Not/belonging as health promotion: The affective potentialities of human and non-human relationalities in mother-baby-assemblages

Eva Neely and Michaela Pettie

Social Science & Medicine, 2025, vol. 371, issue C

Abstract: Motherhood has life-long impacts on health and exacerbates health disparities. Birthing a baby changes life immensely with heightened affectivity and emotions posing risks and opportunities. Identity-focused maternal transition theory and dominant cultural narratives of neoliberal, nuclear, and heterosexual parenting have created a narrow framework within which to understand the responsibilities and challenges of motherhood. In this we paper propose an alternative path to theorising motherhood relationally through the concept of belonging-as-affect in mother-baby-assemblages. To achieve this we plug into posthuman feminism to explore mother-baby-assemblages as relational, embodied and affective sites of fleeting and enduring not/belonging. We develop a creative qualitative reviewing approach and draw on literature that examines motherhood and mothering across place, mobilities, people, bodies and things. We explore how tracing relationalities between human and non-human actants might help us learn about ‘sticky’ sites of not/belonging in mother-baby-assemblages as a more fluid way of understanding the journey into and through mother/parenthood. The sticky-ness of not/belonging as timebound glue offers insights into the vital emergence of maternal health and is articulated as a mode of inquiry for future work in this space. Our orientation to posthuman mothering works through porosity, permeability and vacillation by turning our attention to sites of affectivity, and tracing non/sticky not/belonging emerging in multiple and diverse pathways, embracing openness, and eliciting generosity towards collective parenting. Understanding belonging as emergent co-becoming may allow for hopeful and inclusive motherhoods that are diversely care-ing and care-full.

Keywords: Assemblage; Belonging; Motherhood; Posthuman feminism; Maternal health; Affect (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2025.117865

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