An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Marika Rose (Combe Trust Fellow, 2025)
Mother Monster: Gender and creation in Hobbes’ Leviathan
For Hobbes, the original power of motherhood is derived not so much from gestation and birth as from the fact that it is the mother who decides whether to care for the child just born or to expose it, to leave it either to die or to be cared for by someone else. In accepting the care which is offered at its birth, the child contracts with its caregiver, consenting as it does so to a relationship of domination. For Hobbes, then, the care of the mother is the route via which the child enters into the social contract; a mirror image of Saidiya Hartman’s argument that the slave ship is the womb, the route via which enslaved Africans are delivered into social death. Having thus enabled the child’s entrance into contract and so into personhood, however, the personhood of the mother in Hobbes’ world is then disappeared via the contract of marriage into the personhood of the domineering father and the monstrous Leviathan, much as the maternal power of the goddess Tiamat in Babylonian creation narrative is swallowed up by the chaotic and tumultuous sea of the Genesis creation story. Drawing together these themes in Hobbes’ work – creation, gender, and the waters of chaos – will, I suggest, illuminate the relationship between gender, care, and the modern state structures for whose disorderly birth Hobbes played midwife.
Please join in-person, or click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/83015772676
Passcode: b1QpaAD7