Agora: Red Deer Polytechnic Undergraduate Journal
Volume 15:2 (2024) Student Writer Awards

Motherhood and Violence
Kaitlin White

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I think of Klaus Theweleit a lot. He introduced his two-volume book, Male Fantasies, by
describing his father and the beatings he’d receive from him. Importantly, he described the
ambivalence of his mother towards those beatings. Later, in the second volume, he goes on to write
the most formative quote of my academic career: “Thus the holy cow of motherhood was never
slaughtered.”1 What Theweleit was saying is that the role of mothers in raising violent fascist sons
has never been adequately explored or acknowledged. He’s aware that this framing could be used
to vilify women as sources of evil, but he also argues that for this to be possible then the inverse
must also be equally possible: mothers as the source of production for nonviolent human beings.2
So, is it possible for mothers to produce nonviolent sons, and if so, how? This project doesn’t
answer that question. Rather, through an exploration of my own experiences that have shaped my
own self as a mother, and which will go on to shape my son’s self, I ask that question.
This project was supposed to be something else. I had titled it People/Places, and it was
supposed to be a self-portrait made up of the people and places that I’ve photographed. Instead, it
became a story of motherhood when I created three frames that centered around my fear of
becoming a shit mom.
I thought of Julie Kristeva a lot throughout this. I wanted to include her theory, but that
didn’t happen the way I wanted. It would have had to have been a different project that talked
about language more, and likely more about desire. I realized, though that she is in it through
semanalysis. The incorporation of bodies and images, along with the delivery of text in a way that
is perhaps different, creates new meaning for this project in a way that traditional deliveries, like
an essay, couldn’t do. This is why the first image is labeled “The maternal body.” An
acknowledgement not only to Jess, who is pregnant in that picture, but to Kristeva, where the
maternal body intersects with her work on linguistics.
However, since we discussed Jacques Lacan in class, I’ve been curious about his theory
and motherhood. How much have I influenced my son’s formation of his self, and how have I
impacted the various stages of his self’s development? If I’ve impacted his, then surely my mother
must have impacted mine in some way. How are these experiences passed down? In this project I
talk about mothers raising violent sons, and while I am not a son, I have a mother whose presence

1

Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, trans. Erica Carter and Chris Turner (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1989), 2:384.
2
Ibid.

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and absence have both had impacts on me. Now, I pass these impacts down to my son as I grapple
with raising him in a violent world.
Lacan discusses the mirror stage – where the body becomes fragmented.3 The infant
becomes aware of the outside world and his separateness from his mother. He loses his wholeness.
In class we talked about how there must be some kind of grief that an infant experiences because
of this process, as rudimentary as it may be. But, can’t grief be defined as a type of violence? In
what ways does grief exist that does not feel like violence against the mind, body, and spirit? I
don’t think it does. We are all brought into this world and experience violence very early on.
After looking at my anxieties around motherhood, I move on to explore my experiences
with love – my mother’s love, which she has learned from her own mother, and two dysfunctional
romantic loves. Does any of this matter in the end if it is the act of motherhood, and the subsequent
loss of the wholeness that comes along with the fragmented body that forms as the self
individualizes into its own I, that creates the violence in our sons?

3

Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Routledge, 2005), 3.

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Bibliography
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies. Translated by Erica Carter and Chris Turner. Volume 2.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

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