Matricentric

Feminism in
Dukhtar
Presented to: Dr. Azam Sarwar
Presented by: Nimra Ashfaq
Roll NO. 29184

January 2024
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“Dukhter” movie Trailer

Principles and Aims of Matricentric
Feminism
Matricentric Feminism: Mother-focused feminism
A matricentric feminism seeks to make motherhood the business of feminism by positioning mothers’ needs and
concerns as the starting point for a theory and politic on and for women’s empowerment.
This repositioning is not to suggest that a matricentric feminism should replace traditional feminist thought; rather, it
is to emphasize that the category of mother is distinct from the category of woman and that many of the problems
mothers face.
Consequently, mothers need a matricentric mode of feminism organized from and for
their particular identity and work as mothers. Indeed, a mother-centred feminism is
needed because mothers – arguably more so than women in general – remain
disempowered despite forty years of feminism.
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Motherhood Studies
In the case of Motherhood Studies, three words commonly used are: mother,
mothering, and motherhood.

 Motherhood is generally understood as the social system in which mothering is

performed. Adrienne Rich articulates it thus, “[motherhood] the institution, has
been a keystone of the most diverse social and political systems” (13).

“Motherhood Studies has developed into three interconnected categories of

inquiry: motherhood as an institution, motherhood as experience, and
motherhood as identity or subjectivity” (vol. 2, 831).
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Motherhood Studies

Jeffner Allen’s radical call for the rejection of motherhood because “motherhood is dangerous to
women”

If woman, in patriarchy, is she who exists as the womb and wife of man, every woman is by
definition a mother: she who produces for the sake of men. A mother is she whose body is used as a
resource to reproduce men and the world of men.… Motherhood is dangerous to women because it
continues the structure within which females must be women and mothers, and conversely,
because it denies to females the creation of a subjectivity. (Allen 315)
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Mother
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Mother
Mothers are defined as those performing mothering labor within social constructions of motherhood:
their individual perspectives and experiences as well as a framework of fluid and varying gender
differentiations and the oppositional constraints imposed upon them. Likewise, in some capacity or
other every person has been raised by someone performing mothering labor. This notion was seminal
in Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking, in which she asserted that men could mother, just as women do. “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).

 Mother is the individual, the identity of a person, or even a planet, in the case for example of
“mother earth”
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Mother
Sigmund Freud described the mother as the child's primary love object and the parent most
responsible for its optimal development.

The discourse of being a mother, and a good mother, is seen as implicated in the discourse of being a
wife, and a good wife, with all of its concomitant oppression and lack of power typical of patriarchal
domestic and social context. (DiQuinzio 10-11).
Triple Colonization
Single • Colonizer

Double
• Colonizer
• Patriarchy
• Patriarchy
• Colonizer
• Patriarchy
Triple
• Motherhoo
d
Empowered Mothering for the benefit of
Children
• Although it is evident that empowered mothering is better for mothers, it must also be noted that
such mothering is also better for children. Mothers who are content with and fulfilled by their lives
make better mothers, just as children raised by depressed mothers are at risk.

• What a child needs most in the world, Smith argues, “is a free and happy mother” (167). Smith
explains:
What a child needs most is a free mother, one who feels that she is in fact living her life, and has adequate
food, sleep, wages, education, safety, opportunity, institutional support, health care, child care, and loving
relationships. “Adequate” means enough to allow her to participate in the world – and in mothering. . . . A
child needs a mother who has resources to enable her to make real choices, but also to create a feeling of
adequate control – a state of mind that encourages a sense of agency.
 he
Adrien Rich
(Courageous

ot
)

M
ive
Ariel Gore
ss

(Hip)
re
sg
an

Susan
Douglas
Tr

(Rebellious)

Baba
Copper
(Radical
Mothering
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Allah Rakhi as Mother:

Zainab: (Mother) what are these stains?
Allah Rakhi: Blood. Mine, your Grandmother’s and

ADD A FOOTER
her Grandmother’s.

Zaibo: You are grown now, I’m going to tell you

about a few things…… Things that my mother
didn’t tell me.
Zainab: More I wanna go home.
Allah Rakhi: I won’t let Zainab face what I’ve been
through.
Shehbaaz Khan: I have to take Zainab because she
is someone else’s
Allah Rakhi: I won’t let Zainab go, take me instead,
you loved me and wanted me, take me. I’ll go with
you.
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M/othering
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M/othering
The notion of exactly what makes a mother: birth, caregiving, egg donation, or identity can all be
debated. Here our assertion is that however we define mother there is always a relational aspect,
hence the idea of m/other, m/otherness, or mother-ness.

 The term m-other framed by the American artist Beth Osnes in 2008 (Mothers Acting Up). The
separation of m and o gives a pause to the connections within the word. More recently the M/other
Voices Project, in which m and other are separated by a slash was pioneered by the Dutch scholar
Deirdre Donoghue who explored the idea further`.
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M/othering
An essential component of this theory proposes an examination of how m/otherness or mother-ness is
the experience of being connected, or disconnected, to one who is part of you, or of being a person
who, as part of another and/or intrinsically linked to another, genetically, or through caregiving, or by
association, might inform action in a world conceived as relational. This view differs from a history
shaped by alienation and enacted by violent, external, institutional, hierarchical social constructions.

As Rothman asserts in the Book of Life, “The world that I live in, and the world that I want for my
children, is not a world of scattered isolated individuals, and not a world of walls. It is a world of
communities, of social solidarity, of connectedness between individuals and between communities,
a world in which people and communities grow from and into each other.” (233).
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M/othering
 Simon de Beauvoir was advocated in her seminal book the Second Sex that “[i]t was fraudulent to
maintain that through maternity woman becomes concretely man‟s equal” (de Beauvoir 1953, 525)
She considered motherhood as the main feature which caused women to be seen as “others” and to tie
them to immanence.

 In her view, the decision to become a mother is therefore never performed “in complete liberty”, not
even through ART (de Beauvoir 1953, 696). She saw motherhood as enforced maternity (de Beauvoir
1953, 724).

. Changing laws and institutions, or even changing the whole social context, would not suffice to
change the conditions and the consequences of motherhood for women.
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M/othering
Beauvoir‟s approach and positions received much criticism from feminists, particularly for being a-
historic and for essentializing “woman”, feminists critical of motherhood shared her perception of
maternity as a means to maintain women‟s inferior social and economic status as “objects” and to
deny them the right to determine their position.
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Women and Evacuation

Maggie Andrews

Andrews identifies the following core groups for analysis:

• Birth mothers whose children were evacuated without

them.
• Women who were evacuated with their children.
• Foster Mothers.
• Paid and voluntary carers of evacuees.

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