The mothering village: Posthuman feminist figurations for collective care

Individualised and neoliberal epistemologies of motherhood position mothers as sole bearers of responsibility for their children's outcomes, with detrimental consequences for maternal physical, mental and social health and wellbeing. The imperative to ‘be it all’ reproduces isolation, guilt and shame amid eroded support structures. This article intervenes by mobilising posthuman feminist theory to collectivise agency and foreground fluidity and emergence in the becoming-mother. Drawing on collaborative collage making with mothers, the article engages in situated, embodied and collective knowledge production. Through this analysis, we draw three interrelated posthuman feminist figurations – contingent needs, distributed agency and emergent knowing – which together materialise as mothering villages that enact collective response-ability. These figurations challenge liberal humanist models of agency and responsibility by foregrounding relationality, interdependence and the uneven material conditions through which mothering is enacted and sustained. We argue that response-ability for motherhood is a collective, materially embedded capacity that is differentially supported and politically structured. In doing so, the feminist village figurations contribute to feminist theory by reconceptualising maternal subjectivity as emergent, transversal and more-than-human, while insisting that care and accountability must be understood as political and collective. Together, they offer an agenda for future feminist theory, scholarship and social and political action orientated towards affirmative parenting futures.