This paper analyses the ethics of motherhood in a socially distributed cognition framework, based on its depiction in two contemporary autotheoretical texts, Vanessa Springora’s Le consentement (The Consent, 2020) and Shumona Sinha’s L’autre nom du bonheur était français (The Other Name of Happiness Was French, 2022). In Lauren Fournier’s terminology (2022), Springora and Sinha’s texts are autotheories, commingling autobiographical insights and philosophical considerations to explore topics of social and political relevance in a project rooted in and verging on activist practices. While Springora questions the notion of consent in the Parisian society of the 1980s based on her early adolescence experience of an intimate relationship with a famous writer in his 50s, Sinha draws on her own experience of migration, translingualism and writing to address issues such as racism, xenophobia, interculturality, the place of feminism in the contemporary world and the political dynamics of today’s societies. Drawing on Martha Nussbaum’s ethical criticism, this paper proposes a multilayered understanding of the apparently marginal role that the writers’ mothers play in these texts, examining both its clinical and its social implications. These texts show that although mothers as subjects were absent from philosophical discussions until the 1980s and limited to the status of objects of prescriptive morality, it is important to demystify motherhood and build frameworks in which mothers are not exempt from their status of moral agents whose actions shape not only the intramental landscapes of their children, but also become embedded in the functioning of the society around them.

In the light of the recently-coined concepts of “autotheory” (Fournier 2022) and “transbiography” (Mistreanu 2021 and 2022; Freyermuth 2023), this paper investigates the author’s intention to construct, deconstruct or destroy the figure of the mother. Our approach is based on a comparative method drawing mainly on autotheorethical and transbiographical writing and fosucing on the relationship between literature, film, and photography (Lazar 2021).

Proclaiming that she had "too many mothers", Nelly Arcan depicts the interplay between the mother’s presence and her absence, describing the maternal figure as a worm ("une larve"). On a similar note, the French writer Emma Marsante illustrates in her first book the same strange ("étrange") mother, distant from her child, "cette maman-là est du bois dormant dont on fait les mortes". Likewise, the artist Sophie Calle's creations commingle literature, life and visual arts. In her Autobiographies, Calle uses both photography and writing, being at the same time the narrator and the subject of her work, in which the presence-absence of the maternity occupies a central place. Maternity also permeates her other artistic projects, for instance in Rachel, Monique (2006), the author holds artistic funerals to her mother, while Voir la mer (2015) is based on the assonance, in French, between the words "mer" (sea) and "mère" (mother). Motherhood, life-writing and autobiographic creations will thus be discussed through the prism of contemporary literature and art, focusing on the figure of the mother in de(con)struction as a means of exploring the boundaries between literature, reality and visual representations.

Navigating the boundaries between woman and mother, this study addresses the role of women as mothers in literature written in Western Europe by authors with an immigrant background, examining how in the works analysed depictions of motherhood intersect with societal expectations within African socio-cultural milieux. The views of Adrianne Rich and Obioma Nnaemeka in particular are used to draw a distinction between motherhood as a social institution and mothering as a profoundly introspective feeling. While the former is a product of patriarchal societal structures, the latter relates to the feelings and experiences of a mother towards her own child(ren).

Grounded on the presumptions made above, this study sets out to investigate the ways in which modern fiction written by women of African descent demystifies the idea that mothers are inherently maternal. In more detail, it is shown how the novels The Belly of the Atlantic written by the French-Senegalese, Fatou Diome, and Imagine This, published by the British-Nigerian, Sade Adeniran, question African gendered expectations and demonstrate that motherhood is more of a mindset than an innate trait. Through a comparative approach, this study thus highlights how French and English-speaking female writers delve into sensitive issues such as unwelcome pregnancy, child abandonment, and alienation to dismantle idealised views of maternal figures and roles.