![]() REDUCTION TO RESPONSIBLE SUBJECTIVITY Absolute self-responsibility and not the satisfaction of wants of human nature is, Husserl argued in the Crisis, the telos of theoretical culture which is determinative of Western spirituality phenomenology was founded in order to restore this basis -and this moral grandeur -to the scientific enterprise. The temporality of pregnancy and birth as marking something like “women's time.” The “choice” to become a mother as a “feminist choice” 3. The relationship between pregnancy and sexuality, both in terms of pregnant sexuality and in terms of the pregnant body as sexual object 2. Here, I will focus on three central elements of the revaluation of pregnancy and maternity as they show up in feminist philosophy and in popular culture: 1. The questions driving this essay are: When we look back over the last twenty-five years, what has changed in our conceptions of pregnancy and maternity, both in feminist theory and in popular culture? What aspects of feminist debates from the 1970s and 1980s are still relevant today? And, how might what appear to be radical shifts in popular perceptions of pregnancy actually continue traditional values that objectify and “abjectify” the maternal body? My essay is framed by Hypatia 's first special issue on Motherhood and Sexuality at one end, and by the most recent special issue (as of this writing) on the work of Iris Young, whose work on pregnant embodiment has become canonical, at the other. I argue for a re-assessment and revaluation of the vulnerability in the parent–child relationship by developing an account of the crucial role that vulnerability plays in underpinning and facilitating what is a core – but as yet unrecognised – good of that relationship for both parents and children: namely what I call the good of ‘mutual reflexive co-constitution’ that the relationship enables. ![]() In this paper I consider this supposed ‘vulnerability paradox’, as I will refer to it. ![]() ![]() Indeed, the problem appears deep: on one way of framing it the problem is not merely that realisation of the goods of parenting for parents is incompatible with realisation of the goods of childhood for children it is that realisation of the parental goods of parenting is dependent on precisely what it is that makes childhood bad for children, namely their dependency and vulnerability. It has been suggested that there is a troubling antagonism between the potential goods afforded for parents in the parent–child relationship, and the goods of childhood. ![]()
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