Motherhood as non-ambition?: Negotiating maternal subjectivities

Drawing upon recent empirical research from two separate, but interconnecting studies by the authors, we place a critical focus on ‘the maternal’. We explore how young women negotiate and position themselves in relation to dominant, post-feminist discourses of ‘choice’, ‘success’ and ‘potential’ through/within education and work. We argue, following work by McRobbie and Walkerdine, that the meanings and identities associated with 'the maternal' have been transformed by the impact of neo-liberalism on normative forms of female personhood, oriented around the economic, rational, independent, self-regulatory subject. We highlight that the identification with normative constructions of what Rose calls the ‘worthy citizen’ inculcates a problematic repudiation of motherhood as its 'other' or non-ambition. However, highly ambivalent/ ambiguous processes of dis-identification are debated and resistance to these discourses explored