Liberatory Motherhood: A Framework & Praxis for Caring and Scholaring Otherwise in the Neoliberal Academy

Bhavika Sicka

Gender, Work and Organization, 2025, vol. 32, issue 5, 1834-1849

Abstract: This article contributes to the emergent literature on motherhood in neoliberal higher education by proposing liberatory motherhood as a theoretical framework and praxis to deconstruct and reconstruct motherhood in the neoliberal academy. The author, an early‐career immigrant woman scholar of color, uses feminist autoethnography to critically examine the disempowering, disembodying, and departicularizing effects of neoliberal subjectivation on motheracademics, foregrounding her lived experiences of caregiving in her analysis. She approaches academic motherhood through a prismatic lens of a pluralistic feminist rhetorical analysis that emphasizes interrelationality, tracing her experiences of caring and producing otherwise as a way to signal opportunities to reembody motherhood in the academy. She finds mothering and othering to be mutually reinforcing in the academy and argues for rehumanizing care through alternative (re)productivity. She offers liberatory motherhood as an emancipated and emancipatory motherhood that draws from queer, decolonial, and other motherhoods, reflecting on its potential to further scholarship and practices geared toward reformulating academic subjectivities and emancipating the academy from coercions set by the market.

Date: 2025
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