A Semiotic Ontology of Motherhood

With the help of C. S. Peirce’s semiotics, motherhood can be conceived as an immigrant identity: both involve a culturally and internally disruptive transition.

Using Peirce’s idea that memory constructs a semiotic picture of “the self,” Aisha Raees provides an exegesis of Peirce’s work and builds a picture of how perception and the active constitution of thought deliver a sense of identity dependent on memory as well as on the value and power of hope. In the semiotic movement of our minds, we find evidence of influences from previous events, histories, and arguments. Trauma, too, plays a role in the creation of self as process of memory. Just as immigrant identities are built through a rupture between past and future, motherhood too evolves in a culturally and internally disruptive transition that we can parse out using Peirce’s semiotic “self.” In both, memory forms the backdrop for abduction that requires hope toward a future world and self.

In developing an empowering conception of the ontological condition of motherhood, this book draws out how self can negotiate duality within identity in circumstances where belonging is not tied to physical place and how it unfolds both in the new community and in the ones left behind. In doing so, Raees clarifies the role for memory in Peirce’s philosophy, provides an account of how perception and the active constitution of thought deliver a sense of identity, and goes beyond Peirce to apply the metaphor of migration to the selfhood developed in motherhood.