Julia kristeva stabat mater rossini

This post is part of the Gender and Domination Course in OOPS.

In her 1977 essay “Stabat Mater,” Julia Kristeva prominently states, “A mother is a continuous separation, a division of the very flesh. And consequently a division of language — and it has always been so” (all quotations from essay reprinted in The Portable Kristeva, Columbia University Press, 2002).

front.13 June 2013 - SOAS

With emphasis on the woman-as-mother, it is through silence that a woman is detached from her voice as subject. The subject, for Kristeva, is the construction of identity that is assembled through language.

Through an act of speaking, similar to the Cartesian cogito, the self becomes self-aware and realized. Highlighting a woman’s “weakness of language,” however, Kristeva describes how a woman’s only true expression as an actualized entity is found in fulfilling her duties of being-as-mother through the release of milk and tears.

Kristeva positions the fate of woman, as experienced through medieval art depictions [PDF] Stabat Mater - Semantic Scholar PISAB