Rebirth of Maternal Ethics: Italian Feminist Thought from Sexual Difference to Affirmative Biopolitics

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Degree type
PhD
Graduate group
Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies
Discipline
Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
European Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Philosophy
Subject
Biopolitics
Feminist philosophy
Maternal genealogies
Political philosophy
Sexual difference
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Copyright date
01/01/2025
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Author
Dresser, Deion, James
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Abstract

This dissertation undertakes a genealogical and comparative interrogation of Western political thought in order to expose—and ultimately redress—the systematic effacement of the maternal vantage from modern theories of power, subject formation, and community. It begins by juxtaposing Luce Irigaray’s symbolic recuperation of the mother with Carla Lonzi’s separatist suspicion of motherhood, demonstrating how both converge in diagnosing a “murder of the mother” enacted by psychoanalytic, philosophical, and juridical paternal genealogies. It then turns to the Italian feminist collective Diotima; through concepts of affidamento and maternal authority and negativity it reconstructs a non patriarchal genealogy in which ambivalence, withdrawal, and care figure as productive political forces. The dissertation then reframes the birth as an epistemic threshold wherein negativity, corporeal dependence, and co constitution inaugurate subjectivity prior to any paternal act of naming; birth is thereby shown to displace thanatopolitical logics premised on sovereignty and death. Finally, the work engages Michel Foucault’s analytics of biopower and their Italian extensions in Giorgio Agamben’s bare life and Roberto Esposito’s immunitas, revealing that each, while decentring classical sovereignty, nonetheless reproduces a father centred horizon inattentive to the generativity of maternal difference. To counter this omission the dissertation articulates “tocopolitics” as a theoretical framework that relocates political negativity in the mutually constitutive drama of parturition rather than in sovereign violence or immunitary self closure. Tocopolitics foregrounds birth as the primary site where relational ontology, ethical responsibility, and alternative community become thinkable, thereby offering a constructive reorientation of biopolitical discourse.Across four interlocking chapters, the study advances three principal claims: Western metaphysics and state theory rely on the erasure or instrumentalization of maternal embodiment; feminist philosophies of sexual difference provide the conceptual resources for re inscribing birth—and the maternal negativity it entails—at the centre of ethical and political reflection; a tocopolitical perspective both deconstructs paternal genealogies and furnishes an affirmative biopolitics grounded in natal interdependence, vulnerability, and creative rupture. The project thus calls for a radical revaluation of governance, care, and genealogical transmission through the prism of maternal embodiment and the life constituting power of birth.

Advisor
Del Soldato, Eva
Date of degree
2025
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