Matrixial Trans-subjectivity

‘A Sense of Myself as a Mother’: An Exploration of Maternal Fantasies in the Experience of ‘Circumstantial Childlessness’

“…A second theoretical resource that adds a further dimension to Deborah's 'sense of myself as a mother' and the maternal fantasies it entails is Ettinger's (2006aEttinger's ( , 2006b concept of the 'matrixial borderspace'; a 'space' Ettinger sees as a 'prototype' of Winnicott's 'transitional space' (Lichtenberg-Ettinger 1997, p. 392).…”

“…My intention is to try to make sense of aspects of Deborah's experience that seem -on face valueto be nonsensical. I read her words through the frames of Hollway's work about the development of a maternal subjectivity (Hollway 2015), and of Ettinger's concept of the 'matrixial' (Ettinger 2006b). I conclude by suggesting that 'fantasy mother' may be a dimension of motherhood that has an intense personal reality for circumstantially childless women, even though they have not embodied motherhood, and their 'maternity' is unseen and unrecognised by others in their social worlds.…”

Learning at the nano-level: Accounting for complexity in the internalization of secondary STEM teacher professional development

“…PD content is filtered through teacher subjectivities that are themselves born from previous teaching and learning experiences (Sparks & Loucks-Horsley, 1989;Stiles & Mundry, 2002), ranging from intersubjective encounters with colleagues and pupils to engagement within and through structural forces, such as discourse, policy, institutions, and economic constraints. Subjectivities become through the subtle operation of power: the self exerts influence upon the self, others exert reciprocal (although often asymmetrical) influence upon the teacher-as-subject, and structural forces produce constraints and allowances for the individual subject (Ettinger, 2006;Fore, 2013;Foucault, 2011). In other words, the subject becomes through moments of self-fashioning effort and intersubjective co-emergence, all of which occurs within a particular, and highly influential, milieu (Fore, 2013).…”

“…Drawing on the work of Guattari (1995), Foucault (1997), and Ettinger (2006) in the fields of subjectivity, ethics, and aesthetics, Fore (2013) offers a conceptual model of the learning and subjectivation process that may provide a way to account for the gaps in the Guskey (1986) and Clarke and Hollingsworth (2002) models. Although constructed through research on international development workers at a faith-based NGO in South Africa, Fore's (2013) model, originally called the Cycle of Faith, details a generalizable, four-phase process of subjective becoming as people are developed and, in turn, practice their development.…”

The Dead Mother, the Uncanny, and the Holy Ghost

“…105 Through the term Matrixial, she defined a new non-Oedipal dimension of subjectivity, which exists alongside the phallic order, and does not need to displace the other in order to be. 106 Ettinger argued that the feminine processes of separation from the mother cannot work through cuts and splits (castration) but through differentiation and differenciation-in-jointness and attunement of distance-in-proximity. In her view, psychoanalysis must bring into account the maternal shocks rather than matricide, and must recognize the three primary mother-phantasies of abandonment, devouring and notenoughness.…”