Conclusion

The concluding chapter summarises and links together the most important theoretical and ethical-political issues laid out in the previous chapters of the book. It revisits the crucial aspects of (maternal) subjectivity and addresses the particularities of its embodied, mediated and embedded nature. Rather than viewing pregnant and birthing subjectivity as a special case or deviation, it argues for recognising it as a model that challenges modernist representations of the subject—as whole, stable, bounded and clearly differentiated from others. The often dramatic process of the early transition to motherhood and the visible ruptures in ordinary functioning and experience reveal the processual, (technologically) mediated and distributed character of subjectivity that is not so readily apparent in other, more stable and regular circumstances. The analysis in this book therefore calls for a revision of a psychological theory of subjectivity and offers some important resources for this endeavour.