Reclaiming Maternal Subjectivity: A Feminist Reading of Richa's Mother

This paper offers a feminist theoretical analysis of Richa’s poem Mother from her collection Worms on Flesh (2023) , examining how the poem challenges dominant cultural narratives that sentimentalize and naturalize motherhood within South Asian contexts. Resisting romanticized portrayals of maternal sacrifice, the poem constructs a layered psychological landscape in which the mother negotiates contradictory emotions of attachment, exhaustion, autonomy, and grief. The poem dismantles the dominant ideology about motherhood. Richa locates the most profound crisis of motherhood in the moment of the child’s individuation, when the mother must confront separation and renegotiate her sense of self by acknowledging the child as an autonomous subject with separate desires and trajectories. Drawing on feminist and psychoanalytic theories by Julia Kristeva, Adrienne Rich, Nancy Chodorow, Sara Ruddick, and Jessica Benjamin, this study argues that Richa reconstructs maternal experience as an existential and emotional rupture rather than a purely biological or domestic condition. Situated within South Asian socio-cultural frameworks that renders maternal labour invisible, the poem exposes the psychological costs of prolonged self-erasure and foregrounds the challenge of reclaiming identity once caregiving recedes. Through evocative imagery, intimate confession, vulnerability, ambivalence, and psychological depth, the poem, Mother emerges as a powerful feminist critique and a rearticulation of maternal subjectivity.