Sex, Work and Motherhood: The Impossible Triangle

Author(s): E. Ann Kaplan

Source: The Journal of Sex Research , Aug., 1990, Vol. 27, No. 3, Feminist Perspectives
on Sexuality. Part 2 (Aug., 1990), pp. 409-425
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.

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The Journal of Sex Research Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 409-425 August, 1990

Sex, Work and Motherhood:

The Impossible Triangle
E. ANN KAPLAN, Ph.D.
State University of New York, Stony Brook

This essay explores how current representations of sex, work and

motherhood, in select recent films and women's science fiction, manifest
and give meaning to contradictory discourses about women. Discourse
analysis shows that what at first appear to be polarized discourses may
be part of a larger societal need to control female sexuality, and re-
position the nuclear family with woman safely within it. Ideological
textual analysis may help feminists gauge how far their own discourses
about abortion, female sexual adventurousness, mothering, reproductive
technologies collude with, or challenge, dominant ones in relation to sex,
work and motherhood.

KEY WORDS: Female sexuality, work, motherhood; film; science

fiction; reproductive technologies; ideology; discourse analysis.

Introduction

Many of us know women who, over the past 20 years or so, have
struggled to combine sex, work and motherhood. Even when they are
in heterosexual marriages, women have difficulties linking these three
aspects of their lives. But those who are single or recently divorce
mothers, who are poor or belong to minority groups, or who are gay
parents, find even greater odds stacked against them. It has been clear
that women's difficulties owe much to the lack of facilitating institu-
tions for leading a life combining sex, work and motherhood: we still
do not have adequate, available and inexpensive child care, and flexi
ble and accommodating work schedules.
Accounting for why modernist and postmodernist America stil
refuses to make easy for any women combining sex, work and mother
hood lies beyond my scope here. Let me merely gesture to the
enormous economic and technological changes that have taken place in

E. Ann Kaplan, Ph.D., is a professor of English and director of the Humanities In-
stitute at The State University of New York, Stony Brook. She has written widely on
feminist theory, film, and popular culture. Her most recent books include Rocking
Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism and Consumer Culture; and the
edited volumes, Postmodernism and Its Discontents and Psychoanalysis and Cinema.
Her book on Motherhood and Representation is currently in press. Send requests for
reprints to E. Ann Kaplan, Humanities Institute, SUNY, Stony Brook, Stony Brook,
NY 11794-3394.
409

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410 KAPLAN

the post-World War II period, with their accompanying cultura

that include first, increasing numbers of women in the wor
second, the 1960s/70s/80s women's movements; and third, new
ductive technologies impacting on women's lives. These cultural
have themselves produced various reactions from diverse qu
resulting in the complex, contradictory discourses being d
here.

My interest is in how current representations of sex, wo

motherhood in select dominant and sub-cultural forms manifes
give meanings to, such contradictory discourses. Because do
forms privilege white, middle-class women, and because I
dominant discourses inevitably impact on minority ones
chosen to focus mainly on white, middle-class conflicts. O
research, however, also needs to be done.
Cultural studies scholars have long theorized that popular
sentations provide some evidence for what preoccupies the A
social imaginary in specific historical moments. Because com
productions must command an audience sufficient for han
profit, producers are clever at sensing the fantasies, fears and d
that preoccupy a majority of the people in a given period.
hoping to be the first to provide desired images, producers kee
pulse on the moment, anticipating fashions before they catch o
Cultural studies research has always made a point of teasi
underlying forces setting media discourses in play.' Analysi
hierarchical discourses embedded in texts allows a scholar to see
discourses are privileged, which excluded, and the power r
among discourses. From this analysis, it is possible to deduc
produces certain discourses, what culture needs them for, an
specific needs they serve-this, despite the fact that comm
products present discourses as though they operate merely on t
vidual level (i.e., as though it were merely a matter of p
character, individual choice, or fate). It is true that dominan
are not monolithic (i.e., many different, contradictory discours
be seen at work at the same time),2 and the sheer enormity of t
duction increasingly guarantees gaps and spaces for some alt

1For a good example of this kind of theory, see MacCabe (1974).

2See Stam (1988) for one argument about such contradictions.

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 THE IMPOSSIBLE TRIANGLE 411

discourses. But unconscious cultural constraints still function to

prevent expression of certain kinds of images.3
That the United States in the 1990s is in the midst of a cultural
paradigm shift is generally agreed on: whether called "Post-
modernism" or "New Age Consciousness," part of the shift involves
the development of the contradictory discourses noted above, which
the 1960s/70s liberation movements left in their wake. The excitement
of these movements arose from the challenge they offered to the domi-
nant establishment. A clear polarity between dominant and counter-
culture positions remained in the 60s, as the term "counter-culture"
itself indicated.

But American capitalism, in its incessant search for new markets,

and its uncanny method of co-opting subversive discourses, has incor-
porated many of the 1960s/70s oppositional positions into dominant
ones, blurring distinctions and boundaries. The sense of an "outside"
distinct from an "inside" has produced increasing confusion between
the "popular" and the "oppositional" text, between "dominant" and
"marginal" cultures. While this has some benefits, sites of production
still make a difference in what can be shown (for example, commercial
TV presents soaps, but a wicked critique of soaps, like Joan Braver-
man's video Joan Does Dynasty, is reserved for alternative exhibition
sites, like Paper Tiger TV, or museums). Therefore, I have chosen to
explore contrasting texts from the "commercial/dominant" category
(i.e., popular film, TV, newspapers, etc.), and those from a margin-
alized category, "women's science fiction." Arguably, the first domain
articulates unconscious, patriarchal desire regarding sex, work and
motherhood, while the second reflects the consciousness of women
whose imaginations have both absorbed the lessons of the various
feminisms, and been fascinated by new scientific/technological dis-
coveries and projects.

Representations in Commercial, Dominant Materials

Changes in sex/family/work spheres are emerging culturally in

tandem with changes on the technological/economic/industrial level.
Anxiety in relation to women and these spheres has, in part, to do with
the fact that childbirth and child care are no longer an automatic,

3Feuer (1989) argues that interpretative communities may make new use of popular
materials; they may defuse a program like Dynasty ideologically, and incorporate it
into new imaginary constructs. But this does not mean that it is no longer important to
explore the investments in positions that texts themselves stake out on an unconscious
level.

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412 KAPLAN

"natural," part of woman's life cycle: this centrally affects wo

sex and work lives-women may not only be sexual before marr
but need not have children at all; meanwhile, they can compete
men in the work sphere.
That this change has preoccupied the recent cultural imaginary w
be evident from a brief reminder of some 1970s films. Popular film
the 1970s showed American culture adjusting to women's new-f
sexual freedom outside of marriage and the family. Fears ho
around the fact that if women can be sexual without having child
their sexuality is, in a sense, dangerously "unleashed." Richard
Brooks' 1976 Lipstick showed the violent male desire such open sex-
uality (here in the body of the popular lipstick-model, played by Margo
Hemingway) could provoke, although it interestingly went on to argue
powerfully against allowing rapists to get away with it. The film was
one of the first female "sexual revenge" films. Brooks' 1977 Looking
for Mr. Goodbar, meanwhile, presented Diane Keaton positively as the
new single, sexually adventurous woman. However, the film's ideology
compelled it to demonstrate that she would come to a bad end.
In the 1980s, unprecedented attention has been given to female sex-
uality in dominant media: it is important that the patriarchal im-
aginary has finally acknowledged that female sexuality is not, per se,
dangerous. However, it is significant that films like Sex, Lies and
Videotape or 912 Weeks do not necessarily offer a female perspective
on female sexuality. They do open up the terrain of female desire, but
arguably still within a patriarchal imaginary. While Sex, Lies demon-
strates American culture's new acceptance of female sexuality as
"normal," the film repeats old virgin/whore stereotypes, and has the
male lover conquer the heroine's frigidity. [New perhaps is the atten-
tion to male sexual problems, and the exploration of male voyeurism
as linked to impotence. But this lies beyond my specific focus here.]
Meanwhile, 912 Weeks focuses explicitly on female desire and sexual
pleasure, but there is a question as to how far it really moves beyond
pornographic exploitation of women's complicity in male sexual
sadism to genuine exploration of such a common dynamic. Susan
Seidelman's Desperately Seeking Susan or Donna Deitch's Desert
Hearts perhaps come closer to suggesting the agency and activity that
female sexuality might manifest without patriarchal constraints.
Also significant is the fact that none of the above films combines
treatment of female sexuality with attention to female work, let alone
motherhood. However, some 1980s films do mix romance and working
heroines, although in these cases the focus of the narrative is often

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 THE IMPOSSIBLE TRIANGLE 413

neither sex nor work, per se; and certainly not any special tensio
might be between the two for women. Mystic Pizza intere
treats a group of working class women, but the thrust of the f
again not the working situation per se (this does figure more
tantly than usual, however), but how the various women wil
their love or other personal problems, and find happiness.
Working Girl, meanwhile, is important and unusual in focussi
women in the work place. Its main theme is: what is it like to wo
female boss? And: what is a female boss like? Unfortuna
answers both questions negatively, showing that the female
more ambitious, jealous, and manipulative than any male bo
be; and that working for such a boss is a nightmare! The narrat
construct Melanie Griffith as a potentially humane, empathi
boss, but the film ends as she undertakes her new role, leavi
imagine what will happen. Significantly, this film absolutely ex
any reference to motherhood and children, as these roles might
act with, or problematize, female needs for satisfaction in work
Together, the films show, first, how patriarchy still desires t
trol even a no longer "dangerous" female sexuality; and sec
similar desire to keep female sexuality, work and motherhood d
segregated spheres. If the patriarchal imaginary has to a
accommodated woman's new-found sexual freedom in recent
and has accepted woman's needs for work, new anxiety arises fr
changed reality that childbirth and child care no longer signify
that woman need stay in the home, or that she be married and
monogamous. This fear has arguably produced some recent (diff
discourses about the threat of female sexuality to motherhood,
will briefly illustrate by reference to three recent Hollywood f
The Good Mother (1988), Stella (1990), and Fatal Attraction
exemplify in quite different ways contested discourses about
sexuality, motherhood and the family; together they show alte
in these discourses from the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s. The Good
Mother represents discursive struggles in a 1970s, "high modernist"
framework.4 In the film, the discourse of a heterosexual female desire
released outside of marriage is in conflict with a sentimentalizing
motherhood discourse (in which motherhood is viewed as in itself all
that a woman needs). These in turn operate across other discourses,
4The term "high modernist" is meant to suggest late modernism-a modernism that
has almost exhausted itself, and that is to be differentiated from subsequent "post-
modernism." The film is modernist in that it assumes that Anna's "truth" is achiev-
able, theoretically, if only legal institutions were rational. For more on this, see Kaplan
(1990).

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414 KAPLAN

especially those of conservative legal institutions opposed to s

openness, particularly outside of marriage and in conjunction
motherhood.
The aspects of the film most pertinent here have to do with the
staging of that 1970s moment of the oppressive, sexually unhappy
marriage, followed by divorce and, for the heroine, Anna, single-
motherhood. Never sexually fulfilled in marriage, Anna puts all her
energies into her relationship with her daughter, Molly. Although she
works, her job is purely for income, of low status, and has no meaning
for her in itself. But the film shows her sexual arousal by Leo, a playful
artist, who eschews traditional bourgeois modes of life. There follow
passionate sexual scenes, intercut with Anna's pleasure with Molly,
and, increasingly with Leo, who is fatherlike with the child.
But this discourse of free, open sexuality is contested when the hus-
band, Brian, learns from Molly that Leo has allowed her to touch his
penis. The film only allows us to hear about this in the course of a court
case that follows, but we quickly see how it is Anna's situation as
single mother that causes a problem in relation to her sexuality. Her
sexuality is highlighted, made an object for investigation by the state,
in a way that, within the traditional family, it is usually not. At least
until recently (when concern about child-abuse has begun to alter
things), sex within the family has been protected. But the single
mother's sexuality is to be monitored.
The film then introduces (and sympathizes with) liberatory
discourses about single motherhood, female sexuality and child
custody. But the discourses exist in complex relation to the renewed
sentimentalizing motherhood discourse that I have isolated. The
ending is reactionary, and the film once again fails to integrate career
interests with sexuality and motherhood.
Much the same may be said for the 1990 version of the old Stella
Dallas story. Originally written in 1923, two film versions of Stella
Dallas already exist (1926, 1937); even in those periods, the story was
criticized for being "hoary." The revival of an essentially 19th-Century
paradigm at this historical moment is itself significant (one cannot im-
agine the film being made in the 1970s or 80s). Once again, we have a
single mother (this time, however, the child is born out of wedlock, by
the heroine's choice); once again, nurturing ultimately replaces
sexuality, although in Stella's case this happens far more quickly than
for Anna. The upper-class Stephen Dallas' surprise interruption of a
party Stella is having with her impossible working-class male and
female friends in the baby's presence propels Stella into devoted

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 THE IMPOSSIBLE TRIANGLE 415

mothering (as if to prove to Stephen how much she loves t

Thus, even the tensions between sex and mothering that T
Mother reveals are not explored by Stella.
What is new in the film is Stella's decision to have the child out of
wedlock: after discovering the pregnancy, she tellingly notes that
since it is 1969, she has several choices: to have an abortion, to have
the child and give it up, or to have and keep the child, alone. She notes
that all three are "terrible," and not really choices at all.
New also is Stella's pride, and her determination to go it alone, not
accepting money from Stephen, even though he wants to share in, and
know, the child. Again, the child becomes Stella's whole reason for
being, and any work that she does is merely to put bread on the table.
But she is a feisty mother, warding off (or trying to) unsavory males
chasing her daughter, and she is capable of deep love, anger, and
laughter.
But, as in the earlier versions, Stella's renunciation of the child to
the upper class world where she can have most opportunities, and her
consigning of herself to the margins, oblivion (emblematized in the
final wedding scene), is seen as a positive sacrifice, eliciting as always,
tears in the audience.
Finally, this version significantly adds a strong father-daughter
bonding not evident in earlier ones. In this way, the film subscribes to
the prevailing sentimentality about fathers and daughters, which co-
exists uncannily with increasing evidence of father-daughter incest on
the level of historical reality.
Fatal Attraction, meanwhile, embodies in a much more postmodern
way than either The Good Mother or Stella a violent polarizing of
1970s feminist liberatory sexual discourses and renewed,
pro-("yuppie") family discourse. While The Good Mother looks back
to, and stages, struggles in a mid 1970s mode; and while Stella perhaps
augurs for a return to earlier mothering discourses in this era of AIDS,
Fatal Attraction is very much a late 1980s film. That the confrontation
between the discourses of released female sexuality and of the nuclear
family had to be so violent suggests the enormous psychic (uncon-
scious) tension in contemporary culture as a result of all the challenges
to dominant 1960s sexual discourses that feminists made.
Briefly, Glen Close is shown at the start of the film as an indepen-
dent career woman (with whom the female spectator is invited to iden-
tify), who objects to being made a sex object, but who, in turn, has
intense sexual desire and drive. She basically seduces the married man
and father (played by Michael Douglas), and we are treated to scenes of
intense, lustful love-making. When Douglas tries to end the affair (his

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416 KAPLAN

wife and child have now returned), Glen Close points out the re
double standard, in which his having an affair is a simple thing
object to be used and thrown away. Yet things are not so sim
her, since she is all alone, and needs him.
The female spectator may continue identifying with the hero
far, only to have the identification sickeningly wrenched away
Close, unable to hold on to Douglas, turns into a monster of horr
proportions before our eyes. We are invited now to identify wi
the besieged husband and abused wife and, finally, with the wr
ly tortured child. Glen Close, the repressed underside of the
family, now becomes intolerable: like the ghastly mutations of
fiction and horror genres, she must be eliminated at all cost
representative of all that threatens the biological nuclear famil
those mutations, she keeps returning in ever more vile forms, w
more monstrous purposes, until, finally, husband and wife man
eradicate her. The wife has to take on the murderous aspects
Close in order to achieve her demise (revealing, perhaps, the
embedded even within the family), but the sanctity of the
family is, just about, retrieved as the battered trio regrou
reconstitute their little community.
The film must be read on at least two levels, that of the depi
gender/sex discourses, and that of underlying psychoanalytic
processes. The possibility for the Glen Close character rests, first, on
the new conceptions about female sexuality that the early Women's
Liberation Movement produced: one of the main issues in the first
phase of the Movement was challenging the limitation of female sex-
uality to that safely confined within patriarchal norms. Female sex-
uality was brought out of the closet and discussed: topics such as
vaginal versus clitoral orgasms, lesbian versus heterosexual sexuality,
female sexual fantasies and their implications were extensively
debated in popular materials as well as in feminist scholarship. On the
level of individual discourse (and the dailiness of historical subjects),
these developments resulted in freeing women from the confines of
oppressive, often sexually unhappy marriages, liberating women to
seek sexual satisfaction in whatever modes (lesbian, heterosexual,
"kinky," "vanilla") they chose. It is significant (for understanding the
reaction to these developments in dominant representations) that the
women's movement early on ignored the mother per se, while devoting
attention to problems of day care, control of childbirth and reformu-
lating child-rearing. The fact that much early feminist work was
geared at freeing women from the necessities of mothering [and chal-
lenged dominant codes by refusing to hypostasize the (patriarchal)

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 THE IMPOSSIBLE TRIANGLE 417

mother-function] partly produces (by reaction) the pro-

course in a film like Fatal Attraction.
Fatal Attraction, then, insists on restoring the nuclear family, and in
subordinating the discourse of the independent/sexual woman to that
of the wife/mother. The family is seen to be the only safe location of
female sexuality, in a return to a discourse uncomfortably like that of
the 19th century. Female sexuality outside of marriage is envisaged as
wild, excessive, ultimately destructive. That the excision of this non-
marital female sexuality has to be so violent attests to the enormity of
the perceived threat to the family, reading the film now on its surface
level.
But the more dramatic recent focus on the fetus as subject shows a
new displacement of woman's threat to patriarchy that still remains in
the cultural imaginary, perhaps just because of the advances gained
through the late 1960s and 1970s women's movements. Anxiety about
women's new freedoms is displaced onto the fetus, who in turn dis-
places the woman altogether. When central, the fetus renders unimpor-
tant woman's work, sex, and mother subjectivities; her body (assumed
to be in the home, in heterosexual marriage) is now to be in the service
of the fetus. This positioning is underlined by the fact that fetal
imagery usually represents the fetus as an entity in its own right, un-
attached to the woman, or at least rendering her irrelevant to what is
going on in the womb. A few examples from popular materials (news-
papers, television, film) will make the point.
To begin with, it is important to note that it was the militant anti-
abortionists' campaign that plastered culture with numerous new
images of the fetus. It was sensational pictures of what happens to the
fetus during gestation that drew renewed interest in, and sympathy
for, the fetus. These images, particularly the ones featured in Life
Magazine (April 30, 1965, pp. 62-69) made the spectator identify with
the fetus as subject; they were used by anti-abortionists to initiate an
idea that has now become commonplace, viz, that the fetus is what is
most important.
Meanwhile, a recent New York Times article (Gina Kolata, 1989,
April 18) on fetal survival showed an enlarged image of the fetus, the
umbilical cord moving out of frame. The cord was hanging in space,
and the mother's body not imaged (nor even the womb!). Similar
articles on fetal surgery showed the surgeon's implements entering the
womb as if the womb were located in space, floating unattached to
anything. Discussion of the surgery mentioned nothing about discom-
fort to the women in whose body this was taking place. But, signifi-
cantly, the woman is assumed to be at her fetus' behest. Another New

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418 KAPLAN

York Times article (1988, July 28) about in vitro fertilization ima
the sperm binding to an egg in the woman's body, but again the bl
up image floated in space, and the title said nothing about the wom
Popular narratives also focus newly on the "unborn," make the f
of central concern, and marginalize the woman. A recent Buck Ja
television episode pitted a daughter against her (negatively c
mother over the question of whether or not the daughter should
her illegitimate conception, despite the fetus' having been damage
a sporting accident.
Focus on the fetus may indicate a renewed desire to write the w
out of the story (except as once more an unquestioned patriarchal
tion), or to marginalize and negate her subjectivity. This new
discourse, apparently contradictory to that of a nostalgic return to a
sentimentalized mother-child relationship, in fact colludes neatly with
it. Instead of an intense mother-child relationship being idealized and
hypostatized, we have obsession with conception and gestation-with
fetal life within the woman. But the discourses are linked in both in-
dicating, at least in dominant forms, a return to obsession with the
biological child. The differences are important, however: the senti-
mental mother discourse speaks from the position of the mother's
absorption in nurturing: however oppressively, it situates the mother
as a subject, as in The Good Mother. The reproductive discourse, on
the contrary, marginalizes the woman again (i.e., it is only interested in
the woman as the being that initiated the fetal discourse-by desiring
to create a fetus); it also redefines subjectivity, in making into a sub-
ject what is not yet human. The woman is marginalized, made into a
non-subject, or, as in a recent book by Elizabeth Kane (1988) about her
surrogacy experiences, happily marginalizes herself. Meanwhile,
culture positions the not-yet-born, paradoxically, as subject, raising
anew issues of what constitutes subjectivity.

Representations of Sexuality and Motherhood in

Select Women's Science Fiction

The ways in which sexuality and biological female sexuality

inter-twined in the dominant reproductive-technologies disco
makes it a very complicated topic for feminists. Feminist perspect
on the new technologies are currently being developed from a vari
of positions, but I will here look briefly at relevant representation
the sub-cultural women's science fiction mode from the late 1960s to
the present.
It is clear that feminists' first interest in reproductive technologies
in the 1960s focused on their bodies. Issues of all three areas under

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 THE IMPOSSIBLE TRIANGLE 419

discussion-sex, work and motherhood-were subsumed under the

over-riding need for women to control their bodies in order to have
choice about these three aspects of their lives. Emphasis was on
women freeing themselves from a culturally imposed-and not neces-
sarily desired-reproductive role that still prevailed at the time (Fire-
stone, 1972). It also meant freeing themselves at the same time for
sexual choice, including lesbian relations. Utopian fantasies about
reproductive alternatives appeared in some women's sci-fi novels, such
as Naomi Mitchisons' Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1968), Marge
Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1985), or Joanna Russ' The
Female Man (1975). All three novels, in different ways, sought [as did
Charlotte Perkins Gilman in Herland (1915)] to replace usual reproduc-
tive modes with alternatives that would make possible a utopian,
egalitarian world, in which women were no longer oppressed by their
biological and nurturing functions. Unlike Perkins Gilman, who
simply avoided the issue of female desire altogether, some of this
fiction stresses freedom of sexual choice, as well as multiple and varied
sexual partners, as important parts of the utopian frame. Most novels
assume that women work alongside men, on an equal basis, if men are
included (as was not the case in Herland).
In the 1960s, then, before abortion became readily available, some
women's discourse centered on removing women from being inscribed
within bodies not within their control. It was assumed that once such
freedom from male domination were achieved, issues regarding sex,
work and motherhood could be suitably resolved, and that women
would be able to choose for themselves how to order their lives and
priorities.
In the 1980s, however, such unconflicted fantasies about the
liberating possibilities of open sexuality and of reproductive technolo-
gies are problematic for several reasons. On the broadest level, there is
the backlash against feminism that began in the late 1970s with the
challenge to abortion rights [the Hyde Amendment and the refusal of
Medicaid money for abortions] and continued with the right wing
attacks on sex in general. Women remain vulnerable to high levels of
male violence and to sexual harassment in the work place. If the AIDS
crisis has only had a minimal effect on feminists' sexual behavior, it
has had the psychological, imaginary effect on reinforcing links be-
tween sex and danger. Meanwhile, the way that new scientific dis-
coveries about fetal development have been taken up by anti-abortion
groups, as noted above, has inevitably had an impact on feminist
positions (Petchesky, 1987).
Images in women's science fiction have altered in accord with these

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420 KAPLAN

important social and scientific changes. Two main sci-fi par

may be distinguished: first, novels replacing 1960s utopias
dystopias; and second, novels which radically shift the focus. W
is now informed by an altogether new position that could b
"postmodern" in the sense of an acceptance of new cultural
cies-working with, rather than against, new technological
bilities. A brief look at two novels [Atwood's The Handmai
(1986) and Octavia Butler's Dawn (1987)], each representing one
paradigms, will make the point clear.
Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale offers an example
first kind of dystopia. The 1960's feminist utopia, in which wom
trol and use reproductive technologies to free themselves of an
sive patriarchy, now gives way to a dystopia produced by ev
this case the disasters of environmental depletion and release o
tion) outside women's control. Writing in the context of e
proliferation of nuclear weapons and of projected life-threaten
infertility producing) chemicals, women writers imagine postm
worlds where the issue of the nuclear family is no longer the c
one.

The Handmaid's Tale is a dystopic fantasy of a totalitari

America, now called the Republic of Gilead, in which a group
wing religious fundamentalists are in control. Most wom
fertile, due to excessive use of chemicals and radiation releas
an earthquake on the San Andreas fault. Those women, l
heroine Offred, who remain fertile, are made property of the
the purpose of reproducing the Commander's line. Many of t
born are "unbabies," and there are also "unwomen," i.e., a
fertile women. Since the military takeover, women have b
access to their money and property, which were given ov
husbands. Reduced once again to mere bodies (more thorou
in prior decades), women are refused literacy and education,
limited to reproduction. In an ironically negative sense,
shows sex, work and motherhood as combined in a socially
manner: Offred's "work" is to have sex with the Commander for the
purposes of reproduction. The situation is a caricature of that which
dominated Western culture since the first Industrial Revolution, only
now the "work" of marital sex and motherhood is made "official"
instead of being repressed. As often in the oppressive 19th-centu
marriage, woman's only pleasure is in an illicit passionate affair (such
as Offred's with Nick).

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 THE IMPOSSIBLE TRIANGLE 421

Atwood's novel is, however, complex: running throughout

is a nostalgic discourse that suggests how close women we
the take-over to achieving their aim of linking sex, work an
hood comfortably. Offred constantly remembers the period p
take-over, when she, Luke and their daughter lived happily
Offred was then an intellectual, combining mothering
successfully; and it seems that she and Luke loved one anoth
The child was well-adjusted and smart. Aunt Lydia, the r
moral majority instructor, whose task it is to re-educate
other women, constantly refers negatively to the same peri
the women who chose not to have children, or who part
reproductive medical practices now outlawed (such as looking
womb with machines to see the condition and gender of the
this novel, right-wing thinking abhors new reproductive te
while it seems that from Offred's point of view, women we
verge of having what they wanted when the take-over
Perhaps Atwood wants to indicate that, if only we take
environment, refuse the right-wing positions of power,
technologies with due respect and care, a world like the
novel can be avoided.
Octavia Butler's Dawn provides an example of fiction speaking from
an altogether other position vis-a-vis new technologies-a position
perhaps first articulated by Donna Haraway in 1985, and rearticulated
in a more complete form recently (Haraway, 1989). The novel is con-
cerned with the problem of xenogensis between an earth woman,
Lilith, and a species, the Oankali, from another planet. A post-
apocalyptic tale, Dawn traces the events after a nuclear destruction of
the earth. The Oankali land on earth and take several earth beings up
to their planet to mate with, so as to produce a new species, neither
human nor Oankali, which will be returned to reproduce on earth. The
Oankali need such gene renewal to survive, but they also want to
remove the genetic flaw that lead humans into nuclear war. The novel
ends with Lilith pregnant, but the product remains unknown.
In a sequel to Dawn, Butler again demonstrates how reproductive
technologies will, when carried to a science-fiction extreme, not only
save humankind from destruction but free women and men from the
stifling notions of difference recent feminism has exposed. According
to Donna Haraway, "Butler's fiction is predicated on the natural
status of adoption and the unnatural violence of kin. Butler explores
the interdigitations of human, machine, non-human animal or alien,
and their mutants, especially in relation to the intimacies of bodily
exchange and mental communications" (Haraway, 1989, p. 294). And

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422 KAPLAN

Susan Squier (forthcoming) notes that Butler imagines a sit

where genetic, birth and social parents may be the same people
may be different people. In this sense, Butler opens up the c
possibilities of new reproductive 21st-century concepts of the h
body as the only valorized one.
Butler's postmodern fiction takes us so far into the futu
problems of combining sex, work and motherhood subjectiv
longer apply. She envisions a world, like that of Baudrillard
where the Faustian, Oedipal scenario has been replaced by "the
ecstacy of communication" (p. 1). For now, American culture still has
to deal with the Oedipal configurations that are ultimately responsible
for making it difficult for contemporary women to combine sex, work
and motherhood. But new reproductive technologies open up possibili-
ties of worlds like those in Butler's fiction, and for that reason warrant
our interest and analysis.

Conclusion

In the popular culture sphere, it is clear that discourses attempt to

recoup the status quo that the 1960s shattered in relation to femal
sexuality. Recent images, uncannily like those in the 1950s, have in-
sisted first that the only good female sexuality is that within marriage,
and second, that woman's sexuality is dangerous if freely released. The
sentimentalizing motherhood discourse has also returned, but the new
focus on the fetus perhaps even more than this discourse, marginalizes
and oppresses the mother. A postmodern form of an old patriarcha
fear of the mother, this new discourse shifts the locus of concern away
from the subjectivity of historical mothers, and their struggles to link
sex, work and motherhood, to constructing a new subject, the fetu
(that can only paradoxically be called a subject).
In feminist circles, the overall change has been from discourses
about women in the late 1960s and the 1970s that excluded or
marginalized the mother, while focusing on female sexuality, to,
1980s, including motherhood discourses alongside continuing (if
ferently focused) attention to sexuality. The feminist discourses d
with here address recent reproductive technological advances
imagine how they might harm or benefit women. The early femin
focus on sexuality took precedence over motherhood for good reas
we abhorred the pregnant body because the child stood in fo
phallus-the child seemed to be for the father we no longer aim
please. But we were also still angry daughters who believed tha
mother had allied herself with the father and denied us access to sex
(and other) pleasures. Nevertheless, we ironically re-appropriate

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 THE IMPOSSIBLE TRIANGLE 423

mother through concepts of sisterhood, female bonding

lesbianism.
Understanding this, a first group of feminist scholars gave new and
due attention to the mother,5 largely using a psychoanalytic and socio-
logical approach. In the wake of the recent reproductive technologies,
a second group of feminist scholars has again turned to motherhood to
analyze the new situation produced through scientific and social
changes.6 Interestingly (and disturbingly in some ways), far less
theorizing has been done by feminists about the work sphere, specifi-
cally, as it figures in women's psychic lives. Much important work has
been done by feminist economists, sociologists, psychologists and his-
torians on the empirical, materialist level. But humanities feminists
have largely focused on issues of sexuality, motherhood, and the
domestic sphere, as if agreeing that this terrain is still the central one
for women. This is clearly something that requires more analysis.
Whereas feminisms and popular culture had clearly polarized posi-
tions on female sexuality and motherhood in the 1960s and 1970s, such
a clear polarity no longer pertains in relation to either discourse. On
the one hand, medical discoveries made possible new reproductive
technologies which may benefit women, offering, as they do, alternate
ways to deal with pregnancy, fertility and infertility. On the other
hand, new discoveries were made about fetal development, possi-
bilities for fetal surgery, and the use that fetal tissue might be in
curing some diseases. The perception of the public about these dis-
coveries has been heavily influenced by Right-To-Life propaganda,
whose dramatic visual techniques impact on feminists and others
alike, and enter into popular entertainment materials, as we have seen.
Feminists (like Atwood and Butler) whose imaginations are inspired
by recent developments to look to the future take diverse positions in
regard to these developments; meanwhile, historical women of varied
political persuasions begin to make use of reproductive technologies

5I am thinking of the well-known books by Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born (New

York: Harper and Row, 1976); Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering
(Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 1981); Jane Lazarre, The Mother-
Knot (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985).
6Cf. new books by Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1989); Barbara Katz Rothman, Recreating Motherhood:
Ideology and Technology in a Patriarchal Society (New York and London: W. W. Nor-
ton & Co., 1989); E. A. Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation: The USA Maternal
Melodrama, 1830 to the Present (London and New York: Routledge, 1990, in press); and
J. Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Pyschoanalysis, Feminism and the Problems of Domi-
nation (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988).

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424 KAPLAN

because they serve a need. Collusion thus occurs between the m

establishment, geared to ever more sophisticated technologies a
controlling reproduction (and women) while benefitting thems
financially, and women needing the technologies in an era in w
bearing the biological child has again become central.
What seem like contradictory discourses (liberated female sexuali
pitted against a sentimentalizing family discourse; the absence of r
attention to women in the work place pitted against the need
female workers; sex, work and motherhood kept carefully segrega
on the imaginary level, while women themselves try to cope) m
actually be part of a larger economic need to reposition the nu
family, whose centrality was challenged by various 1960s liber
movements. Different economic entities have realized that fulf
1960s/70s/80s demands for freedom of sexual choice, and for l
arrangements alternate to the modern nuclear family, puts enorm
financial strain on the state. This discourse, however, has to conten
with a series of other (largely 1960s) discourses which have problem
tized the old nuclear family: the 1960s discourses, then, although h
archically lower than the economic one, push themselves to the sur
of popular culture as other forces insist on re-instating the family
the only viable institution.
Other discourses that also link up with the broader economic
behind the renewed valuing of the family, and the controlling of fe
sexuality are those of female promiscuity (indeed, Fatal Attrac
could be read as an attack on female adventurousness, labeled
"promiscuity"), and of the virulent anti-abortion crusade. This latter
discourse implicitly excoriates pre-marital female sexuality, which it
hopes to recoup through sentimental emphasis on having the child,
and on constructing the family. Meanwhile, reproductive technologies
in turn emphasize the biological family, privileging this over adoption,
and newly problematizing mother-child relations by making the fetus,
not the mother, the central subject.
I have here tried to suggest the need to examine both popular
culture and sub-cultural feminist discourses carefully so as to tease out
their governing ideologies. As the difference between these two kinds
of cultural products disappears, so the need for ideological analysis in-
creases. Only discourse analysis,7 which aims to locate hierarchical
ideological positions, can help us understand whose interests certain
discourses serve. Feminists need to know how far their own discourses
collude with dominant ones from which they are no longer so easily dis-

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 THE IMPOSSIBLE TRIANGLE 425

tinguished. Above all, we need to understand more abou

culties we all still have in linking sex, work and motherh
level of the imaginary.

References

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aesthetic: Essays in postmodern culture (pp. 126-134). Port Townsend, Washing-
ton: Bay Press.
FEUER, J. (1989). Reading Dynasty: Television and reception theory. South Atlantic
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FIRESTONE, S. (1972). The dialectic of sex. New York: Bantam.
FOUCAULT, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge (A. M. Sheridan Smith, Trans.).
New York: Pantheon.
FOUCAULT, M. (1978). The history of sexuality, Volume I (R. Hurley, Trans.). New York:
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7"Discourse analysis" usually refers to Foucault's interventions, particularly in his

The Archeology of Knowledge (1972) and The History of Sexuality, Volume I (1978).
Jacqueline Suter (1976) defines feminine discourse as "an ideological position from
which a subject 'speaks' (acts/interacts) within the social order. Delineating parameters
for what might constitute the feminine in cinematic representation may best be
approached by examining how discourses present themselves in a given text." Or, cf.
Claire Johnston's definition: "I use 'discourse'," she says, "to refer to a particular level
of 'speech' within a film attributable to a source (or more precisely a 'subject'-not to be
confused with a character in the film-and thus answers the question 'Who is speaking
here?'). It derives from the manner in which the textual system of the film operates.
Thus within a film there may be a variety of discourse, each having a different perspec-
tive on the action; though in classic Hollywood cinema, a male discourse is almost in-
variably dominant" (1975, p. 3).

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