Abstract
When women embark on a journey of self-discovery, which often bears strong similarities to the psychoanalytic process, they eventually reach the realm of the M(O)ther. In some cases the latter is a heterotopic place, both an actual place in which women contemplate the complexities of their maternal attachments, and a literary/metaphorical locus with which women express the contemporary shifts in the maternal iconography and the representation of femininity. Combining Lacanian psychoanalysis and the Foucauldian notion of heterotopia, this paper discusses the role of the heterotopic maternal place in three contemporary Greek novels arguing that such a place has the potential to become a permanent ethical locus for contemporary women. Accommodating both the traversal of fantasies and symptoms and the departure from the conventional hierarchical order, it inaugurates a critical attitude towards the world and oneself by means of a transgressive or 'traversarial' ordering.
How to Cite
Voela, A., (2010) “Locating the M(o)ther”, Studies in the Maternal 2(1), 1-10. doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/sim.99
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