Parents as Paradigms: Recasting the Problems of Individualism in a New Mold?

Feminist turns to maternal experience have emphasized its asymmetries of power, capability, vulnerability, and need against traditional philosophical paradigms of individual subjectivity as ideally invulnerable, self-sufficient, and self-controlled. This paper considers how mother-child relationships have been used in recent feminist thought to develop accounts of obligation from asymmetries of power, vulnerability, and need. It argues that taking maternal experience as an ethical paradigm obscures important questions about domination in care, both because maternal experience might be relatively exceptional, instead of exemplary, with respect to domination and because of the way these projects focus on the immediacy of care, fixing the mother-child relationship as a dyadic encounter. Where these accounts depend on a paradigm of encounter, they recreate some of the problems they seek to resist by fixing complex power relationships in time.