Foucault, the Modem Mother and Maternal Power:: Notes Towards a Genealogy of the Mother

Abstract

In his work of the mid to late 1970s, Michel Foucault analysed various social phenomena: abnormality, sexuality, neoliberalism. He rendered these objects of inquiry problematic by, in part, giving detailed descriptions of various figures2—the masturbator, the hysteric, the physiocrat—whose emergence was made possible within what Foucault called dispositifs 3 or problematisations, that is to say, complex intersections of various practices.