Alter-a Mater: The Evoking Figure of M-otherness:
Feminine/Feminist Landscapes through Rosi Braidotti’s Vision

Claudia Dell’Uomo d’Arme, Postdoc
Chercheuse associée – UMR Dicen IDF, Université Paris Nanterre    

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Abstract

This article offers an interdisciplinary cartography of contemporary feminist philosophy with Rosi Braidotti’s thought as a central reference, while proposing an original figure—Alter-a Mater—to address a persistent gap: feminist theory still lacks a concept that holds together motherhood & maternal spheres, alterity and otherness, as well as a posthuman inter-connected zoé perspective. Building on Braidotti’s bio-centred feminism and nomadic reasoning, I differentiate Alter-a Mater as a conceptual but mostly agentive figure that signifies the maternal as a threshold space. Through the critical device of Alter-a, multiple passages across identities, languages, species, and technologies become thinkable and practicable within arts and academic literature, emerging forms of reasoning, and socio-political design. My proposal converses with scholars such as Luisa Muraro, Adriana Cavarero, Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Derrida. Methodologically, Alter-a Mater reframes the female-feminine corps made by multi-positional natures. In my paper, they structurally transform and translate loss and vulnerability (trauma, repression, instrumentalisations of the maternal) into affirmative politics, pursuing those settings in which alliance-building across human and more-than-human assemblages. Conceptually, Alter-a Mater is rich in plural life yet narrowed by the maternal approach as the primitive relational infrastructure. Politically, Alter-a Mater foregrounds collective futurity by conjugating the maternal into a situated praxis of thresholding. In this lively archive, the critical travelling encounters several becoming-other patterns: for the nexus-infans, Alter-a imagines co-creative languages, based on care, love, and bodily thinking.

Keywords: Feminine subjectivity, motherhood, alterity, otherness, posthumanism, zoé, maternal ethics.