenderness as
central to civilized family life at a higher evolutionary stage. “The allegedly
exquisite sensitivity of civilized whites was increasingly expressed in terms of a
special capacity for romantic love and erotic satisfaction in reproductive wedlock”
(Carter, 74). Ultimately, Carter suggests, this development results in “an emerging
understanding of true whiteness as an enactment of love,” particularly an enactment
of tender, familial love, which is understood to be an evolutionary advancement
(98). The association of whiteness with familial tenderness and love made it seem,
to the white people whose identity it infused with meaning, “benign and innocent”
(154), and also noble. The fusion of whiteness with love in the white imaginary
domain also provided “white racial dominance with an extraordinarily strong alibi,”
Carter notes (159), in other words, with a powerful justification for systematic
injustice.
62 Bonnie Mann

Of course the figure of the “pervert” lurks on the outside of idealized white
heterosexuality, and thus lurks, in some sense, on the outside of whiteness. While
white lesbians and gay men remained white historically, in many respects, and
continued to enjoy some of the privileges of whiteness—it is also and paradoxically
the case that gay and lesbian people of all races have been, in ways that are difficult
to articulate, radically decentered from the norms of whiteness that are fused in such
significant ways with racialized ideals of heterosexual, marital intimacy. The sense
of being an “outsider” that is so often central to lesbian and gay life, is inflected
with racialized meanings, whatever the race of the subject in question. In this sense
we could say that white lesbians and gay men were, at least for a significant period,
and at least in some contexts, a little less white than the straight white folks were.
At the same time, the centrality of heterosexual intimacy to the white social
imaginary provides some flexibility to the category of whiteness. By aspiring to
models of intimacy that have been historically associated with whiteness (at least by
whites), those who aren’t white, or aren’t as white can become more white in terms
of social status. Carter acknowledges the degrees of whiteness ascribed to various
immigrant populations and the aspirational nature of whiteness. The ascendency to
whiteness could be achieved, in part, through hyperbolic displays of “normal”
heterosexuality (I am reminded, here, of the Obama campaign’s constant emphasis
on his normal, even exemplary, heterosexual family life, and his role as a
responsible father).
What happens, then, when same-sex couples, historically excluded from the
possibility of such displays, establish families? In the case in question here, when
same-sex couples, especially white same-sex couples, adopt children of color, one
might expect that the outsider status of the parents echoes or matches, in some
ways, the outsider status of the children. We might even expect that thoughtful
social workers would hope that same-sex parents would be especially sensitive to
experiences of exclusion and discrimination that they anticipate in the lives of the
children of color they place for adoption. Without denying the legitimacy of any of
these expectations, I will argue that more recent historical developments have
significantly altered the cultural landscape in which we build our families, so that
the meanings attached to sexuality and the meanings attached to race actually work
to erode such connections between white same-sex parents and their adopted
children of color, despite the parents best efforts to enact the expected solidarity.
Before making that argument in detail, however, it is important to remind ourselves
of the context of systematized, institutionalized racism through which so many
children of color come into the foster care system in the first place.

Apparatus

Legal scholar Dorothy Roberts, in her work on the relation between the prison
system and the foster care system in the lives of African American citizens, argues
that there is a direct statistical and causal relation between the number of African
American women in prison, the erosion of public safety net supports, and the
number of African American children in foster care. “About one-third of women in
prison are black… about one-third of children in foster care are black” (Roberts,
Adoption, Race and Rescue 63

1477). “This statistical overlap is evidence of a form of punitive governance that

perpetuates social inequality” (1477), she argues, and she goes on to identify “the
concrete mechanisms that create the statistical overlap between the prison and foster
care systems” (1478).
While Roberts is focused on African American women, her analysis sheds light
on the broader connections between prison and foster care. The Sentencing Project
reports that the numbers of women in prison increased 646% between 1980 and
2010. The rate of increase for women was 1.5 times that of men. The lifetime
statistical chances of being incarcerated in the United States, for women, vary
dramatically by race. One in 118 white women, one in forty-five “hispanic” women,
and an astounding one in nineteen black women will be incarcerated in her lifetime.
This statistical variance persists at the end of a decade (the decade between 2000
and 2010) in which the chances of black women being incarcerated have decreased
by 35%, while the chances of Hispanic women being incarcerated increased by
28%, and the chances of white women being incarcerated increased by 38%. The
majority of women in prison are mothers of minor children (62%). Most women
who are incarcerated are there for nonviolent drug and property offences (The
Sentencing Project, 2012).
The rise in incarceration rates for women coincides with the general rise in
incarceration rates after the declaration of the “War on Drugs” by Richard Nixon in
the 1970s, which escalated dramatically in the 1980s. The dismantling of the
welfare system by Bill Clinton in the 1990s only intensified the escalation. Today,
the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world (Tsai and
Scommegna, 2012; Liptak, 2008). Roberts argues that the child welfare system
became more punitive in the same time period, as it switched from its primary focus
on preserving white families to a primary focus on disciplining families of color
(Roberts, 1484). This transition was most starkly marked by the passage of the
Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997. “The end to the welfare safety net
coincided with the passage of the Adoption and Safe Families Act in 1997, which
emphasized adoption as the solution to the rising foster care population,” Roberts
writes. The act “implements a preference for adoption through a set of mandates
and incentives to state child welfare departments,” “establishes deadlines for
terminating the rights of birth parents with children in foster care and offers
financial incentives to states to move more children from foster care into adoptive
homes,” it “weakens the chances of family preservation by encouraging agencies to
make concurrent efforts to place foster children with adoptive parents while trying
to reunite them with their families,” and generally creates “a ‘fast track’ to
adoption” (Roberts, 1498).
Roberts argues that both the end of meaningful public welfare and the
passage of new incentives for adoption out of foster care, “can be seen as neoliberal
measures that shifted government support for children toward reliance on private
employment and adoptive parents to meet the needs of struggling families. This
convergence marked the first time the federal government mandated that states
protect children from abuse and neglect without a corresponding mandate to provide
basic economic support to poor families” (Roberts, 1485). The moves toward
64 Bonnie Mann

“private remedies for systematic inequality and punitive state regulation of the most
disadvantaged communities—are mutually reinforcing” (1479). She cites a
Michigan study which showed a systematic tendency on the part of social workers
to believe that black children are better off when removed from their families and
communities. The study shows that case workers work more aggressively to
remove black children from their homes and that it takes a higher level of risk for a
white child to be removed than for a black child (1486). Perhaps this tendency is, in
part, the effect of our inherited beliefs about the special familial love that attaches to
whiteness, which is part of our national history.
The Adoption and Safe Families Act was passed in 1997, in 1998 my partner
and I became part of Califonia’s “fost-adopt” program, through which we became
“foster parents” for our first three children while waiting for birth-parent parental
rights to be terminated, a process that took two years. While our experiences of
deciding to become parents, acting on that decision, and waiting for our children
were as deeply, viscerally personal and emotional as they are for any set of parents,
those experiences were inextricably entangled with the policies of a nation on a
political trajectory that has systematically devastated communities of color,
disrupted the lives of hundreds of thousands of children in ways that they would not
have been disrupted in the decades before, persistently created or exacerbated the
conditions that make birth-parent/child relationships fragile, and ultimately flooded
the foster care system with children in need of permanent homes. In saying all of
this, I am not saying that the children who come into foster care are not in danger,
they often are, nor am I saying that protecting them is not a necessary social goal, it
certainly is—what I am arguing here is that the state, through changes in its
incarceration and welfare policies, made already tenuous social situations for
families much more tenuous, practically guaranteeing the failure of birth-
parent/child relationships in many cases, and at the same time opted for a privatized
solution to the problems those policies greatly intensified. I am not saying that those
of us who became part of that privatized solution, who chose to adopt through the
system that resulted from these policies, who accepted state monies (through the
federal Adoption Assistance Program) to support our families that weren’t available
to our children’s birth parents, are somehow uniquely responsible for the policies
that brought our children to us—all citizens are responsible. What I am saying is
that our families and our lives have been shaped by these specific institutional
histories and that these policies are a result of racist politics. Acknowledging this is
extremely important to understanding a history with which our personal lives are
deeply complicit.

Imaginary

If there are quotes, we use parenthetical notation (Authorlastname, page

number). It is not necessary to indicate the date unless there is more than one
source from a single author. Subsequent citations can simply list the page number if
the source remains the same and there is no ambiguity in the reference. The point is
to minimize apparatus especially footnotes in order to improve readability.
Adoption, Race and Rescue 65

Frame

There have certainly been many responses to our family and its unusual
composition over the years, but the one consistent, dominant response has been one
that I find deeply troubling. My partner and I have been told hundreds of times that
we are heroes. Dozens of people have responded to their first introduction to our
family, its history, and its particular troubles with, “They are so lucky!,” and as the
kids got older, “Do they know how lucky they are?” It has not always been easy to
respond to these remarks, and often we have just sat in uncomfortable silence or
changed the subject. I know some adoptive parents who respond to such remarks
with a counter-narrative, “I’m the one who’s lucky here,” or “our daughter has been
nothing but a gift to us,” or something similar. The problem is, both of these are
what I have come to call “purified narratives” that don’t fit the experience of
parenting or being parented in the vast majority of cases, perhaps especially when
histories of trauma, multiple disruptions, and attachment difficulties are a constant
source of trouble.
The two narratives are both firmly rooted in our social imaginaries, the first is
nothing but the classic rescue narrative that cognitive scientist George Lakoff
understands to be a “deep narrative” in American cultural life. The second is
nothing but the “children are a blessing” narrative which we have inherited from the
Judeo-Christian tradition, particularly Psalm 127:3 “Children are a blessing and a
gift from the Lord” (Contemporary English Version), which holds that God
promises to reward the faithful with fertility. One narrative frames the situation as
one in which the children should be grateful, the other frames the situation as one in
which the parents should feel blessed. Both are deeply prescriptive. Both deny the
complexities of what are often extremely challenging family formations. What is
clear is that these narratives mobilize social meanings that are directly opposed to
one another, and I would argue, are racialized in complex and contradictory ways.
This is to say that each of these narratives is a “frame” which powerfully shapes or
formats the meaning of the act of adoption.
My understanding of the notion of a “frame” comes from two distinct sources,
Butler’s work on war and Lakoff’s work on the “cognitive unconscious.” Butler
argues that frames are “cultural modes of regulating affective and ethical
dispositions” (Butler, 1). Frames are normative schemes that “generate specific
ontologies of the subject,” she suggests, through setting the parameters for or
conditions for recognition, although not deterministically (3-4). She notes a
resonance between a “frame” and “being framed” by a false accusation that has
enormous power (8), but is also inherently unstable (11). Cognitive scientist George
Lakoff notes that a linguistic “frame,” i.e. a set of words that are used over and over
again as a short-hand method of generating whole networks of meaning (think
“hero,” and “lucky”), affects the very neural structure of the brain (Lakoff, 1, 40).
Cognitive scientists have learned that the vast majority of “thought,” by which they
mean neural activity in the brain, is unconscious, emotional and empathetic rather
than “rational” in the traditional sense of the word. “The cognitive unconscious,” he
argues, is simply “the system of concepts that structure our brains” (43), through an
66 Bonnie Mann

ongoing process of “neural recruitment” (83). “Recruitment is the process of

strengthening the synapses along a route to create a pathway along which
sufficiently strong activation can flow” (84), he explains, “neural binding” is
effected by the repeated association of a particular word or narrative with particular
emotions (84), so that “narrative structures are brain structures” (93). Our
conscious thought “makes use of and is built on the cognitive unconscious” (226),
so that certain words “evoke whole frames—whole mental structures” 241;
Most significantly, a particular “frame” mobilizes particular affects. Let’s take
the frame of “rescue” as our example, which is the frame that transracial adoption
evokes so consistently. A frame is “one of the small narratives with a very simple
structure that makes up a more complex narrative” (Lakoff, 22), Lakoff argues, and
such frames have ready-made roles (a cast of characters), ready-made relations, pre-
scripted scenarios and events (22-23). Lakoff identifies “rescue” as one of the most
significant “frames” in the American context (24, 36). In fact, Lakoff calls the
rescue narrative a “deep narrative.” Narratives that occur everywhere with very
little variation are “deep narratives” (24). The rescue narrative always involves a
certain cast of characters, a victim, a villain, and a hero. The relations between the
characters are established in advance, as are the events through which those
relations are expressed. The victim will be victimized by the villain and saved by
the hero, the hero will vanquish the villain. The frame is powerful because it carries
with it a whole set of affective responses and mobilizes pre-reflective moral
commitments. Frames are “simple cultural narratives with ready-made emotions”
(28), or as Butler puts it, affect is produced by the frame (Butler, 13). “Our affect is
never merely our own,” she notes, “affect is, from the start, communicated from
elsewhere. It disposes us to perceive the world in a certain way” (50).
In Butler’s discussion of violence and grief, she argues that “the frames in which
we apprehend or, indeed, fail to apprehend the lives of others…are politically
saturated,” but what she says of violence and grief is perfectly true of the frames
that govern the social meanings of transracial adoption as well (Butler, 1). Forms of
social and state power are as thickly embedded in these frames as they are in frames
of war (72). The affective and moral commitments of the history that I traced
above—a history in which whiteness comes to be associated with tender familial
love, and a more recent history in which our nation imagines itself to be sexually
progressive and tolerant and produces the evidence for that self-imagining by
celebrating gay and lesbian family life—are mobilized by the narrative that frames
transracial adoption as “rescue.” The frame effects a kind of erasure of the reality of
family-formation under difficult circumstances, since such a narrative “hides the
reality of anything that contradicts it” (Lakoff, 36).
Adoptive parents, living in the thick of things, resist the frame of rescue because
it mobilizes a whole system of pre-reflective meanings and affects that violently
simplify the realities of the lives they have built—and because they sense that there
is cruel harm to their children in such narratives. “Rescue” means that white, same-
sex couples are heroes. Heroes are pure people, devoid of self-interest, narcissism,
and the imperfections that most parents confront in themselves daily. The narrative
sets their children up to read these imperfections as hypocrisy, since the purified
narrative demands purified characters who are wholly good, wholly bad, or wholly
Adoption, Race and Rescue 67

helpless. This sets up an impossible and false standard by which parents, who can’t
possibly live up to it, are praised anyway. It makes the parents, who know they
aren’t perfect, feel like impostors.
Even more, same-sex couples become the imagined bearers of that particular
familial tenderness and love that have historically been the special purview of
racialized heterosexual normalcy, and have constituted one of the core conceits of
whiteness. The celebration of sexual tolerance, the elevation of gay and lesbian
family life as a mark of American exceptionalism in the remaking of U.S.
nationalism, opens the way for the whitening and straightening of same-sex
intimacy and family life in the social imaginary. The deployment of the rescue
narrative is an invitation, an invitation to dis-identify with our own children, and to
identify instead with the historically-burdened, hyperbolically self-congratulatory
self-understanding of the white American couple laboring together to conquer the
wilderness. It offers an ascendancy to normalcy, heterosexual normalcy, and insofar
as normal heterosexuality is a vehicle for whiteness, an ascendency to whiteness.
But in this case, our children are the wilderness we are conquering, their families
and communities of origin are the villains we are vanquishing. Whiteness defines
itself over-and-against darkness. Whiteness compliments itself in contra-distinction
to other modes of life. Not that it isn’t tempting, at certain difficult moments, to
accept the praise, to relish the praise, to glory in one’s own self-sacrificial goodness,
but giving into that temptation is a betrayal of one’s children—and of course, it is
also a betrayal of the truth.
Why? After all, it isn’t the children who are the villains in the rescue narrative,
it is their birth parents—the villainy happened in their communities of origin. The
villainy is the origin point of the story, not its end point. And what an easy story that
is to tell, given the alcohol and drug addictions, the neglect, the abuse, the prison
sentences, the violence. But villains are purely evil people, and that doesn’t fit any
birth family story that I know—neither does it create a way for our children to
understand where they come from that they can live with—which puts them in an
impossible position psychologically. To bond in a healthy way with their new
families, children need to be able to value and respect their families and
communities of origin, they need to see their first families valued and respected by
their new families and new communities. The rescue narrative misdirects our
outrage to individual subjects or individual families, and away from the social
conditions that are created or exacerbated by punitive social and economic
policies—it makes us forget the systematized, institutionalized racism that has been
central in the creation of the conditions that throw an out-of-proportion number of
children of color into the foster care system, and an out-of-proportion number of
their mothers into jail.
No matter what the social circumstances, of course, our children have to come to
terms with the particularities of their own past, on individual terms. Birth parents
are individuals who may be more or less capable of helping with this process, and
more or less culpable for the traumas their children have suffered. They have stories
to tell about the events that led to their children being removed permanently that
should be heard. But for our kids, there is a process of coming to an understanding
68 Bonnie Mann

of what happened, who is responsible, what it has meant, that is completely

circumvented by the impinging rescue narrative. The rescue narrative sews the story
up in advance, assigns the roles prescriptively, robs the birth parents of any voice,
and is brutally psychologically cruel to kids who are trying to figure out who they
are in already difficult circumstances.
The rescue narrative insists that they are the “victims” in the story. But these are
unusual victims indeed. While they are passive and deserving of pity like the victim
in any rescue narrative, helpless until they are rescued by the heroes, they are also
expected, it seems, to feel and express a level of gratitude for their rescue that is not
the norm in the rescue frame. Typically the victim is understood to be deserving of
rescue, and typically it is her purity, her innocence, her beauty, and her goodness
that make her deserving. The hero is responding to the value of the victim, through
his action, and the response is an appropriate and valiant one, even if few are
capable of it. His rescue of her is not an act of charity, in any sense, it is an act of
heroic justice. For children of color adopted by white parents, on the other hand,
there is some sense that they are tainted by their beginnings, that their rescue is an
act of heroic charity, rather than justice. The rescue narrative has to be stretched, we
might say, to accommodate the new racial situation, in which the victim is no longer
white (in fact quintessentially white if we think of the classic fairy tales in which
this frame is rooted). The rescue takes place across difference. The parents offer the
children a gift of that special familial tenderness that is the mark of whiteness,
which they can’t, as children of color, really deserve. In other words, they are the
permanent recipients, not of justice, but of an exemplary act of charity.
Of course adoptive parents, at their best, try to shield their children from the
rescue narrative, often by deploying the “children are a blessing” narrative. But
here, too, the story and its characters are purified. The parents’ goodness is now the
cause of a reward rather than the capacity that gave way to a heroic act. The child
has been bestowed on the parent, she is a gift from a benevolent God. This gifted
child is pure blessing, appearing like a miracle from nowhere. Here the birth family
disappears entirely, the circumstances of the child’s coming into foster care are
washed away, or worse, reinterpreted as the very origin of this blessing.
An impossible standard is set up for the child. What happens when this little
blessing is troubled, has difficulty attaching, acts out sexually in ways that might get
her expelled from school? She recognizes herself to be an impostor almost
immediately. Her parents, if they believe their own story, feel cheated. What kind
of blessing invents so many ways to keep you up all night with worry—hundreds of
nights—acts out in ways that are much more extreme than most kids, then after
years of this proclaims in the course of her teenage tantrums that you are not her
real mother? The problem with purified narratives is that we are not, any of us,
purified people. They undercut our ability to deal with the messy realities involved
in creating a family in a messy social situation, and to tell stories that we can
actually live with.

Conclusion
Adoption, Race and Rescue 69

I am finishing this paper in the midst of a frenetic primary election season, in

which the Republican contest has been shaped by a rising tide of self-confident
race-hatred among white Americans. Inspired by Donald Trump’s open and proud
racism, xenophobia and misogyny, collected under the banner of a rejection of
“political correctness”, combined with the incessant attention bestowed on Trump
by the media (who can’t seem to stop themselves from making him the center of
every news cycle no matter how little actual news he makes), a newly intensified
wave of white supremacist brashness has inundated our national discourse.
For children of color today, these events are one part of what will shape the
national space of their childhoods far into the future. The decisions white adoptive
parents make to establish families take place in the flow of this racist history, amidst
the institutional structures that impoverish, weaken or destroy certain kinds of
parent/child relationships disproportionately, within an imaginary domain structured
by dreams of white excellence, and in the context of narratives that will plague their
own relationships with the children of color they adopt.
Their adoptive choices will inspire comments about who is “heroic” and who is
“lucky,” who has been rescued and who has done the rescuing, who should be
grateful (“Does he appreciate what you’ve given him?” “Do they understand what
you’ve done for them?”)—comments that reoccur like reflexes, unthought,
unstoppable. Parents may reply with their own counter-story, “a blessing”, “a
gift”—an attempt to enact solidarity across the divide of race privilege that has just
opened up in the middle of the living room. Purified narratives at war with one
another, but the “blessing” narrative, let’s be frank, doesn’t stand a chance. The
“rescue” story, backed up by all that history, by systematic forms of
institutionalized injustice, will not be dispelled, especially not by a fairytale. The
only thing that I found was powerful enough to stand against that narrative and its
insidious harm, and only in fleeting moments, was reality itself, unedited,
unabridged, brutal – too much for any child, but too often, the only thing one has to
offer, the only bridge across that gaping wound left by a friend’s compliment that
has ripped apart the sofa cushions, leaving your child on one side, you on the other.

Works Cited

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and Race in the United States, 1880-1917. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Butler, Judith. 2009. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? New York and
London: Verso.
Carter, Julian. 2007. The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in
American, 1880-1940. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Ehren, Zachary. 2013. “A Reason to Celebrate: San Francisco Says Goodbye to
DOMA,” Huffpost San Francisco. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zachary-
ehren/san-francisco-celebration-doma_b_3507717.html. Accessed 4/7/2016.
Hurley, Lawrence. 2013. “Reuters/Ipsos Poll: Views on Gay Marriage still Divided
after Court Ruling,” Reuters U.S. Edition.
70 Bonnie Mann

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/28/us-usa-court-gaymarriage-
idUSBRE95R15220130628. Accessed 4/7/2016.
Lakoff, George. 2008. The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st Century
Politics with an 18th Century Brain. New York: Viking Press.
Liptak, Adam. 2008. “U.S. Prison Population Dwarfs that of Other Nations,” New
York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/world/americas/23iht-
23prison.12253738.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. Accessed April 7, 2016.
Mann, Bonnie. 2014. Sovereign Masculinity: Gender Lessons from the War on
Terror. New York: Oxford University Press.
Mann, Bonnie. 2007. “The Lesbian June Cleaver: Heterosexism and Lesbian
Mothering,” in Joan Callahan, Sara Ruddick and Bonnie Mann ed. Against
Heterosexualism: Overcoming Heterosexual Normativity and Defeating
Heterosexist Bigotry, a special issue of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist
Philosophy 22: 1, 149-165.
Puar, Jasbir. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages; Homonationalism in Queer Times.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Roberts, Dorothy E. 2012. “Prison, Foster Care, and the Systematic Punishment of
Black Mothers,” UCLA Law Review Vol. 59, 1474-1500.
The Sentencing Project. 2012. “Incarcerated Women Factsheet.”
http://www.sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/cc_Incarcerated_Women_Fa
ctsheet_Sep24sp.pdf.
Tsai, Tyjen and Scommegna, Paola. 2012. “U.S. Has World’s Highest Incarceration
Rate,” Population Reference Bureau.
http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2012/us-incarceration.aspx. Accessed
April 7, 2016.
_________________________________

“When We Handed Out the Crayolas,

They Just Stared at Them”:
Deploying metronormativity in the
war against FLDS mothers
Shelley M. Park
University of Central Florida
shelley.park@ucf.edu

_________________________________
ABSTRACT: In 2008, over 400 children living on the Yearning for Zion
Ranch, a rural Texas polygamist community of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus
Christ of the Latter Day Saints (FLDS), were forcibly removed from their mothers’
care by State troopers responding to allegations of child abuse. This essay examines
the role of neoliberal ideologies and, more specifically, what some queer theorists
have identified as ‘metronormativity’ in solidifying a widespread caricature of
FLDS mothers as ‘bad’ mothers. The intersections of these ideologies with neo-
colonialist discourses, I argue, positions the FLDS mother as a subaltern subject
unable to effectively speak in her own defense.

IN 2008, OVER 400 CHILDREN LIVING on the Yearning for Zion Ranch, a
rural Texas polygamist community of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of
the Latter Day Saints (FLDS), were forcibly removed from their mothers’ care by
State troopers responding to allegations of child abuse. Although the children were
subsequently returned due to a lack of evidence supporting abuse allegations, many
onlookers to these proceedings remain convinced that children on the YFZ ranch (as
well as other FLDS children) are imperiled. Here I examine the role of neoliberal
ideologies and, more specifically, what some queer theorists have identified as
‘metronormativity’ in solidifying a widespread caricature of the FLDS mother as a
‘bad’ mother. I also examine the intersections of these ideologies with a neo-

Philosophy in the Contemporary World 23:1 (Spring 2016)

72 Shelley M. Park

colonialist discourse that positions the FLDS mother as a subaltern subject unable to
effectively speak in her own defense.
My interest here is not in determining the well-being of children on the YFZ
ranch or any other FLDS site. Instead, I explore a set of assumptions about rural
women and rural life in order to sketch how these assumptions make it difficult for
the urbane to take FLDS women seriously as maternal agents capable of ensuring
the well-being of their children. Whether FLDS girls are sexually abused and/or
forced into marriages with much older men obviously matters; such questions
deserve feminist attention. Also deserving of feminist scrutiny, however, are the
forms of epistemic violence embedded in understandings of FLDS communities as
sites of barbarism promoting sexual and physical violence against women and girls.
To “know” FLDS communities to be patriarchal enclaves wherein women and
children are abused is to sanction state-sponsored violence against rural polygamist
families. As I argue below, close examination of public dialogue about child abuse
within polygamous enclaves in the U.S. reveals an obsession with the dangers of
raising children in rural backwaters. The crime of which the FLDS mother stands
accused is neither polygamy, nor the facilitation of child sexual abuse. Her primary
crime is being backwards and raising primitive children. This crime becomes
impossible to defend oneself against while wearing—and training one’s daughters
to wear—19thcentury attire and a backcombed hairdo.
I begin by tracing the evolution of the figure of the FLDS woman from a mere
victim of oppression to herself a perpetrator of abuse. I then argue that the
demonization of the FLDS mother may be more closely tied to her rural mores than
to her status as polygamous. The largely positive reception of suburban polygamy as
featured in fiction, memoir, documentaries and talk shows reveals quite disparate
public attitudes toward rural and suburban polygamy and a willingness to embrace
some (suburban) polygamist mothers as good mothers. In part three, I investigate
how the FLDS mother is Othered by neoliberal norms that equate ‘good’ mothering
with urban living and capital and cultural accumulation. I conclude by examining
the parallels and intersections of metronormativity and colonization. Our difficulties
in hearing the pleas of FLDS women to be reunited with their children as serious
ethical pleas suggest the rural polygamist woman is a subaltern subject. Insofar as
the FLDS mother is culturally, politically, and geographically excluded from
hegemonic discourse and power, there is no intelligible space from which she can
speak.

FLDS Mothers as Bad Mothers

A raid on the YFZ Ranch was initiated April 3rd after the State received a phone
call from someone identifying themselves as a 16 year old girl named Sarah who
was being abused at the ranch. Although Sarah was never located (weeks later, the
call was acknowledged as a likely hoax), Texas law enforcement officers removed
all of the children at the ranch from their parents’ custody. The 2008 raid on the
YFZ ranch echoed a 1953 raid on the FLDS community in Short Creek, Arizona
(now home to an FLDS community known as Colorado City). In Short Creek, law
“When We Handed Out the Crayolas, They Just Stared at Them” 73

enforcement officers—under the Arizona Governor’s orders to investigate the

“bondage” of teen girls to older (“greedy and licentious”) men in the polygamous
community—took almost the entire (500 person) town into custody (Murr ). Thirty-
six men were arrested and jailed 250 miles away; mothers and children were bused
to foster homes yet further away. However, no-one was ever prosecuted and after
two years under court custody, every man, woman and child voluntarily returned to
Short Creek.
Because the events in Short Creek were a public relations disaster, the State
largely turned a blind eye to the (still illegal) practice of polygamy in FLDS
communities in Pacific northwest for the remainder of the twentieth century. When
Warren Jeffs became Prophet of the FLDS church in 2002, however, his leadership
drew significant negative attention back to FLDS communities in the U.S. and
Canada. In 2004, Warren Jeffs' nephew, Brent Jeffs, filed a lawsuit against him
alleging that his uncle had sodomized him as a child. Soon other allegations
surfaced depicting Jeffs and other members of his inner circle as despots and child
abusers. By 2005, the State of Arizona charged Jeffs with sexual assault on a minor
and with conspiracy to commit sexual misconduct with a minor for allegedly
arranging a marriage between a fourteen year old and her nineteen year old cousin;
when Jeffs went into hiding, the FBI placed him on their “most wanted” list. By the
time of Jeffs’ arrest in 2006, significant news coverage, including several
documentaries featuring corruption and child abuse in the FLDS church, had
captured the public’s attention, setting the stage for the 2008 Texas raid.
The 2008 raid echoed the events of Short Creek a half century earlier in several
ways. A SWAT team removed the children from the Yearning for Zion Ranch,
taking them first to a Baptist Church in nearby El Dorado and subsequently busing
them to a makeshift shelter in San Angelo 45 miles away. Although no evidence
was presented that specific children were in immediate physical danger (as Texas
law required), the State asserted that a “pervasive belief system” encouraging
underage marriage and sexual activity made “any child in that environment” unsafe
(Barlow, 286-87). The FLDS men were detained while the child abuse investigation
continued, but two months after the raid, a Texas state court ruled that child welfare
officials had no right to remove the children from their families. Upon appeal, the
State Supreme Court upheld the ruling, indicating that “The existence of the FLDS
belief system as described by the [state’s] witnesses, by itself, does not put children
of FLDS parents in physical danger;” nor is “teen pregnancy, by itself . . . a reason
to remove children from their homes and their parents” (Sullivan).
There were, however, important differences between the 1953 and 2008 raids on
FLDS communities. In 2008, unlike in 1953, some of the FLDS men were arrested
and subsequently convicted.1 Moreover, in 2008, not all of the women who had left

1
In addition to Jeffs who was convicted of sexual assault in 2008, Raymond Merrill
Jessop, Allan Eugene Keate, Michael George Emack, and Merrill Leroy Jessop,
were each charged with one count of sexual assault of a child; Merrill Leroy Jessop
also was charged with bigamy. Lloyd Hammon Barlow, the ranch's onsite
physician, was charged with three counts of failure to report child abuse.
74 Shelley M. Park

the ranch returned to it. Conjectures that the women who left the ranch in 2008 did
so to escape patriarchal abuses overlook another critical difference between the
1953 and 2008 raids: while mothers and children were together bused off the Short
Creek property as potential victims of FLDS men, in 2008, the FLDS children were
separated from their mothers as well as their fathers. Girls—and later also boys—
were literally wrest from their mothers’ arms at the ranch and placed onto buses
alone. Mothers who volunteered to leave the ranch and follow their children were
later reunited with their children temporarily, but only under the supervision of
armed officers. Later, FLDS mothers were supervised during prayer sessions by
LDS women charged by a Texas judge with ensuring fundamentalist mothers did
not indoctrinate their children. As this suggests, in 2008, FLDS women were
viewed as actively complicit in the endangerment of their children. FLDS mothers
were not merely marginalized by the events; they were also actively demonized.
The failure of some women to return to the YFZ ranch must be understood in this
context . After living in squalid and supervised conditions with their children for
several weeks, the FLDS mothers were once again separated from their children as
plans went forward to place children into foster homes. At this juncture, some
mothers agreed to leave the ranch permanently in order to retain custody of their
children; others were bused back to the Ranch but continued to appeal to public
sensibilities via media appearances while also fighting the State’s actions in court.
The demonization of FLDS mothers was vividly illustrated in a July 2011
episode of the CNN program, Dr. Drew—an episode that aired 3 years after the raid
amidst sensationalist media coverage of the trial of former FLDS leader Warren
Jeffs. Jeffs was charged with—and ultimately convicted of—the sexual assault of
two minors whom he had taken as his “spiritual wives.” This “news” segment did
not address Jeffs’ alleged abuse of underage girls, however; instead, it focused on
the question, “[a]re FLDS moms to blame for the abuse?” Notably, although the
segment’s description advertised that Dr. Drew would “look at some of the FLDS
mothers who were upset that their children were taken during a 2008 raid,” none of
the mothers separated from their children during that raid were interviewed.
Instead, they were condemned by Dr. Drew’s guests—a less than unbiased panel
comprised of Flora Jessop, an ex-FLDS member and outspoken critic of FLDS
communities, Michael Watkins, a reporter covering the Jeffs’ trial who had worked
with Jessop and others to bring media attention to FLDS wrongdoings for over 25
years, and Loni Coombs, a former L.A. county prosecutor turned broadcast network
legal analyst. The segment opens with Dr. Drew posing a leading question that
enables Flora Jessop to make her case against FLDS mothers: Flora, do you
agree—I suspect you do—that the moms are to blame here? Jessop replies:

Absolutely. . . . I went to Texas a year after the raid and . . . visited the
homes where the children were kept and talked to hundreds of caseworkers .
. . who were heartbroken at having to return the children to the ranch. Their
hands were tied and there was nothing they could do. A lot of these
caseworkers have talked to me and told me personally that they, in their
interactions with these mothers, felt that these mothers had as much
“When We Handed Out the Crayolas, They Just Stared at Them” 75

culpability as these men did when it came to abusing these children. You
know, you have to look past the soft-spoken [sic], old style hairdos and the
fuzzy colored care-bear prairie dresses and realize that these women are just
as culpable as the men are.

Dr. Drew quickly agrees, calling the women “perps” and, using his medical
credentials as a practicing psychiatrist, suggests it is “crazy” that the FLDS women
would be complicit given their own history as abused children. Dr. Drew then
briefly turns his attention to Michael Watkins, inquiring whether he thinks the Jeffs
trial will raise awareness of FLDS abuse. When Watkins redirects the attention
away from the show’s stated theme and towards the “shameful, willful ignorance . .
. of the media,” however, Dr. Drew shifts to Loni Coombs, asking the former
prosecutor, “[s]hould charges be raised against these mothers?” She responds:

You know, I think something drastic like that has to be done. I make the
comparison between Jaycee Dugard who was taken by a child molester at
age 12 and the difference is that her mother would have spent her dying last
breath to try to save her child from that child molester, do anything she could
to try to bring her daughter to safety.2 These mothers are so far from that—
not only are they not trying to save their daughters—they are sewing the
wedding dresses and handing them the bouquet to push them down the aisle
with the admonishment . . .

Here Dr. Drew interrupts Coombs to once again attempt to articulate his
hypothesis that the FLDS mothers are victim-perpetrators (“It’s like the moms and
the daughters are the captives of Jaycee Dugard’s captors.”) Coombs agrees that the
abusive mothers exemplify a “cycle” of abuse and that in some sense they “don’t
know any better,” but asserts that “something drastic has to happen” because
“whether you call it brainwashing or indoctrination, they believe that this is the right
thing to do and they are abusing their children.” Dr. Drew then cautions his
viewing audience against ethical relativism, suggesting to those who might take a
live-and-let-live-attitude toward the FLDS faith that the religious practices of the
FLDS adults are as unacceptable as “throw[ing your child] in the volcano to
appease the volcano gods.” By means of further leading questions, Dr. Drew elicits
agreement from Coombs about his analogy between FLDS religious practices and
cartoonish stereotypes of Polynesian culture prior to European colonization. Then
he once more turns back to the victimization of the FLDS women: “What about the

2
Jaycee Dugard was kidnapped in 1991 in South Lake Tahoe, California and
remained missing for 18 years. Her captors, Phillip Craig Garrido and Nancy
Garrido, were arrested in 2009 and convicted of kidnapping and sexual assault in
2011—around the time this Dr. Drew episode aired. During her captivity, Dugard
bore two daughters who were 11 and 15 at the time she was rescued. Her mother
kept her story alive for the duration of her kidnapping and is largely credited with
her eventual rescue (Dugard).
76 Shelley M. Park

abuse of women here? This whole thing seems to be primarily perpetrated on

women, does it not?” he asks Coombs. Again, Coombs agrees with him (as seems to
be her role), uttering something about 1950s mores of gender and the suppression of
women when she is interrupted by an impatient Flora Jessop:

I want to jump in here. One of the dynamics of polygamous culture that

you’ve got to understand is that the domestic violence in these communities
is not in large part from the men—it is from the women on each other. In
order to be the favorite wife . . . you must make sure that the other wives are
beaten down. I saw some domestic violence from the men to the women but
the majority of the domestic violence I witnessed as a child was women on
women.

Jessop thus successfully returns the discussion to the blameworthiness of the

FLDS mothers, re-invoking the image of them as perpetrators of abuse rather than
victims, gaining the penultimate word on the program. Dr. Drew invites Watkins to
have the last word, giving him ten seconds to answer the question, “Where are we
going to go with this?” The reporter, having learned his lesson the only other time
he was given the opportunity to speak, stays on message this time, noting that we
need to “prosecute the men . . . [and] prosecute the women,” urging law
enforcement to “step up and do their jobs.”
Even if we consider Jessop to be the voice of experience (and I do not wish to
question her testimony here), her evidence is at best anecdotal and won’t warrant
the conclusion that all FLDS mothers (living in different areas of the northwestern
U.S. and Canada decades after Jessop’s own recounted childhood experiences)
should be considered abusive or neglectful. On what basis then do commentators
such as Dr. Drew and his guests—and their sympathetic viewers—confidently
conclude that all FLDS mothers are guilty of abuse and ought to be prosecuted?
Utah Attorney General Shurtleff provides one common ground for this conclusion,
linking child abuse specifically with the FLDS practice of polygamy: "taken as a
whole,” he argues, “the FLDS belief system and lifestyle . . . enable what amounts
to institutionalized child rape and other forms of abuse” (Gher, 580). Shurtleff is not
alone in linking the FLDS practice of plural marriage to child abuse and other
crimes. Many believe that polygamous FLDS communities foster incest, underage
marriage, nonconsensual marriage, rape and other forms of sexual and physical
abuse, such as those highlighted by Flora Jessop and Dr. Drew’s other guests
(Duncan, 316). Indeed, this has been a common feminist presumption about
polygamous communities. However, the polygamous practices of FLDS men and
women cannot, on their own, explain the widespread belief that the children on the
YFZ Ranch (and in other FLDS communities) are imperiled and in need of
rescuing. Nor can they explain the shift from a widespread depiction of FLDS
mothers themselves as victims to the increasing cultural representation of them as
abusers. Below I suggest that what renders FLDS practices and FLDS mothers
“abnormal” and thus dangerous at a time when some forms of polygamy are being
normalized is an urban/rural dichotomy bearing a neo-colonial hue.
“When We Handed Out the Crayolas, They Just Stared at Them” 77

Polynormativity: Not All Polygamists are Abusive

Recently, North American discourse on polygamy has shifted to allow the

possibility of good (or at least benign) polygamous parents. Much as the
homonormative discourse surrounding gay marriage successfully re-formed the
North American cultural imaginary to admit the possibility of gay citizens who are
in most respects “just like” their heterosexual counterparts (mature, civilized,
productive and non-threatening), an emerging discourse embracing plural marriage
as not-all-that-different-from monogamous (straight or gay) marriage allows for the
possibility of civilized, non-threatening polygamists. I have elsewhere called this a
polynormative discourse (Park). Like homonormativity, polynormativity upholds
neoliberal ideals (e.g. free markets, capital accumulation, urbanization and
privatized kinship) rather than critiquing the sexist, heterosexist, racist and classist
ideologies upholding monogamy and other forms of normative sexuality and
kinship.
The discourse of polynormativity was initiated in the U.S. by the sympathetic
portrayal of the fictional Henrickson family on the popular HBO series Big Love
(2006-2011). Big Love centers on a Mormon family composed of Bill Henrickson,
his three wives, Barb, Nicki, and Margene, and their nine children. Bill is a
hardworking businessman who believes in the American dream; when we first meet
him, he is the owner of a hardware shop that he subsequently expands into a
franchise. His story is, in many ways, the rags to riches story of the mythic hard-
working immigrant. Exiled as a teen from his rural and impoverished childhood
home of Juniper Creek (a rural FLDS compound), Bill relocates to the city where he
starts a successful business and builds a new family for himself as an “independent”
polygamist in the suburbs of Salt Lake City, Utah. By the conclusion of the series,
Bill has become the leader of his own Church and staged a successful run for public
office. As a newly elected Utah state senator, in the final season, Bill acts to rescind
municipality to Juniper Creek (the evil FLDS compound), while openly advocating
the legality of plural marriage (for polygamists like himself).
The distinction drawn between “good” polygamists and “bad” polygamists in
Big Love is often stark. Consider the contrasting characters of the family patriarchs.
Bill Henrickson is sometimes domineering; yet his “father knows best” moments
are no more frequent than in most mainstream representations of monogamous,
heterosexual families. In sharp contrast to Bill, the leader of the Juniper Creek
compound, Roman Grant (loosely modeled on the FLDS Prophet Warren Jeffs)
terrorizes his constituents, including his own wives and children. As importantly,
consider the contrasting depictions of urban and rural polygamist women. The
Henrickson women are not submissive; nor do they lack agency. Two of Bill’s
wives have careers and independent incomes; collectively the three wives make
most of the important decisions affecting the family. It is the assertiveness of Barb,
Margene and, to a lesser extent, Nicki that keep Bill’s patriarchal tendencies in
check. Bill’s status as the relatively benevolent family patriarch is thus less a matter
of Bill’s character than it is a function of his marriage to women who insist on being
78 Shelley M. Park

treated with respect and having their voices heard. In contrast, the women of
Juniper Creek are largely (albeit not exclusively) portrayed as conforming to the
wishes of the Prophet, Roman Grant, and to those men who are part of his inner
circle. Sometimes this conformity stems from fear (those who resist the Prophet’s
wishes are often harshly punished). Other times it reflects a desire to consolidate
their own power; as favorite wives, they exert dominion over the other women and
children in the community. Whatever the reasons for their subservience to male
leaders, the results are the same: Juniper Creek women betray each other and
betray their children by failing to provide the necessary checks and balances on
patriarchal power.
Big Love takes considerable care to establish the Henrickson wives as good
mothers. Early in the series Barb is successfully nominated by her youngest
daughter as Utah mother of the year. When this award is rescinded by Utah’s first
lady who has learned Barb is a polygamist, viewers are clearly meant to view
Barb’s loss of the award as unfair; polygamist or not, she is an exemplary mother
and deserves to be recognized as such. In numerous episodes, the Henrickson wives
collaborate to ensure forgotten costumes for school plays are delivered and various
other mundane crises are averted. Most importantly, unlike the women of Juniper
Creek, Barb, Nicki and Margene stand up for their sons and daughters when they
are at risk of mistreatment by Bill or other patriarchs. Margene enlists Barb’s help
in bringing the eldest son, Ben, back into the familial embrace after he has been
kicked out of the house by his father; Nicki helps her daughter from a previous
marriage (Cara Lynn) escape the compound prior to her arranged marriage to a
much older man; at various junctures during the series, the Henrickson home is
refuge for compound residents seeking temporary or permanent asylum from FLDS
abuses.
When asked after the conclusion of Big Love, whether the show was making a
statement about polygamy, Will Scheffer responded that he and his co-creator and
life partner, Mark Olsen, had been “careful not to make a statement about
polygamy.” Yet, his remarks suggest that they were distinguishing between two
kinds of polygamy: one form that deserves liberal tolerance and another form that
does not. In Scheffer’s words:

At the beginning we tried to be non-judgmental about whether this particular

kind of marital arrangement [the marriage between Bill Henrickson and his
wives] had merit or not. As the show went on and we started to explore the
abuses on the compound, certainly we were making a statement about that kind
of polygamy. But in terms of this sunny suburban life that Bill had with his three
wives, we always saw the women as choosing the relationship. (Ausiello)

The polynormative narrative initiated by Olsen and Scheffer’s depiction of the

Henrickson family as a (liberal) family of choice was extended by TLC’s reality
show, Sister Wives (2010-). Featuring Kody Brown and his four wives, Meri,
Janelle, Christine and Robin and their seventeen children, Sister Wives promises
viewers a glimpse into the “real life” workings of a polygamous family. Like the
“When We Handed Out the Crayolas, They Just Stared at Them” 79

fictional Henrickson family, the Brown family is depicted as a likeable, non-

threatening family created and sustained through women’s choices. Kody Brown is
a self-effacing, “laid back surfer dude” and his wives (several of whom work
outside the home) appear intelligent, self-reflective, and respectful of one another.
No one seems exploited, much less abused. Nor do the family’s children seem at
risk. Indeed, all threats to the children’s well-being seem to arise through encounters
with an outside world that is hostile to polygamy. The children rarely fight with one
another, and often demonstrate considerable generosity and maturity in their
dealings with one another, mirroring their mothers’ capacity for critical self-
reflection as they matter-of-factly negotiate differences, jealousies and conflicts.
Moreover, the children appear to lead quite “normal” lives, as do their parents:
They go halloweening in October and tobogganing over winter break. The children
wear blue jeans and t-shirts like ordinary suburban kids; like ordinary suburban
parents, the Brown adults worry about finances, manage family schedules, drive
their children to school in mini-vans, and prepare their older children for college
and life outside the family. As one television reviewer observes, “considering its
sensational subject matter, TLC's Sister Wives has been refreshingly modest.”
Noting that the Browns have “a natural, honest presence in a genre fabled for the
camera-hogging antics of Jersey Shore,” the reviewer applauds the series for
downplaying “what's different about the Brown family” (their plural marriage) and
showing us “how normal they seem: loving and good-natured around their children,
occasionally prone to envy and feelings of betrayal” (Velasco).
The polynormative discourse that seeks to assuage public concerns about
polygamy has been further solidified and distributed through a proliferation of pro-
polygamist memoirs, blogs, TV specials, and television and radio interviews3
following Big Love and Sister Wives. In a 2011 interview with U.S. National Public
Radio, for example, Julie Halcomb, writer of the blog, “A Normal Polygamist
Family,” seeks to distinguish the form of polygamy she practices from that
associated with the FLDS church. “When you mention polygamy to the world,” she
states, “they tend to think of prairie dresses and French braids and women not
allowed to speak [because] their husband is ruling over them in an authoritative
manner.” “I wanted to show the world,” she continues, “that . . .I live in the middle
of a city. . . . on a normal street in a normal house. . . . We raise our children as
normal, everyday, go to school, go to the store, go to the library kind of kids.
[W]e're completely normal. There just happens to be four adults instead of just two
in the house” (NPR).
Similarly, the book jacket of the 2011 memoir, Love Times Three (while
promising “a riveting inside look at a world most of us can hardly imagine” to
titillate the buyer) frames the story of the polygamous Darger family as an account
of a normative middle-class family:

3
Segments on polygamy, featuring the Browns and others have been featured on
mainstream television “news” and talk shows such as Good Morning America, the
Today Show, the Rosie Show, the Ellen DeGeneres Show, Oprah, Dr. Phil, and
Anderson.
80 Shelley M. Park

He runs his own business and coaches Little League. She drives a minivan,
and she'd be lost without her trusty BlackBerry. They go on date nights.
Their kids attend public schools, play sports, and take music lessons. They
live in a roomy house in the ‘burbs. They're about as mainstream as families
come. They're also polygamists.

Like the Darger family (with their own 2012 television special, My Three
Wives) and the Brown family, the Thompson family has captured the nation’s
attention as “a poster family” that “defies the stereotypes of polygamy” (Ling).
When first interviewed on My America with Lisa Ling in 2011, Isaiah, Marlene, and
Becca Thompson and their children lived in a modest trailer park home in the
independent polygamist community of Centennial Park, Arizona where they were
filmed making sushi. By the time of their second interview, the Thompsons had
moved into a more spacious Centennial Park home with multiple bedrooms and
baths. The Thompsons became one of the families regularly featured on the
National Geographic series, Polygamy U.S.A., where the sister wives can be seen
raising their four children, eating steak, and drinking wine and playing cards after
their children have gone to bed. In order to support the upscale life of his family,
Isaiah spends much of his time working away from home. We are assured, however,
that each time he returns home, he spends “quality time,” with his family—time that
includes “taking his wives out to dinner and engaging in special projects with his
kids.”
The positive reception of suburban polygamy as featured recently on television,
in books, on the radio and the internet, illustrates a trend towards understanding
polygamy as a potentially rational kinship choice and a trend towards adjudicating
some polygamous families (those formed through mutual, rational, consent) as
morally acceptable. Being a polygamist is no longer sufficient, on its own, to mark
one as an “unfit” (or even a non-feminist) parent. Polynormativity links the
acceptability of polygamy as a rational “lifestyle” choice consistent with ethical
parenting to iconic symbols of “first world” neoliberal consumption: minivans,
smart phones, little league, music lessons, high school and college education, dinner
dates, sushi, steak, wine, sprawling suburban homes, family vacations and
commuter marriages. Below, I trace ways in which the FLDS mother becomes the
abject Other to neo-liberal motherhood through discourses that equate ‘good’
mothering with urban living and capital and cultural accumulation..

Metronormativity: Rural Homes Produce Savage Children

The term “metronormativity” originates with J. Halberstam, who argues that “a

story of migration from ‘country’ to ‘town’ is a spatial narrative within which the
subject moves to a place of tolerance after enduring life in a place of suspicion,
persecution, and secrecy” (36-37). Scott Herring extends Halberstam’s analysis of
the spatial and temporal dimensions of metronormativity to include explicit
attention to the race and class dimensions of the queer migration narrative. Below I
“When We Handed Out the Crayolas, They Just Stared at Them” 81

further extend these analyses of metronormativity to illustrate how polynormativity

(like homonormativity) privileges material accumulation and leisure time and
identifies rural life with barbarism. As I will further argue, metronormativity’s
norms of idealized urbanity render the FLDS mother ethically suspect. Media
coverage of the YFZ raids and its aftermath makes this ethical reasoning explicit. I
examine two examples: a People magazine article published three weeks after the
YFZ raid (April 21, 2008) and an Oprah special that aired approximately a year
later (March 30, 2009).
The People magazine article, entitled “RAIDED! Inside the Polygamy Sect”
promises an exposé of “a strange world where 50-year-old men are free to marry
teenage girls” but provides little discussion of the sex-abuse concerns allegedly
providing the rationale for the raid, save to note that the FLDS is “notorious for its
practice of having older men take multiple young girls for their wives,” and that
state officials insisted the raid was justified despite the fact that the report of abuse
had been unsubstantiated. Instead, the article focuses on the “culture shock”
experienced by the children who had been transported from the country to the city.
Emphasizing the civilized and hospitable nature of the Baptists who first received
the displaced FLDS children in El Dorado and contrasting this with the somewhat
“savage” status of the children who had never been exposed to toys, leisure, or
culture, the article opens with an anecdote about Helen Pfluger, a member of the
First Baptist church in El Dorado, attempting to put the dislocated children at ease:

She chatted with them as she passed out food. She also offered crayons, which
quickly demonstrated just how different these kids were. “When we handed out
the Crayolas, they just stared at them,” says Pfluger, who was volunteering at
the church. “I think they were trying to decide if a crayon was something you
were supposed to eat.”

The metronormative framing of the anecdote presumes a deficiency in the

children rather than a misstep by the volunteers. The volunteers—like the readers of
the article—are in-the-know about Crayolas and find it unimaginable that any 21st
century child would not be. The idea of these “different” children eating the crayons
offered to them, moreover, invites us to imagine them as savages who—through no
fault of their own—are untrained in worldly ways.
Intersecting with the concerns about the children’s lack of knowledge are
concerns about the children’s lack of aesthetic taste—concerns that are framed in
temporal terms. The reporter notes that, during the raid, authorities “found an
undisclosed number of teenage girls who were pregnant and hordes of children
wearing clothes that looked like something out of Little House on the Prairie.”
While pregnant teens were a stated concern of authorities who removed the children
from the ranch (teen pregnancies were deemed evidence of forced underage
marriages), the People article does not emphasize the pregnancies; nor does it
attempt to link them to sexual abuse. Instead the teenage pregnancies are largely
downplayed here (the “undisclosed number” of such pregnancies suggests the
documented incidents may be small), while the children’s lack of fashion is
82 Shelley M. Park

emphasized (“hordes” of poorly dressed children suggest that this is the epidemic of
concern). The conjoining of pregnant teens (an ethical or medical concern) and
oddly dressed children (an aesthetic concern) as two equivalent “findings” by the
authorities only makes sense within a temporal framing of issues. What these
strangely conjoined findings both illustrate is the backwardness of FLDS life:
modern, liberated women delay childbearing beyond their teen years and (just as
importantly, it is suggested) they would not be caught dead in clothing that was
popular at the turn of the 19th century.4
The aesthetic deficiencies of rural FLDS life are again noted toward the end of
the article with an emphasis on the conformity of and restrictions on FLDS
children’s style. Pfluger expresses a reluctant acceptance of the shelter residents’
unwillingness to wear the modern clothes donated so generously by El Dorado
residents:

The girls didn’t ever wear any of the clothes that were brought in, because their
needs are so restricted; they all stayed in the same clothes they arrived in, and so
did the boys. The females’ dresses were all basically the same: all-cotton, long-
sleeved to the wrist, high necks, ankle length and loose waisted. The women and
girls wore black leggings and clunky, work-shoe-type styles in either brown or
black.

And, “yet,” she notes, “there were people who wore contact lenses,” expressing
surprise at this seeming incongruence with the FLDS members’ lack of modernity.
“We know because they asked for contact solution.”
The failure of the FLDS children to live up to the ideals of metronormativity is
ultimately blamed on their parents whose real sin, it appears, is to isolate their
children in a community “located on a bleak stretch of scrub land outside El
Dorado.” The decision to locate the YFZ ranch in rural Texas is linked to the
oppression of young girls by unnamed former FLDS members who “believe Jeffs
ordered the move to El Dorado because it was even more remote than Colorado City
and thus would discourage disgruntled girls from fleeing.” Given the sexual abuse
allegation prompting the raid, we assume the reporter refers to the difficulty of
fleeing such abuse. However, sexual abuse does not seem the sort of thing about
which one would be merely “disgruntled. Moreover, the reporter seems
unconcerned with persuading the reader that the abuse allegations are true. Noting
that the call from an alleged minor that triggered the raid was “sketchy” and “so-far-
unsubstantiated,” the article remains focused on the cultural backwardness of the
children. Asked why state officials took the “extraordinary step” of removing
hundreds of children from their home “for their own safety,” a quoted private
investigator explains: “[t]hese kids have been raised in a cave, basically. . . . They
have little or no education, have never seen TV or listened to radio.”

4
Little House on the Prairie is a series of books—later turned into a TV series—
based on the life of Laura Wilder Ingalls (1867-1957).
“When We Handed Out the Crayolas, They Just Stared at Them” 83

The YFZ residents are not unskilled. As the People article notes, the YFZ ranch,
“worth roughly $20 million,” was entirely built by members of the FLDS
community who set up their own rock-cutting quarry, woodworking and cement-
making facilities, water-treatment plant and electrical grid. Such a feat might
suggest that these folk (rather than their suburban counterparts) are the independent
polygamists. However, the reporter does not adopt such a perspective. Rather than
exploring what lessons might be learned by children raised as members of a self-
sufficient community, the reporter immediately turns his (and our) attention to
concerns about the exploitation of child labor. Again emphasizing the religious
community’s lack of bourgeois privileges, the reporter observes that “children [are]
forced to work long hours and forbidden to play games or with toys.”
The reporter also emphasizes the confinement of women and children by
property walls. Unlike men who sometimes worked or went shopping in town, he
suggests, “women and children almost never left the compound.” At no point does
the reporter consider whether the women and children might be content with their
life at the ranch; the metronormative framing of the article presumes that a lack of
consumer goods, a failure to prioritize leisure over work and a failure to configure
either leisure or education in urban terms (crayons, toys, television, fashion and
shopping rather than outdoor exercise, building, gardening or cooking, for example)
is oppressive. The assumed metronormative ideals imply that anyone who could
migrate to the city would do so; thus, those who do not flee must be either
brainwashed or held against their will.5
That the children of the YFZ ranch find city life desirable, despite being
originally “dazed by their surroundings,” is evidenced by People in closing
paragraphs that support the metronormative migration narrative. We are informed—
again by volunteer Pfluger—that the younger girls “loved” boxed cereal (“Froot
Loops were an especially big hit”) and Capri Sun juice boxes (“once they were
taught how to use them”). We are also told that the kids are “enjoying the outside
world” in other ways:

The day after they arrived at the church, the kids were allowed to go out and
frolic on the playground. ‘I don’t know if they’d ever been on slides, swings or
monkey bars before, but it doesn’t take any child long to figure out what to do,’
[Pfluger] says, ‘You should have heard the squeals of laughter. The joy, the glee
in their voices just thrilled my soul.’

The metronormative framings of rural polygamist life that characterize the 2008
People article are reiterated by Oprah Winfrey a year later in her “exclusive” report,

5
“They’re just like sheep,” says Benjamin Bistline, who left the sect 20 years ago.
“The only do what they’re told to do” (Hewitt and Meadows 2008).
84 Shelley M. Park

“Oprah Goes Inside the Yearning for Zion Polygamist Ranch.” The various
residents of the ranch that Oprah meets during her visit—including women and
children—contend that they are both happy and free (“we don’t get forced into
anything”), but Oprah is clearly skeptical. Her skepticism may be warranted—it is
possible that residents are self-censoring from fear of retribution by compound
leaders or simply that they wish to make a good impression and dispel widely
circulated stereotypes about themselves and their community. What is noteworthy,
however, is Oprah’s disbelief that one could be happy leading a life absent of most
modern amenities, fashion, and culture.
Oprah begins her interviews of ranch residents in a second grade classroom.
After asking the children what they recall about the raid (“They told us they were
only going to take us for one hour and then they took us for months,” a small boy
responds), Oprah quickly turns the conversation to what the children “do for fun.”
“I don’t see any toys around,” Oprah notes. “So what do you play with or what do
you do when you want to play?” When the children respond that they don’t want to
play—that it is “not fun”—Oprah responds incredulously that she has “never in
[her] entire life heard of a second grader that didn’t want to play.” In a voice over
that accompanies images of young children building fences with drills and levels,
using hoes and pushing wheelbarrows, milking cows and sweeping sidewalks,
Oprah informs us that the word “play” isn’t used on the ranch as it connotes
“goofing off” and being “unproductive.” While one might think that the children’s
work ethic would be considered virtuous in an era of global capitalism that
fetishizes productivity, Oprah’s focus—like the focus of People—is inflected by a
socio-economic bias that privileges consumerism (toys) and leisure time (play) as
the reward for one’s labors. Thus, as the footage cuts back to the classroom, we
witness Oprah quizzing the children about their knowledge of books and movies.
She asks them “who has ever heard of Humpty Dumpty?” No one. Then, “who has
ever heard of Mickey Mouse?” “Cinderella?” One girl raises her hand tentatively,
although it is unclear whether she really has heard of Cinderella or is just trying to
please their guest. “The Little Mermaid?” “Shrek?” “Shrek II?” No child has heard
of these stories or characters either. The teacher explains the religious reasons that
such fiction does not find its way into their curriculum; yet, the viewer is clearly
supposed to pity the culturally illiterate children who have been raised without the
benefit of Disney movies.
A similar dynamic pervades Oprah’s interview with ten teenage girls. Like the
People article, Oprah begins with a serious question about whether the girls are
forced to marry against their will. They deny this and also inform her—contrary to
the speculations of the People article—that they are allowed to leave the ranch.
They leave to visit doctors and dentists and some intend to leave to go to college
(one states a desire to go to law school). None of them would be forced to stay, they
assert, should they decide to live on the outside. As with the second graders,
however, the bulk of Oprah’s time with the teenage girls is spent discussing lifestyle
issues. Attempting to display themselves as technologically modern, the girls show
Oprah they have cell phones, while admitting they don’t play video games or have
computers. Attempting to present themselves as culturally knowledgeable, these
“When We Handed Out the Crayolas, They Just Stared at Them” 85

older girls assert they have, in fact, watched television and movies. However, the
films they list—Chicken Little, Winnie the Pooh—serve to highlight the vast gulf
between themselves and urban teens. A discussion about fashion produces further
disbelief from Oprah. When the girls attempt to highlight the differences in their
long “peasant” dresses—with one stating, quite plausibly, that although their dresses
may “look the same” to outsiders, they say to each other, “where’d you get that
dress?!”—Oprah laughs. This discursive strategy is repeated when Oprah
subsequently asks older women about their allegedly identical hairstyles; “I have to
ask,” Oprah says, “what’s up with that ‘poof’?” When the women point to
differences among their hairstyles, Oprah cannot see the differences. When they
claim a common desire to backcomb and braid, the viewer is clearly intended to
share Oprah’s suspicion that anyone would voluntarily choose to adopt such a
coiffure.
The message of Oprah’s 2009 special—much like the message of the earlier
People article—is that FLDS communities abuse children by forcing them to labor,
denying them time to play or the amenities to play with, failing to properly educate
them in the ways of the world, and forcing them to conform to aesthetic standards
that are highly questionable. The mothers and (female) teachers are culpable for
isolating their children (especially their daughters) from the larger world; failing to
expose their children to modern technologies, urban sensibilities and aesthetic
choices dooms those children to a bleak future containing little promise of
becoming what the urban dweller would consider fully developed and autonomous
adults. The thought that FLDS girls may never transform from Crayola-eating,
Shrek-deprived, prairie-dress wearing children into smart-phone using, sushi-eating,
minivan-driving women in high heels may horrify the urban imagination as much as
the thought of child brides and teen pregnancies.

The FLDS Mother as Subaltern Subject

What renders us unable to imagine FLDS women and girls as content, despite
their claims to be so? Note that this question is about us and not about FLDS
women and girls. In giving public lectures on polygamy to varied North American
audiences, I am consistently struck by the widespread inability to hear this question
as asked. Audiences inevitably turn the question into an occasion to expound on
why the FLDS woman is not—and could not be--content. This, of course, both
misses the point and simultaneously makes the point that Gayatri Spivak eloquently
analyzes in her essay, “Can the subaltern speak?” In that essay, Spivak observes that
when intellectuals analyze the experience of the colonized subject, they often fail to
note their own historical roles, institutional responsibilities, interests and desires,
thus constituting the Other as “the Self’s shadow” (74-75). What keeps the subaltern
figure a mere shadow of the self is a form of sanctioned ignorance that projects
western understandings of subjectivity onto the subaltern experience. Spivak is
concerned with the epistemic violence of imperialism as committed by both the
conservative intellectual who advocates colonialism and the progressive intellectual
who claims to represent colonized subjects but who, like his conservative
86 Shelley M. Park

counterpart, privileges particular ways of knowing and understanding the world and,
in so doing, renders other ways of knowing and understanding unintelligible. In
particular, Spivak suggests, the subordinated woman in a colonized society can only
be heard by the colonizer if she speaks his language; thus dominant intellectual and
cultural filters muddle the voice of the subaltern.
Rosalind Morris suggests that subalternity is less an identity than a predicament:
subaltern forms of subjectivity are only legible when subjected to dominant
discourses, thereby becoming illegible as subaltern (8). This is precisely the
predicament in which mothers from the YFZ Ranch find themselves as they plead to
have their children returned to them via public media in the weeks after the YFZ
raids. The women’s distress over the raid on the YFZ ranch is rendered legible
through a discourse of motherhood recognizable to bourgeois sensibilities. Each
mother recounts the number of her children and their ages, how they were in their
homes eating dinner or doing homework with their children as law enforcement
arrived and the trauma that has been caused to their children by being forcibly
removed from their loving mothers. Sally, a mother interviewed by several
television journalists, recounts how she pleaded with law enforcement officers to
leave her 5 year old, special needs son with her.6 The officers’ refusal to do so, she
explains, leaves the child at serious risk as he requires special care hourly that he is
not receiving at the place the children are being warehoused. This elicits the
empathy of news reporters and the television audience (“I can’t imagine what you
are going through!” a young Fox reporter exclaims, indicating that she too has a
child that age and would be devastated if he were taken from her). Notably, the
discourse that elicits our compassion is a discourse that sentimentalizes the mother-
child bond as imagined and enacted in contemporary, middle-class, nuclear
families. It enables us to imagine children wrest from families and homes just like
our own. Through the FLDS mothers’ controlled composures, we detect an
occasional break in a voice; some mothers hold white hankies that they use to
intermittently dab at the corners of their eyes.
While the content of the women’s pleas to have their children returned mask all
signs of difference through a dominant discourse of sentimental motherhood, the
woman’s legibility as normative mothers remains limited. They seem a bit too stoic;
their voices are too controlled with little emotional inflection (“robotic” according
to one television pundit).The tears seem staged as if the mothers have been coached;
yet their performance is not altogether convincing and is undermined by their
embodiment. To the bourgeois viewer, the FLDS women look strange with their
high-collared, long sleeved, ankle-length, pastel dresses and backcombed hair.
Sitting with meticulously erect posture, hands folded in laps, the mothers look
uncomfortable—which is to say, they make us, the viewers, uncomfortable. Thus,
when the reporter reminds us of their difference (e.g. of the sexual abuse
accusations leading to the raid, of the women’s polygamous “lifestyle,” or of the
fact that they live inside a “sect”), the mother’s pleas to have their children returned

6
See e.g. “Inside polygamy: secret lives,” Larry King Live, CNN, April 18, 2008
and Fox News Alert, April 16, 2008.
“When We Handed Out the Crayolas, They Just Stared at Them” 87

lose their force. The women’s denials that teenage girls are marrying older men,
their resistance to claims that plural marriage is wrong, and their insistence that the
life they lead on the YFZ ranch is a good life that they have freely chosen are now
open to a limited range of interpretations mandated by our dominant discourse:
either the women mean what they say or they are lying. If they believe what they
say, they are clearly ignorant—perhaps willfully ignorant, perhaps brainwashed, but
in either case inadequately attentive to the perils faced by their children. If the
women are knowingly lying about life on the ranch, they may be doing so to protect
FLDS patriarchs and/or to protect themselves from the barbarianism of male FLDS
members. In either case, the women are complicit in the abuse of their children,
although their fear of retaliation is understandable and perhaps mitigates their
responsibility.
The conservative interpreter of the FLDS women’s words and actions will
advocate holding these mothers personally responsible for the abuse or
endangerment of their children while the progressive (e.g. the feminist) interpreter
may view the FLDS mother as subject to coercion (utilizing discursive
interpretations such as ‘battered woman syndrome,’ ‘Stockholm syndrome,’ ‘cycle
of abuse’ and so forth).7 Both, however, privilege particular—metronormative--
ways of knowing and understanding the world, thereby rendering unintelligible the
FLDS women’s claim to find the YFZ Ranch a “wonderful” place to live and rear
children and rendering the FLDS woman herself illegible as a good (bourgeois)
mother. As former prosecutor Loni Coombs suggests to Dr. Drew, whether the
mothers do or do not exemplify a cycle of abuse, whether they do or do not know
any better, whether you do or do not believe they have been brainwashed or
indoctrinated, “something drastic has to happen” to stop these women from abusing
their children by keeping them at the ranch.
To consider the FLDS mother as a subaltern subject is not to romanticize her
life. Like other subaltern subjects (e.g. the widow who practices Sati, the mother
who facilitates her daughter’s cliterodectomy), FLDS women may face hardships
and may be the subjects (and/or perpetrators) of abuse. To see the FLDS mother as a
subaltern subject, however, shifts our attention to our own role in perpetuating
violence against FLDS women and children. When we claim to “know” that all
FLDS women and children are held captive by dominating and abusive patriarchs in
the rural spaces they inhabit, we practice a form of epistemic imperialism that
upholds culturally dominant ideals of western freedoms and progress—ideals, as I
have argued, closely linked to urban living and capital accumulation. Against this
hegemonic discourse, members of FLDS communities are imagined as primitive or
barbaric. A failure to desire what we have and to live how we live is unimaginable
to us; thus, we infer that the rural Other is either stupid (uneducated, brainwashed)
or dangerous (morally degenerate) or both (dangerous because brainwashed).

7
This is precisely the debate that takes place on the Dr. Drew show between Flora
Jessop (conservative ex-FLDS member) and Dr. Drew, who attempts to bring
lawyer Loni Coombs to his more progressive side of the debate.
88 Shelley M. Park

In an insightful genealogical account of anti-polygamy sentiment in North

America, Margaret Denike traces the moral panic over polygamy in North America
to racist and nationalist sentiments linking the “spiritual” marriages of the white
Mormon community to practices of plural marriage among immigrant and
indigenous peoples during the mid to late 19th century. The distinction between
monogamy and polygamy, she suggests, became meaningful in the context of
discourses of national purity and identity that imagined America’s manifest destiny
as the emergence of a white, Christian nation (853-54). The continued salience of
the distinction is illustrated today, Denike notes, through the selective enforcement
of laws criminalizing polygamy in both the U.S. and Canada and anti-Chinese and
anti-Muslim immigration policies (855).
The racialized, neo-colonialist overtones of anti-polygamy discourse are
evidenced in Dr. Drew’s likening of FLDS religious practices to the imagined ritual
sacrifices of virgin brides to Volcano gods (a practice typically, albeit questionably,
attributed to primitive Polynesians). The Orientalist—and more specifically
Islamaphobic—overtones of contemporary anti-polygamist discourse are also
apparent in analogies drawn between life in North American polygamist
communities and life under alleged patriarchal rule in the middle East. In the
documentary, Banking on Heaven, for example, legislators from the northwestern
U.S. claim that FLDS compounds are sites of “massive corruption and violations of
human rights” with “many striking similarities to the Taliban.” Providing stories of
women who are beaten and young girls who are forced to become child brides and
mothers, the filmmakers draw explicit parallels between the need to “liberate the
women of Afghanistan and Iraq” and the need to “liberate the women and children
of Colorado City.” As Denike suggests, the racialization of white polygamists is
what has marked them, in part, as barbarians who threaten the purity of the
(western) nation and, related to this, as a threat to the innocence of (white) women
and children.
The association of non-whiteness (e.g. Negritude, Orientalism) with dangerous
sexual perversity has a long history. The association of non-normative sexual
practices with child abuse is also nothing new. Gays and lesbians, like polygamists
and polyamorists, members of BDSM communities, and transfolk, for example,
have been widely marginalized as social outcasts and demonized as a threat to the
safety of (white) children. In the North American cultural imaginary, sexual non-
normativity has frequently been associated with pedophilia and other forms of child
abuse—perversities which are, in turn, frequently associated with racial otherness.
I suggest that an urban/rural dichotomy intersects with and further complicates
the colonialist discourse distinguishing (white) civilization from (racialized)
barbarism. Today’s metropolitan subject (representing the Empire’s center) is the
middle-class city-dweller. This subject finds its abject Other in the primitive and
often ignoble savage who dwells outside of the city in isolation from civilizing
intellectual, aesthetic and ethical influences. The urban/rural dichotomy crosscuts
the monogamy/polygamy dichotomy to brand some North American (rural)
polygamists as dangerous while positioning other North American (urban)
polygamists as civilized..
“When We Handed Out the Crayolas, They Just Stared at Them” 89

Conclusions

My primary interest in this essay has been to explore a set of assumptions about
rural life, rural women and rural children in order to sketch how these assumptions
make it difficult for the urbane to take FLDS women seriously as potentially good –
or even good enough--mothers. We can only understand the raid on the YFZ ranch
and the State’s wholesale removal of the community’s children if we look at how
rural polygamous practices depart from metronormative ideals. Exploring the
intersections between polynormativity, metronormativity and our ethical ideals of
good mothering, moreover, helps to explain how FLDS women who were once
viewed solely as victims of patriarchy are now themselves demonized for their
failures to protect their children from the sins of rural ignorance and bad taste.
Insofar as FLDS mothers are depicted as backward country folk who isolate their
children from bourgeois freedoms and consumer choices, they are perceived as
threatening their children’s well-being.
We ought to be suspicious of any attempt by the State to enact the wholesale
removal of children from a community deemed to be uncivilized. We now
recognize the removal of African children from their parents at slave markets and
the removal of indigenous children from their tribal homes to be instances of gross
political injustice. Why, then, do we fail to see the wholesale removal of FLDS
children from their communities to be similarly suspect? I have argued that FLDS
communities are among the contemporary world’s subaltern communities. As such,
they are subjected to epistemic imperialism. We “know”—even in the absence of
empirical evidence of physical or sexual abuse—that such communities are sites of
patriarchal oppression that damage women’s capacity to mother and harm their
children. Thus, both women and children are seen as needing protection from their
own community. Insofar as the FLDS mother is a subaltern subject under
metronormative neoliberalism, she cannot respond in ways that we can hear her.
I conclude with two modest claims: First, we need to be wary of the
unacknowledged metronormative biases that lead us to stereotype FLDS
communities as inevitably damaging to all of the women and children who inhabit
them. Such overgeneralizations are seldom helpful and typically signal that
epistemic imperialism is at work. That we find another’s life undesirable or
unintelligible from our own epistemic position does not entail that no-one will find
that life worth living. Second, we need to be wary of our colonialist impulses to
“save” others from lives we imagine reprehensible or find unintelligible. Given that
we have no compelling evidence (aside from our own metronormative, neo-colonial
biases) to believe that all FLDS children are endangered, we have no ethical or
political obligation to stage a wholesale rescue of them. Nor do we have the ethical
responsibility—or even the ethical right--to separate those children from mothers
who do not live according to western teleological notions of progress.

Works Cited
90 Shelley M. Park

Ausiello, Michael. March 20, 2011. “Big Love Post Mortem: Your Burning Series
Finale Questions Answered!” TV Line.
“Are FLDS mothers to blame for abuse?” July 27, 2011. Dr. Drew. CNN.
Barlow, Keith W. 2012. “’Can they do that?’: Why religious parents and
communities may fear the future regarding state interests and custodial law,”
Brigham Young University Law Review. 2012,:1, 281-312.
Big Love, seasons 1-5. 2011. HBO entertainment. New York: Time Warner, DVD.
Darger, Joe, Alina Darger, Vicki Darger, Valerie Darger and Brooke Adams. 2011.
Love times three: Our true story of a polygamous marriage. New York:
HarperOne.
Denike, Margaret. 2010. “The Racialization of White Man’s Polygamy,” Hypatia,
25, 852-74.
Dugard, Jaycee. 2012. A Stolen Life: A Memoir. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Duncan, Emily J. 2008. “The positive effects of legalizing polygamy: ‘Love is a
many splendored thing’,” Duke Journal of Gender and Law 15, 315-337.
Gher, Jaime M. 2008. “Polygamy and Same-Sex Marriage - Allies or Adversaries
Within the Same-Sex Marriage Movement,” William & Mary Journal of
Women and the Law 14: 3, 559-603.
Halberstam. J. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Trangender Bodies, Subcultural
Lives. New York: NYU Press.
Herring, Scott. 2010. Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism. New York: NYU
Press.
Hewitt, Bill and Bob Meadows. April 21, 2008. “Raided! Inside the polygamy
sect,” People 69: 15. Online.
Morris, Rosalind, ed. 2010. Can the subaltern speak? Reflections on the history of
an idea. New York: Columbia University Press.
Murr, Andrew. May 12, 2008. “Look Past Polygamy,” Newsweek 151: 19. Online.
National Public Radio. August 19, 2011. “Polygamists share their faith and family
lives.”
Park, Shelley. 2013. Mothering queerly, queering motherhood: Resisting
monomaternalism in adoptive, lesbian, blended and polygamous families. New
York: SUNY Press.
Spivak, Gayatri. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence
Grossberg, eds. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana, Illinois:
University of Illinois Press, 271-313.
Velasco, Schuyler. Oct. 16, 2010. “Secrets of the polygamists.” Salon.com.
Retrieved Oct 18, 2010.
_________________________________

Arju as “Caring Space, In-Between:”

Philosophical Reflections on “Care”
from Ao Naga, India
Amrita Banerjee and Karilemla

abanerjee.phi@gmail.com
karilemla@gmail.com

_________________________________
Abstract: Through a philosophical engagement with “Arju” (communal
dormitories for children/adolescents among the Ao tribe, India), we develop a
distinct conceptualization of it as “caring space, in-between”. In its various
ontological, epistemological, and ethical dimensions, Arju becomes a space for
mothering of Ao children and of caring for the tribe at large. It provides a basis for
developing a notion of “caring space” within a philosophy of care. Finally, while
theorizing its “in-between” character, we argue that Arju resists mapping onto
dominant Western spatial binaries such as private/public, home/world, etc. This
essay is not only an articulation of a non-dominant group’s philosophy of
“mothering” and “care”, but also aims to create an alternative theoretical space from
which to engage with the dominantly Western feminist philosophies of care.

T HIS PAPER PHILOSOPHICALLY ENGAGES with the communal

institution called “Arju,” which was prevalent among the Ao tribe from north-
eastern India. “Arju” can roughly be defined as communal “dormitories” designed
by the tribe as continuation of home-spaces for Ao children and adolescents. We
argue that “Arju”, becomes a remarkable instantiation of a “mothering” strategy
adopted by a non-dominant group. In this essay, we argue for and develop a distinct
conceptualization of “Arju" as “caring space, in-between”1. We think that “Arju"
provides an intriguing opportunity to evolve a philosophy of “mothering” and

1
We use Arju (without quotes) when we refer to the institution, and “Arju” (within quotes) when we use
it as a concept.

Philosophy in the Contemporary World 32:1 (Spring 2016)

92 Amrita Banerjee and Karilemla

“care” from the “margins”, as well as an alternative theoretical space from which to
engage with the dominantly Western feminist tradition of care ethics.
First, we develop a conceptualization of “Arju" as “caring space”. It can be seen
as participating in many tasks that we associate with the goals and labor of raising
children. Of special importance in the context of Arju is the labor associated with
training children in virtues (various ontological, epistemic, ethical, and political
virtues), developing individual and collective conceptions of selfhood, and training
them in survival. Apart from the labor of care, various facets of Arju life also seem
to prepare children for an orientation towards care, which eventually turns out to be
key to the survival of the tribe as a collective. In taking up these critical tasks, we
think that Arju proves to be fundamental to the material and emotional growth of
Ao children. We argue that multiple “care-givers” from the community who inhabit
this space can be thematized as inhabiting roles very close to “mothers”, and the
space can be viewed as a dynamic “system of nested intradependence”. It becomes a
productive theoretical vantage-point to conceptualize a “collective maternal praxis”.
We further argue that the possibilities of this space as “caring space”, however, are
not reducible to the activity of any single care-giver. In this essay, “Arju" as
material-symbolic space is defined as having a certain orientation towards care, and
provides a foundation for developing a notion of “caring space” within a philosophy
of care.
Following the conceptualization of “Arju" as “caring space”, we turn towards
theorizing its “in-between” character. What is conceptually distinctive about Arju is
that it is a unique physico-symbolic space created by the community, and is
dedicated to the purpose of carrying out the labor and goals of caring for its
children. We argue that it resists mapping onto dominant Western imaginations of
spaces, and especially the Western middle-class imagination of a privatized “home”
space in which the labor of care pertaining to the raising of children is primarily
seen to be concentrated. “Arju”, on our analysis, turns out to be a unique kind of
“blurred” space, which we argue is conceptually located “in-between” the “home”
and the “world” for Ao children. It is a continuation of both, and yet reducible to
neither. It is through this intermediate space that the work and responsibility of
raising children can be extended from the home space to the larger communal space,
and everyday maternal practices of individual Ao mothers co-exist alongside Arju.
The “betweenness” character of the space is also responsible for imbibing it with
unique orientations towards care. However, amidst a history of violence, the labor
of care within Arju cannot simply be seen as exhausting itself in the raising of
individual children. Rather, we argue that collective maternal praxis in this “in-
between” space also becomes a political act of care for the tribe. It gets tied to the
performance of cultural identity, and aids in the cultural survival of Ao as a distinct
tribe among others in the north-east. “Arju" as “caring space, in-between”,
therefore, is argued to have ontological, epistemological, ethical, and political
significance for the Ao tribe.
Section 1 provides a brief introduction to the Ao Naga tribe, and their system of
communal dormitories such as Arju and Züki/Tzüki (Tzüki” in the Chungli dialect,
Arju as “Caring Space, In-Between:” Philosophical Reflections 93
on “Care” from Ao Naga, India

and “Züki” in the Mongsen dialect)2. Section 2 focuses on developing an analysis of

“Arju" as “caring space”. While 2.1 foregrounds a move from “care-givers” to a
conception of “caring spaces”, 2.2 discusses the various “faces” associated with the
labor of care in this space. Section 3 analyzes the “in-between” character of this
“caring space”. Section 4 discusses how “Arju" can be conceptualized as a space for
providing care to the community at large and not simply to individual children, that
is, it is a “caring space” for raising both children and community.
The absence of any systematic philosophical treatises within Ao culture creates
difficulties in the kind of theoretical exercise we undertake in this essay. Most of the
literature and everyday cultural beliefs of the Ao are preserved in the memory of the
learned Ao village elders, and transmitted through an oral tradition. Some narratives
have been published (for instance, see Miri and Karilemla, 2015), while other
insights come from stories shared by elders in native Ao with Karilemla over
several years during trips to her native village in the course of her work on the Ao
oral tradition, and transcribed by her in English. Although memory introduces its
own epistemic and representational quandaries, the elders are eager to tell stories to
the younger generation in order to preserve cultural memory, and this is their critical
contribution to keeping this memory alive. As with any narration, variations and
dissonances are bound to occur. In the light of this, and given our own diverse
speaking and hearing locations (from within and outside the tribe respectively), our
aim in this essay is to draw out underlying philosophical implications that appear to
us as intriguing and insightful by conceptually engaging with “Arju”. In no
circumstance, do we claim to provide a universal Ao philosophy of “Arju" in the
process.

1. Arju as Communal Dormitories on the Ao world-view

The Aos are a major tribe from the north-eastern state of Nagaland in India, and
are largely found on the high hills of the Mokokchung District of Nagaland. The
entire Ao territory is divided into six ranges, namely, the Langpangkong range, the
Asetkong range, the Ongpangkong range, the Changkikong range, the Japukong
range, and the Tsürangkong range. Each Naga tribe has a language of its own. The
Ao too have a distinct language called Ao-O (Ao language). There are three distinct
dialects, namely, Chungli, Mongsen, and Changki. The Chungli dialect has become
the standard Ao language, but in many Ao villages both Chungli and Mongsen
dialects are spoken.
Among key communal institutions that evolved within the Ao community, were
dormitories for children and adolescents in the forms of Arju for male children and
Züki/Tzüki for female children. Of course, the “gendered” division of the
dormitories immediately stands out, and it might appear tempting to indulge in a
reading of these spaces through an already available binary conceptualization of
gender. However, we think that the gender issue demands a complex theoretical

2
In different ranges of the Ao territory, there is a slight dialectical variation within both Chungli and
Mongsen speaking groups. In some published books like Naga Society and Culture by N.Talitemjen
Jamir & A Lanunungsang, “Tzüki” is used as “Tsüki”.
94 Amrita Banerjee and Karilemla

analysis, especially to see if cultural specificities modify the binary analysis in any
way. In fact, we think that we will conceptually be in a better place to address this
issue once we have had a chance to philosophically analyze each one of these
institutions with some rigor. Such analysis could then lay the ground for a
comparative reading of the two, from which a robust theorization of the “gendered”
nature of these spaces can be generated. Therefore, in order to avoid any reductive
and superficial analysis, we resist tackling the gender question relative to these
spaces in this essay, and purely devote our philosophical energies to a conceptual
analysis of “Arju”.
The institution of Arju existed since the first Ao settlement at Chungliyimti,
where six Arjus and one senden reju (common dormitory) were constructed
according to Merazulu Longchar (Miri and Karilemla, 28). Since then, Arju became
a robust part of Ao culture. Although putting a specific date to its origin is difficult,
the fact that Arju was prevalent since this first settlement at Chungliyimti is usually
a part of the origin story for the Ao. Some sources put the approximate age of the
boys at Arju between 11-17 years old (Miri and Karilemla, 11 and 47). They had to
attend Arju for a certain number of years, and they would be under the guidance of
communal elders within this space. Arju, therefore, became a home away from
home for them through several critical years of their childhood and adolescent lives.
Various activities, trainings, etc. marked their lives at Arju. The institution,
however, slowly began to die down with an increasing number of conversions from
the traditional Ao religion to Christianity during British colonial rule in India.
With the advent of Christianity to Molungkimong, a historical village in
Nagaland in 1872, the Ao villages became divided over the new religion. Religious
conversions took place gradually in different parts of the Ao territory. It is to be
noted that some members of the Ao embraced the new religion early, while others
did so later. Some of the elders (in the age group of 89-90 years old) in the
narratives share their personal lived-experiences at Arju. We can infer from these
available sources that Arju died roughly eighty years back or lesser than that.
Although the older institution of Arju has completely disappeared now, certain
norms and practices reflecting its spirit still persist in the form of cultural festivals
and social practices in the Ao community.

2. “Arju" as “Caring Space” and Collective Maternal Praxis

On the Ao world-view, the task of caring for children and adolescents could
clearly not be left solely or primarily to parents within a “private” notion of a
“home” space, as is prevalent within hegemonic Western middle-class imaginings
of the “family”. In the latter, both the labor of care and the responsibility of
disciplining one’s child is thought to be primarily confined to a pre-designated
“private” sphere. Of course, several Western feminists (see Ruddick 1995, Kittay
1999, Fraser and Gordon 2002) have drawn attention to the ways in which such
privatization creates problems for mothers and care-givers. Yet others have exposed
intersections between gender, race, and capital, which in conjunction with a
privatized account of caring for children, create unjust conditions for communities
of color. (see Collins 2009 and Roberts 1999).
Arju as “Caring Space, In-Between:” Philosophical Reflections 95
on “Care” from Ao Naga, India

“Arju" in a sense stands as a radical counter-point to the trend of privatization of

care for children in a pre-designated “private” sphere and, in so doing, affords us an
opportunity to enter the philosophies of “mothering” and “care” from a different
perspective. The unique aspect of Arju is that these spaces were created by the
community itself, purely for the sake of its children and adolescents, and became
part of an extended home-space for them. In the very least, it embodies an
acknowledgement of a community’s responsibility towards its children. This also
makes Arju different from the “forced” boarding school systems that were imposed
on several indigenous tribes of North America by White colonizers from the
“outside,” and as part of a violent mechanism of assimilation into a White culture
(see Smith 2005).

2.1 From “Care-givers” to “Caring Spaces”: “Arju" as “System of Nested

Intradependence”

War and violence have historically confronted the region in which the Ao have
found themselves. Therefore, the physical location on which to construct an Arju
was of primary importance — it would be one of the most secure spaces in the
village. I. Akang. Longchar highlights that, “the literal meaning of Arju is to defend
and safeguard a village” (interview and transcription by Karilemla at
Chuchuyimlang Village on January 6, 2016). “Protection”, even in its most literal
sense of ensuring the material well-being of the cared-for, is one of the hallmarks of
a caring praxis. Arju provided precisely such a space for its children and
adolescents, in the context of which further possibilities for growth and identity-
formation could flourish.
Structurally, Arju was a complex organization. People at Arju or “Arjunünger”
(interview and transcription by Karilemla at Longkhum Village on January 15,
2016) comprised of four different peer groups of boys. There is a slight variation in
naming each rung of the ladder in different Ao villages. Each peer group was
assigned different tasks to train and discipline themselves under the guidance of
their elders. The first or junior-most batch at Arju were known as “Süngpur”. After
they performed their duties well as Süngpur for three years, they were promoted to
the next rung known as “Tenapang”. Having learned everything from their seniors,
they would in turn train and mentor the freshmen (Miri and Karilemla, 47). The
striking aspect of the structure of Arju is that the continuous and everyday cycle of
training/mentoring seems to be accompanied by an ever-increasing sense of
responsibility for the well-being of the young as well as one’s peers. An awareness
of the labor related to such responsibility heightened as one moved up the ladder.
For instance, Tenapang would be responsible for and mentor the Süngpur as well as
their peers, while in turn, being mentored by the elders in the rung above. The
highest rung would formulate rules and regulations, and would take maximum
responsibility for both the young and their peers.
Multiple care ethicists in the West have highlighted the intimate conceptual
linkage between “care” and “responsibility”. While highlighting key aspects of an
“ethic of care”, Virginia Held observes that the “moral salience of attending to and
meeting the needs of the particular others for whom we take responsibility” (Held,
96 Amrita Banerjee and Karilemla

10) is the hallmark of such an ethic. In the Western context, a shift from the
language of “obligation” towards a “generalized other” to the language of
“responsibility” towards a “concrete other” is often taken to be an outcome of a
conceptual shift from a justice-based paradigm to a care-based paradigm in the
domain of Moral and Political philosophy. If we admit a conceptual linkage
between “responsibility” for “concrete others” and a philosophical conception of
“care”, then one could argue that a gradual stepping into the role of a “care-giver” to
both the young and one’s peers at Arju, marks a key aspect of Arju life. “Arju" can,
therefore, be conceived of as an integrated system of social cooperation or, as we
call it, a “system of nested intradependence”. This system is dynamic, sustained by
the presence of multiple care-givers with varying degrees of responsibility towards
their wards, and characterized by a general ethos of care and reciprocity. The
individual self and the collective self, we will argue, is constantly in the making
within this space.
Of course, conceptualizing “mothering” as a “role” rather than as an “identity”,
along with a focus on the labor of care allows us to further conceptualize the
relevant female figures at Züki/ Tzüki and male figures at Arju as not simply “care-
givers”, but also potential “mothers”. Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking is a key
text in the Western philosophical tradition, which pushes for a conceptualization of
“mother” as a role by highlighting the labor associated with caring for children. For
Ruddick, “a mother is a person who takes on responsibility for children’s lives and
for whom providing child care is a significant part of her or his working life” (40).
Thus conceptualized, mothering is potentially work for men and women, although
most mothers have been or are women. Ruddick also foregrounds a kind of adoptive
intent in the definition of a “mother”. “To adopt is to commit oneself to protecting,
nurturing, and training particular children” (51). The upshot of this position is that
mothering becomes an “act” (Ruddick, 56), characterized by both voluntarism and
deep responsibility. Finally, Ruddick outlines a conceptual distinction between
“mothers” and “fathers”, where “fathers” don’t just become male counterparts of
“mothers”. “Fathers, historically, are meant to provide material support for child
care and to defend mothers and their children from external threat. They are
supposed to represent the ‘world’ ” (42). “Fatherhood” so to say, becomes critically
distanced from the everyday labor of care, along with its immediacy and unique
responsibilities.
If we are to perceive “mothering” as a role emerging through participating in
everyday concrete activities aimed towards the material and emotional growth of
children, then the Arjunünger seem to be conceptually closer to “mothers” rather
than “fathers”, who can only be indirect participants in the labor of care. However,
unlike some dominant trends within White middle-class feminist philosophies of
“mothering”, “Arju" can be seen to challenge all of the following: defining
“mothering” primarily as a dyadic relation between a singular mother and her child,
locating the figure inhabiting this role in the person of a single individual, and
ascribing both primary care and disciplining responsibilities tied to this role to this
individual within a “privatized” notion of a “home” space. Yabangchila Imchen
from Longkhum Village remarks, “We never restrict if mothering was taken up by
the community. In community life, children do learn many skills and things which a
Arju as “Caring Space, In-Between:” Philosophical Reflections 97
on “Care” from Ao Naga, India

mother fails to educate them at home” (interview and transcription by Karilemla at

Longkhum Village on January 15, 2016). Imchen’s remark seems to assume the
location of “mothers” (or those inhabiting “mothering” roles) in a larger conception
of public life, and could hint towards a conception of “collective maternal praxis”.
What is striking about Arju is that even though this place is populated by multiple
Arjunünger as “care-givers”, tied together in a system of mutual responsibility and
the labor of raising children (which also helps orient it is as a “caring space” for
children in the Ao community), it is not a “collective maternal praxis” simply in the
sense of a coming together of individual mothers or care-givers to children in order
to think and share maternal stories and experiences, where the primary
responsibilities and labor of care continue to remain individual and private. “Arju"
should rather be viewed as a “system of nested intradependence”, which resists
characterization in such purely additive terms.
“Arju" can also not be collapsed to a conception of “othermothers”
(Collins,192), although certain aspects of it might intersect with this conception. In
her seminal work on African-American motherhood, Patricia Hill Collins claims
that these communities often distinguish between biological mothers and other
women who care for and discipline one’s child. “Othermothers” is defined as
“women who assist bloodmothers by sharing mothering responsibilities” (192).
Grandmothers, sisters, aunts, cousins, and sometimes even neighbors often share
child-caring responsibilities for one another’s children, and could discipline each
other’s child. Collins’ concept of “othermothers” can be read as a step forward to
expanding the “mothering” role to other women, who are neither biological nor
social mothers to a child. However, the definition seems to bear traces of biological
essentialism in so far as it perceives mothering (whether “bloodmothers” or
“othermothers”) as primarily women’s work. To a certain extent, and if we are
willing to do away with the woman-centered clause inherent in Collins’ definition,
one could perhaps understand the mutual system of responsibility towards peers and
the young at Arju, whereby village elders and senior members who are neither
biological nor legal parents look after and train the young on an everyday basis,
through the frame of “othermothers”. However, even if the concept of
“othermothers" might resonate with an aspect of Arju (namely, the role of
“Arjunünger” as “care-givers”), the concept of “Arju" as a whole cannot be reduced
to the concept of “othermothers”. The frame of “othermothers" clearly does not
exhaust the theoretical possibilities of this space.
“Mother” figures, perhaps even similar to “othermothers" exist in these spaces,
but the “caring” aspect of the space is not simply reducible to the fact that care-
givers are present in it. Within the Ao imagination, what becomes increasingly clear
in the course of analysis, is that the whole material-symbolic space of Arju is
considered to be imbued with a certain orientation towards the praxis of care. This
orientation becomes clear as we work further through its structure, location, and
functions/activities. For instance, its conceptualization as a “system of nested
intradependence”, along with its spatio-temporal location “in-between”, opens up
unique possibilities for fostering an orientation towards care. Again, the space itself
along with various symbolic connotations associated with it, is considered to
98 Amrita Banerjee and Karilemla

embody the specific epistemic-ethical-political virtues (to be discussed in 2.2),

which it aims to transmit for the children to grow materially and spiritually.

2.2 The “Faces” of the Labor of Care in “Caring Spaces”

“Arju,” we argue, can be thematized as a space of caring for young children not
only due to the presence of care-givers as discussed above, but also due to the way
in which the space is oriented to actualize some of the essential components that we
associate with the labor and goals of care. Of special mention in this context, are
three interconnected things, which turn out to be critical for the material well-being
and emotional growth of children. These are training in virtues (ontological,
epistemic, ethical, and political virtues), individual and cultural identity, and
survival. Interestingly, on the Ao world-view, one is not simply born an “Ao,” but
becomes one after going through Arju. He becomes a full-fledged member in the
village only after completing training at the dormitory. Arju is, therefore, an
indispensable and critical site for the generation of a sense of self and identity as
“Ao” among children of the tribe. We also highlight in Section 4, the way in which
it is a primary site for the generation of a material and symbolic identity for the
tribe.
The collective life at Arju was characterized by distinct sets of traditions and
practices, which both embodied and imbibed a distinct set of codes emphasized by
the tribe. Referring to the importance of Arju in the socialization of children to the
Ao way of life, Arenjenba Ozukum remarks, “All the moral codes are learnt in arju.
For instance, the values that they (the children) imbibed through their arju
experience are obedience, humility, patience and friendship” (Miri and Karilemla,
49). Our analysis of training in virtues and identity formation reveals two important
things of philosophical significance. First, that virtues resist being neatly mapped
onto one or the other category, such as epistemic, moral, and so on. Rather, a virtue
overlaps between categories; thus suggesting an intertwining between them.
Second, a virtue is often defined in relation to another, thus offering an interactive
theory of virtue.
One of the first virtues, which has import for identity and community is
“equality”. Despite the fact, that Arju was organized in terms of seniority, the
institution itself aimed to cultivate a sense of equality amongst its residents.
Sometimes children from economically well-off families would not have any
incentive or inclination towards manual labor, and Arju would be the primary space
to develop sensibilities and appreciation for such work among these children. I.
Akang. Longchar explains,
“in order to exempt their children from Arju training, some parents would
even request the village council for an exchange of their wealth. … But
such offer was turned down because Arju training has no exemption to
both the rich and the poor. The goal of Arju training was to train the boys
in order to make them good citizen for the society. In order to do this, boys
from the rich family must also undergo the same kind of physical labor and
learn all the cultural history, handicraft and discipline along with others.
Thus, the rich men’s son were made to learn how to respect and obey their
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on “Care” from Ao Naga, India

elders who were from the poor family. Class distinction is alien to the Aos.
Everyone was treated equally and strict rules were imposed in order to
carry out the moral principles” (interview and transcription by Karilemla at
Chuchuyimlang Village on January 6, 2016).
Therefore, non-discrimation and the spirit of equality characterized the space of
Arju and was, in turn, geared towards the inculcation of a broader ethic of equality
and a sense of justice among its residents3. Of course, an ethos of reciprocity seems
to go hand-in-hand with the an ethic of equality in the fabric of Arju life.
Ultimately, perhaps, this is geared towards the cultivation of a sense of individual
responsibility, while seeing oneself as part of a collective. Thus conceived,
“equality” becomes an ontological virtue that is key to the generation of a sense of
self; an ethical virtue that provides a way of grasping oneself in relation to others;
and a political principle of group solidarity. Eventually, it also contributes to
training in Ao citizenship.
We think that “Arju" could push us towards a fascinating paradigm,
characterized by a blend of an ethic of equality (and of justice) with an ethic of care.
Moreover, an intimate conceptual tie between “friendship” and “care” is also
revealed. As has been pointed out, “Arju" can be viewed as an “system of nested
intradependence”, where one’s role as a “care-giver” intensifies as one moves up
the ladder. This system is predicated on both “peer caring” and “friendship”.
Finding oneself in the dual role as “care-giver” and “cared-for” through childhood
and adolescence, could offer productive epistemic and ethical vantage-points to
reflect on the intertwining between power and vulnerability. The ambiguous
experience of being in a position to exert power over the “other” as “care-giver”,
but also being constantly “vulnerable” as “cared-for”, could perhaps mitigate some
of the tendencies to control and shape that always threaten to undermine care-givers
and activities of care.
“Friendship” not only aids in socialization, but also in the development of an Ao
identity. Arjunünger were expected to do voluntary services, and continue with
these even after completing training at Arju. They were also expected to take part
in all the village social activities like fishing, dragging of the log drum from the
forest to the village, sudden outbreak of fire in the village and in the dense jungle,
etc. A sense of humanitarian response and social responsibility were instilled at a
very tender age through Arju, thus paving the way for the development of a
“caring” sensibility, which feels responsible and called to meet the needs others.
Here, interestingly, this caring sensibility seems to be oriented towards proximate
concrete others and the community as a whole at the same time.
Both “friendship” and “care” thus conceived, demand the opening up of the self.
A self that is willing to engage or meet the other can very well be characterized as a
“communicative” self. “Friendship” and “care” are not only important for a

3
This, by no means, should be taken to mean that in reality there was a total absence of hierarchy in the
life of the Ao. What we would like to draw attention to is that there is a certain normative orientation to
an ethic of equality that the Arju way of life and the necessity of Arju in a male child’s life seems to
propagate. Of course, by default this need not generate/translate automatically into actual social equality.
The opposite would, indeed, be a romanticized claim about any culture.
100 Amrita Banerjee and Karilemla

particular ontological narrative of an individual self, but also contribute towards

training in Ao citizenship. In fact, the kind of “communicative” self, which
“friendship” aims to inculcate, encompasses the domains of social and political life
for the Ao. Rongsenwati Longchar remarks,
“whenever a stranger approached the village he was taken to Arjukima
(Arju compound) there he would be interrogated by the village councils in
order to know the intention of the stranger”(interview and transcription by
Karilemla at Yimyu Compound on May 2009).
A stranger is looked upon with suspicion but not unwelcome. The intention of
the stranger was taken up by the village council in order to reject or accept her/his
friendship. Says I. Akang. Longchar,
“Irrespective of any strangers, once a stranger comes and stays with us, the
villagers will no longer treat or regard him/her as inferior to them or called
them “other”. Rather, they would consider them as ‘equal’ ” (interview and
transcription by Karilemla at Chuchuyimlang Village on January 6, 2016).
It is important to notice how a nuanced understandings of “friendship” and
“respect” for the “other” developed among the Arju residents from an early age, not
only in the context of face-to-face living together with members of one’s own
community, but also through concrete negotiations with complete ‘outsiders’ to the
Ao community within the space of the Arju. Friendship with the “stranger” and the
latter’s integration into citizenship, also emphasizes the political valence of this
virtue. Finally, we see a blending of “friendship” with an ethos of “equality”.
Interestingly “responsibility” within Arju seems to be not merely stipulated in
terms of “care” understood as an “affect” or an “affect-based relation”, but also in
terms of a “cognitive relation”. Temsula Ao holds, “mere acquisition of information
was not enough… In other words, the emphasis was on the proper form of delivery
of speech so that these youngsters in their turn would become good teachers when
their time came” (Temsula Ao, 9-10). Further, this quote emphasizes “cognition”
not only in terms of its content and truth-value, but “cognition” as a “relation of
speaking and hearing” and of developing the capability for such a relation. From
this conceptual ground, we thematize “care” in an “affective-cognitive” mode. The
focus is on the potential to develop a sense of “communicative self” with a distinct
style of speech, which can establish a relation with intended learners, transmit the
knowledge in question, and thereby preserve the continuous cycle of training at
Arju. The epistemic intent of communication is, therefore, situated within the
ethical.
The intertwining of the epistemic and the ethical seems to become even richer
when the virtue of “truth” as propagated in Arju enters the picture. Training and
socialization into a “truthful” way of life was a focus of Arju training, and the
physical site of Arju (which the Ao took a great deal of care in selecting), was
symbolically conceived as a “space for truthfulness”. Tako Jamir, in fact states that,
“It (Arju) was also a place of truthfulness” (interview and transcription by
Karilemla at Chuchuyimlang Village on January 6, 2016). “Truth,” therefore, has an
ontological and moral valence. It has a social valence as well — it was instrumental
in inculcating the value of friendship among peer groups in and outside of the
dormitory, members of the same clan, members from other clans and, other non-Ao.
Arju as “Caring Space, In-Between:” Philosophical Reflections 101
on “Care” from Ao Naga, India

The importance of learning and narration of history of the tribe within Arju is
intimately connected to the search for truth. Knowing history was also tied to the
generation of a courageous self — a self that is rooted and respectful of one’s
cultural identity.
At the basic level, activities and traditions at Arju were structured to cultivate
bodily and mental resilience among the young. Two of the first moral codes one
learned was “obedience” and “respect” for elders, irrespective of whether or not he
obeyed his parents. Disciplining and accountability characterized the Arju way of
life, and the senior leaders took up this task with great responsibility4. Instead of
privatizing “responsibility’ and the task of disciplining one’s child to the mother
within a private “home” space alone, Arju can be read as an attempt on the part of
the tribe to develop a larger commitment and responsibility towards individual
children. I. Akang. Longchar puts it, “the institution of Arju could control the boys
who were regarded as black sheep at home” (interview and transcription by
Karilemla at Chuchuyimlang Village on January 6, 2016). Along with “respect”,
one of the other aims of disciplining was to foster “active listening”, which was not
only tied to the completion of the task-at-hand but also to the development of
“patience”, “perseverance”, and “courage”.
Arju was the main political space for the Ao community, and therefore, proved
to be a perfect training ground for “leadership” and “citizenship”. From a young
age, children would see all men in the village assembling in Arju for council
deliberations, and decisions were made under top most secrecy. Being exposed to
leaders and leadership from a very young age, the children learnt basic skills of
leadership, and of surviving in hostile environments and war-ridden times. Young
boys would get trained in the art of warfare at Arju so that they could defend the
villagers from their enemies. They would learn to spy in and around the village, and
develop the necessary surveillance skills in order to guard the villages. Again,
training for leadership was not simply for individual growth, but also to ensure that
the community had trained leaders.

3. “Arju" as “Caring Space, In-Between”

Arju was both a cultural institution (a symbolic space), and a designated

physical space within the village dedicated to children and adolescents. It was not
only a set of rituals and rules, but also an actual living-together with others. Hence,
this collective space turns out to be a kind of physico-symbolic space for various
clans of the Ao tribe. Further, the space of Arju itself becomes a very interesting
and provocative instance of a “blurred” space in several ways. It is to the enmeshing
of spaces of care that we now turn, in order to conceptualize “Arju" as “caring
space, in-between”.
“Arju" resists conflations with several categories and symbolic dichotomies
associated with space such as ‘public’/‘private’, ‘home’/‘world’,

4
At this point Collins’ observations comes to mind. She says that African-American mothers are
described as being “strong disciplinarians and overly protective; yet these same women manage to raise
daughters who are self-reliant and assertive” (200).
102 Amrita Banerjee and Karilemla

‘personal’/‘impersonal,’ etc. and the different mappings that each binary evokes.
For instance, on the one hand, “Arju" embodies certain intimacies of everyday life
and face-to-face living together with a select few, which one would typically
associate with the private “home” space of the family in the life of a child. On the
other hand, “Arju" in its collective dimension (and especially in its political
dimension, as we will discuss further), immediately opens onto concerns and
activities that one would typically associate with the “public” sphere or the “world”.
The village log drum, which was used to announce danger was kept at Arju. Arju
was the place where cultural history, social etiquette, virtues of citizenship, and
even the art of warfare would be taught. Deliberations of the council in the village
would also take place at Arju. Whenever the Ao went to war, they would assemble
in “Arjukima” (Arju compound). There, at Arju “salang" (platform), they would
promise to each other how many trophy heads one would bring home by counting
the numbers. Therefore, the dormitory was pivotal to the well-being of the
community life at large.
It is perhaps this “betweenness” character of “Arju" as “caring space”, that is, its
spatial and temporal blurredness, which in turn, facilitates a phenomenological
continuity (both spatial and temporal) between the “home” and the “world” so to
say, for the child. The absence of experiencing a sharp break between the two
domains, could potentially help negotiate other implied binaries such as the
‘personal’/‘political’, ‘inside’/‘outside,’ and ‘family’/‘tribe’ for Ao children in Arju.
This might fuel alternative conceptualizations of spatiality, and a different
appreciation for the uniqueness of these spaces without instituting a strict boundary
in the middle.
From certain Western points of view, it might also appear tempting to conflate
“Arju" with a modern conception of a “school”. Merazulu Longchar gives us a
productive point to distinguish between the two. He claims, “Arju training was not
like classroom teaching but the boys were trained and disciplined as they lived
together” (our emphasis, Miri and Kailemla, 48). Moreover, a direct analogy
between “Arju" and “parenting” is provided by Mr. I. Akang. Longchar who goes
on to say, “the institution of Arju took the responsibility of parents” (interview and
transcription by Karilemla at Chuchuyimlang Village on January 6, 2016). As we
read such claims in the context of the larger Ao world-view, we find that the
intimacy and personal character that we typically attribute to the “home” space, is
precisely being evoked to institute a distinction between a school system and Arju.
On the one hand, “Arju" appears to be an instance of a “public” space without being
an “impersonal” one, and on the other, it is marked by intimate bonds without being
a “private” space in the sense of a Western imagination. Thus, one again finds
binary mappings of private/public, personal/impersonal, etc. being confounded in
such a space, which strikingly seems to stand “in-between” either end of these
binaries.
Just like “home”, and much unlike the modern-day “school” system, the focus at
Arju was on capacity-building not simply in the sense of developing intellectual
capacity or vocational skill-building, but taking up the much larger task of
developing the material and spiritual selves of the children. In fact, Arju recognized
the children’s demand for protection, fostering growth, discipline, and training. Sara
Arju as “Caring Space, In-Between:” Philosophical Reflections 103
on “Care” from Ao Naga, India

Ruddick holds, “Only in societies that recognize children as creatures who demand
protection, nurturance, and training is there a maternal practice that meets those
demands” (Ruddick, 22). In this sense, it reflects several goals and impetus of
intimate forms of maternal praxes, as discussed in some of the philosophies of
“mothering”. However, the uniqueness of “Arju" lies in the fact that, while aiming
for the material and spiritual development of individual children and their
integration into an Ao way of life, the institution is equally geared towards the
preservation of the identity of the tribe as a whole. It is not simply a reflection of an
Ao way of life, but critical to conserving Ao cultural identity through generations.
In The Ao-Naga Oral Tradition, Temsula Ao holds,
“it was here that the young men had a foretaste of community life and were
indoctrinated about the need to follow rules in order to survive in hostile
surroundings. But most important of all, it was here that the history and
traditions of the tribe and the particular village were taught” (9).
In this respect, “Arju" is a far cry from the ways in which either the “home”
space or a “school” is conceived in contemporary imaginings of these spaces. It
stands “in-between” these, that is, as a continuation of both, but reducible to neither.
“Arju training thus is a complete system of education whose aim it was to equip the
young with resources to lead a fulfilling community life guided by the ethical
principles tested through generations of practices that make up the life of the
community” (Miri and Karilemla, 11).
One notices that a distinct character of the Ao world-view is the enmeshing of
individual and communal lives. “Collective space” is linked to the clearing of a
whole new range of possibilities for the Ao. Immediately, one notices how the
clearing of certain unique possibilities in the domain of caring for and raising
children are opened up in the context of Arju. Moreover, its location “in-between”
the “home” and the “world”, the “private” and the “public”, the “personal” and the
“political”, confers on it unique capacities to care. This is evident in its capacity to
generate an individual and yet culturally rooted self for the child, a kind of
“communicative” self that recognizes its own responsibility but is also open to the
needs of others, and trains them in values that are not only individual but also
cultural. It is this “betweenness”, which allows it to raise not just an individual, but
a community at the same time.

4. From Raising of Children in Community to Raising of Children and

Community

Collective maternal praxis in Arju, on final analysis, seems to have a three-fold

objective: the material and emotional growth of children as individuals, the
generation of a sense of self in the individual that is also culturally rooted, and the
preservation of material and spiritual identity of the Ao as a tribe. The first two
came within the purview of analysis in Section 2.2. Here, we primarily focus on the
third.
The tribe’s self-definition, self-valuation, empowerment are also in the making
through the material-symbolic space of “Arju". This is evident if we trace out the
implications of the virtues further. For instance, “equality” is not only an individual
104 Amrita Banerjee and Karilemla

virtue, but is geared (at least in spirit) towards facilitating a certain “respectful”
comportment towards the “other” in the social spheres of Ao life. Therefore, the
ultimate aim was to foster group solidarity and the visibility of Ao as a distinct
collectivity among the tribes in north-eastern India. Again, “leadership” training is
not only significant for individual growth, but connects to training for “citizenship”.
The emphasis on training in “truth” as part of Arju also needs to be
contextualized within the larger social narrative of the tribe, which defines the Ao as
a “truthful people”. Indeed the space of “Arju" is conceptualized as a “truthful
space”. This, in turn, connects to the general Ao belief that if the land is truthful,
any action performed within that space will also be truthful. They believed that truth
determines one’s own fate on earth. “Truth” appears to be a blend of ontological,
epistemological, and religious virtues within the Ao world-view. “Truth” is
considered to be the highest goal of life (Miri and Karilemla, 51). We immediately
see the intimate connection between the praxis of truth in Arju and a larger
performance of Ao identity in terms of truthfulness.
The relation between “narration”, “truth”, and “moral virtues” is also significant
here. “Narration” (especially in the context of the exclusive oral tradition) is not just
important for raising a culturally rooted individual, and a communicative sensibility
in children as discussed above; but can also be seen as strategy for the tribe to write
a particular reality about itself into existence. It is about a communal self writing
itself into existence (and into history) through a reference to the past, and ensuring
its temporal continuity into the future. The interpretive horizon of history and
culture that is generated, also motivates future action. Listening to tales of their
courageous ancestors for instance, not only distills courage in children for the
future, but also creates a distinct identity along these lines for the tribe.
While “friendship” carries an ontological potential to facilitate a
“communicative” conception of selfhood in an individual child, it also helps fashion
a dialogic conception of the “Ao” in their orientation towards the “other” (for
instance, the “stranger”). Reiterating the centrality of “friendship,” Arenjenba
Ozukum remarks,
“There are different words that the young use for friendship. Supposing we
belong to the same clan the word used is tinu but in Changki village it is
keti. If the friendship is with a member of another clan we call it kapu or
temba. These terms are used for describing friendship between two people.
Variations of dialect as we move from one village to another are common.
Friendships, once made, can last a lifetime” (Miri and Karilemla, 49).
The centrality of Arju to the community’s well-being and self-perception, is
therefore, critical. It can be read as a sphere of fashioning self-definition and
performing a distinctively Ao identity within the context of an extremely pluralist
nation. Arju becomes a key site of survival for tribal identity and interestingly, in
this respect, it is deeply attentive to the preservation and growth of its children. The
concept of “Arju" can finally be read as “caring space, in between” that reflects
certain goals of an ethic of care, potentially fuels such an ethic among its residents,
and also exists as part of the public sphere for the Ao tribe. In its latter capacity, it
appears to embody certain basic aspirations/visions for a political sphere modeled
along ideals of both “care” and “equality”. Acts of caring unfold in the midst of
Arju as “Caring Space, In-Between:” Philosophical Reflections 105
on “Care” from Ao Naga, India

such complex dynamics within the material-symbolic space of Arju, thereby helping
to raise a self in community along with an entire community in its stead.

Works Cited

Ao, Temsula. 1999. The Ao-Naga Oral Tradition. Baroda: Bhasha Publications.
Collins, Patricia Hill. 2009. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness,
and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge Classics.
Fraser, Nancy and Gordon, Linda. 2002. “A Geneology of Dependency: Tracing a
Keyword of the U.S. Welfare State” in Eva Feder Kittay and Ellen K. Feder, ed.
The Subject of Care: Feminist Perspectives on Dependency. Lanham, Maryland:
Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Held, Virginia. 2006. The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Jamir, N. Talitemjen and Lanunungsang, A. 2005. Naga Society and Culture: A
Case Study of the Ao Naga Society and Culture. Lumami: Nagaland University.
Printed at Barkataki and Company (p) LTD Malow Ali, Jorhat.
Kittay, Eva Feder. 1999. Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and
Dependency. New York: Routledge.
Miri, Sujata and Karilemla. 2015. Ao Naga World-view: A Dialogue. New Delhi:
Indian Council of Philosophical Research and D.K. Printworld (P) Ltd.
Roberts, Dorothy. 1999. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the
Meaning of Liberty. New York: Vintage Books.
Ruddick, Sara. 1995. Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. Boston:
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Smith, Andrea. 2005. Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide.
Cambridge, MA: South End Press
_________________________________

Biographical Notes on Authors

Special Issue: Mothering from the Margins
Guest Edited by Amrita Banerjee and Bonnie Mann
_________________________________
Amrita Banerjee

Amrita Banerjee is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Department of

Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India. She
received her Ph.D. from the University of Oregon, and held the position of Assistant
Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies,
Allegheny College, Pennsylvania, USA prior to joining IIT Bombay. Banerjee
specializes in the areas of Ethics, and Social and Political Philosophy. Her work in
these areas encompasses the traditions of Feminist philosophy, American
philosophy, and twentieth century Continental philosophy. Banerjee’s work has
appeared in journals such as Hypatia, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, and The
Pluralist.

Shirley Glubka

Shirley Glubka is the author of Return to a Meadow: a novel; All the Difference:
poems of unconventional motherhood; End into Opening: six sestinas and their
humble companion poems; Echoes and Links: poems; and Green Surprise of
Passion: Writings of a Trauma Therapist. Shirley is a retired psychotherapist. She
lives in Prospect, Maine with her spouse, Virginia Holmes. Website:
http://shirleyglubka.weebly.com/

Karilemla

Karilemla is a Fulbright fellow. She has received her PhD in Philosophy from the
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India. Her research interest include
Continental Philosophy (especially Heidegger), Philosophy of Technology, and
Indian Culture (especially Ao-Naga Culture). She has co-authored a book(with
Sujata Miri) Ao Naga Worldview: A Dialogue published by Indian Council of
Philosophical Research and D.K. Printworld, New Delhi, 2015.

Philosophy in the Contemporary World 23:1 (Spring 2016)

Author Bios 107

Bonnie Mann

Bonnie Mann is Professor of Philosophy and Department Head at the University of

Oregon, in Eugene, Oregon. She is the Author of Women's Liberation and the
Sublime (Oxford, 2006), and Sovereign Masculinity: Gender Lessons from the War
on Terror (Oxford, 2014). She is the lesbian mother of four adopted daughters.

Shelley M. Park

Shelley Park is Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at the University of

Central Florida and Associate Editor of Queer Studies in Media and Popular
Culture. She is the author of Mothering Queerly, Queering Motherhood: Resisting
Monomaternalism in Adoptive, Lesbian, Blended, and Polygamous Families (NY:
SUNY Press, 2013) and several articles on non-normative forms of kinship. Her
current research focuses on the ethics of care in a technological era.

Diana Carolina Peláez Rodríguez

Diana Carolina Peláez Rodríguez was born in Bogota, Colombia. She received in
2012 a Master's Degree in Cultural Studies from Colegio de La Frontera Norte
(COLEF), Tijuana (Mex); her undergraduate program was in Language Philosophy
and Sociocultural Studies from Universidad de Los Andes, Bogota (Col). She is
currently a researcher and a professor at the Education Center for Development, in
Corporación Universitaria Minuto de Dios (UNIMINUTO), Bogota (Col.). She is
also a member of the National Network of Researchers on the Sociocultural Studies
of Emotions (RENISCE) due to her latest research field of study on Collective
Emotions and Social Change. Other areas of interest are Youth Identities, Gender
Studies and Migration, and Translation Studies and Cultural Mediation.

Harrod J. Suarez

Harrod J Suarez is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative American

Studies at Oberlin College, where he teaches courses in Asian American literature,
globalization and diaspora, and transnational American studies. He is currently at
work on The Diasporic Maternal: Nationalism and Globalization in Filipina/o
Literature, a book that examines overseas maternal figures from the Philippines in
literature and history in the effort to access what he calls the archipelagic underside
of global empire.
Philosophy in the Contemporary World is published in cooperation with the
Philosophy Documentation Center. It is indexed in Academic Search
Premier, American Humanities Index, Current Abstracts, Index
Philosophicus, International Bibliography of Periodical Literature (IBZ),
International Bibliography of the Social Sciences, and the Philosopher's
Index.

Electronic access is provided by POIESIS: Philosophy Online Serials,

ISSN 1077-1999

© 2016 by The Society for Philosophy in the Contemporary World

www.spcw.info
PHILOSOPHY IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD

Volume 23 Number 1 Spring 2016

Special Issue:
Mothering from the Margins: Critical Conversations

AMRITA BANERJEE AND BONNIE MANN, Philosophical Articulations

on “Mothering” and “Care” from the “Margins”

DIANA CAROLINA PELÁEZ RODRÍGUEZ, Stuck on This Side:

Symbolic Dislocation of Motherhood due to Forced Family
Separation in Mexican Women Deported to Tijuana

HARROD J. SUAREZ, Dreaming of Bad Motherhood in the Jungle

SHIRLEY GLUBKA, Claiming: thoughts of an unconventional older

mother

BONNIE MANN, Adoption, Race and Rescue: Transracial Adoption

and Lesbian/Gay Ascendency to Whiteness

SHELLEY M. PARK, “When We Handed Out the Crayolas, They Just

Stared at Them”: Deploying Metronormativity in the War
Against FLDS Mothers

AMRITA BANERJEE AND KARILEMLA, Arju as “Caring Space, In-

Between”: Philosophical Reflections on “Care” from Ao Naga,
India

AUTHOR BIOS