Writing the Desire that Fire Bore: Emergent Motherhood in Hélène Cixous's The Book of Promethea

Understood as a socially expected and historically significant event in most societies, motherhood signifies women’s adulthood, a time of life shaped by matrimony and child-rearing within heteropatriarchy. Motherhood may be a cause for celebration for women who identify with their procreative role; however, as a normative institution it limits the range of our understanding of potential maternal experiences. In the face of such oppressive maternal codes, I propose an emergent motherhood: a nonbiological, nonessentialist, and inherently queer concept that challenges fundamental assumptions about maternity and empowers women to sound their own politics of procreative desire through embodied practices of writing. I anchor my argument on the French psychoanalytic feminist standpoint that exposes the unconscious role of language in women’s ideological suppression, particularly as explicated in Hélène Cixous’s work. I take Cixous’s The Book of Promethea—primarily a work of love relishing the complexities of relationships—as an exemplar of a woman writing with the body to experience the creative, political, and poetic joys of linguistic expression that an emergent motherhood offers.