Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Gender Studies and Sexuality, 2024
Year: 2024
DOI:
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The Stepmother’s Ideological Utility for Late Capitalism
Paulina Aroch-Fugellie and Astrid Van Weyenberg
ABSTRACT:
We read contemporary cultural representations of the stepmother in the context of late capitalism. If the bourgeois nuclear family was the silent correlate of the development of capitalism (Engels 1884; Federici 2004), the moderate contemporary flexibilization of that family formula is correlative to developments in late capitalism. Despite the gradual, uneven normalization of new family configurations – not unrelated to queer studies’ emphasis on alternative forms of kinship (e.g., Butler 2002) – one female figure continues to operate as blind spot: the stepmother. This figure, relegated to opprobrium, abjection and lack (reflected in the etymology of the prefix “step”), remains surprisingly unchallenged in cultural narratives. We explore representations of stepmothers at the intersection of manifold ideological demands (including the sanctification and sacralization of genes and of biological mothers) and their role in patriarchal inheritance laws and in the concentration of capital. Embodying a non-biological form of motherhood onto which the “bad mother” can be projected, the figure of the stepmother allows for the preservation of the pristine nature of the unique birth-mother, in what we consider a necessary rhetorical move for the preservation of contemporary capitalist biopower. The fetishization of mothers and stepmothers in opposite yet correlated moral poles, ontologizes motherhood while obscuring it as a socio-political relation and as a value-producing form of labor. The rejection of the stepmother also indexes the disavowed continuities running between neoliberal, allegedly post-foundational social realities and monotheist logics, as well as contemporary ideology’s reinforced commitment to Capital, biological foundationalism and patriarchy.
keywords: stepmother; biopower; contemporary family; cultural representations; neoliberalism; polimaternalism