후기-근대 “전문엄마”의 자리에서 읽는 크리스테바의 “아브젝트” 모성

Abstract

This is a sociological study about “professional mother,” which is a typological motherhood institutionalized by the neo-liberal societal orders of the 21st late-modern Korea, followed by a critical evaluation on the performativity of the “professional mother” in a comparative reflection with Julia Kristeva’s theoretical concept of “abject” motherhood. Influenced by the rapidly changing social institutions of the late-modern Korea since the year of 1997, such as the flexibility of employment and instability of the bureaucratic position, housewives who have been placed in the private home have started to concentrate their meaningful works on professional and effective management of their children’s knowledge education. In spite of their sincere and furious devotion, however, the strong engagement of the “professional mother” in the growth of their children prevents them from establishing subjectivity not only of their children’s but also theirs own. In use of the concept of “abject” motherhood, for that reason, this study aims to invite the powerful energy of the professional mothers to the formation of inter-subjectivity between the mother and her children. Criticizing patriarchal interpretation of mother as a passive object in the traditional psychoanalysis, Kristeva insists that a child’s experience of being with his/her mother as ‘abject’ is the first and most significant relation for the establishment of subjectivity. In the process of struggling with his or her mother’s meanings which constantly invade the existential boundary of the child, the child acquires his/her subjectivity by placing them “abject” in the marginal line of his/her being. It is also the mother’s life-going task to establish her own subjective and meaningful boundary while encountering the “abject” coexistence with her children. According to Kristeva, such process of positioning “abject” and symbolizing one’s own meaning into a language leads both a mother and her children to accomplish the subjectivity and also provides the possibility of creative languages and symbols, which could be the resources of re-constructing the given social orders and systems and also of preparing the new world and human relations which the fourth-industrial revolution would change. This article in a concluding mark suggests a further study of Christian theological reflection of Bonhoeffer’s “ethic of formation” in relation with the task of new ways of being ‘mother.’