The 1st year research result, “A Critical Reflection on Kristeva’s ‘Abject’ Motherhood in Comparison with the ‘Professional Mother’ Position of the Late-modern Korean Society”, is a sociological study about “professional mother,” which is a typologica ...
The 1st year research result, “A Critical Reflection on Kristeva’s ‘Abject’ Motherhood in Comparison with the ‘Professional Mother’ Position of the Late-modern Korean Society”, is a sociological study about “professional mother,” which is a typological motherhood institutionalized by the neo-liberal societal orders of the 21st late-modern Korea, followed by a critical evaluation on the performativity of the “professional mother” in a comparative reflection with Julia Kristeva’s theoretical concept of “abject” motherhood. Influenced by the rapidly changing social institutions of the late-modern Korea since the year of 1997, such as the flexibility of employment and instability of the bureaucratic position, housewives who have been placed in the private home have started to concentrate their meaningful works on professional and effective management of their children’s knowledge education. In spite of their sincere and furious devotion, however, the strong engagement of the “professional mother” in the growth of their children prevents them from establishing subjectivity not only of their children’s but also theirs own. In use of the concept of “abject” motherhood, for that reason, this study aims to invite the powerful energy of the professional mothers to the formation of inter-subjectivity between the mother and her children. Criticizing patriarchal interpretation of mother as a passive object in the traditional psychoanalysis, Kristeva insists that a child’s experience of being with his/her mother as ‘abject’ is the first and most significant relation for the establishment of subjectivity. In the process of struggling with his or her mother’s meanings which constantly invade the existential boundary of the child, the child acquires his/her subjectivity by placing them “abject” in the marginal line of his/her being. It is also the mother’s life-going task to establish her own subjective and meaningful boundary while encountering the “abject” coexistence with her children. According to Kristeva, such process of positioning “abject” and symbolizing one’s own meaning into a language leads both a mother and her children to accomplish the subjectivity and also provides the possibility of creative languages and symbols, which could be the resources of re-constructing the given social orders and systems and also of preparing the new world and human relations which the fourth-industrial revolution would change. This article in a concluding mark suggests a further study of Christian theological reflection of Bonhoeffer’s “ethic of formation” in relation with the task of new ways of being ‘mother.’
The 2nd year article, “An Ethical Suggestion of the ‘Participatory Motherhood’ in the era of Artificial Uterus/Plancenta” examines the social-ethical reconsideration of the concept of moth- erhood, facing the “postmodern predicament” as in Rosi Bridotti’s use of the term, which is shortly will enable us to produce human babies through biotechnological methods. This study pays attention to French feminists such as Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, who see the revolutionary and relational power of the mother experience. Also, this article attempts to present the use of the re- production machines, which in Donna Haraway have been treated as ‘womb’ and controlled their reproductive power and process by patriarchal males. At the same time, she disagrees with being-mother in the frame of the political power game that could be trapped in another biological essentialism, i.e., being a moth- er as the woman’s soul and authentic experience. This work suggests the concept of “participatory motherhood” as the meaning of social motherhood, not ex- clusively biological motherhood. Also, this study argues that the construction of “social uterus/placenta,” in which babies, mothers, and other social weeks are nurtured in the mutual interaction with the participatory mothers.