Eighteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

The arts move society to identify the social movements of the present as well as to help mold the future. While books like Jessica Valenti’s Why Have Kids? interrogate the myth of motherhood, critical theorists such as The Theorist’s Mother Andrew Marder in The Theorist’s Mother suggests mothers “constitute the defining limit of philosophy and critical theory.” Other theorists like Sophie Lewis in Full Surrogacy Now argues that the creation of children could be reconstituted through surrogacy. While these philosophers and critics argue the limits of motherhood, novelist and transwoman Torrey Peters places these philosophical positions into what she deems a “domestic novel” where “artistic form and politics could meet up. This paper refracts the ways in which Peters’ novel Detransition, Baby explores ultimate questions about the nature not only of the identity but of the social category of motherhood.