Smith (1999), while building upon Foucault’s concepts of discourse, similarly criticized his work for displacing the female subject as “passively cowed by texts” (p. 84), rather than as a knower and actor, actively engaged in mediating discourses. In their latest work, which explores in detail the relationships between mothering and schooling, Griffith and Smith (2005) explained:

We use the term discourse somewhat as Foucault does, though the notion of discourse that we work with here shifts from discourse conceived simply as forms of signification or meaning to emphasize discourse as the local practices of translocally organized social relations … people participating actively and embodied in a conversation mediated by written and printed materials. (2005, p. 34)

Along these lines, the event that opens this thesis, in which I attempt to turn an innocuous game with my daughter into a pedagogic activity, is what Griffith and Smith (2005) would name as a moment in the practice of the discourse of mothering. A key aspect of this moment, and one that is obscured in discourse analysis, is the agency of my daughter, Maya, who chooses to opt out of the game, and my own agency in choosing to explore the meaning of the moment. And so while we may not “cower” to mothering discourses, they do shape our relationship as mother and daughter, and indeed our respective identities as a mother orienting her daughter toward school literacy, and as a daughter wanting to make her own choices about how we spend our time together.

Thus, a common concern surrounding Foucault’s work within feminist theory is that the over-extension of social constructivist approaches has led to greater attention to the representations of motherhood than to the lived experiences of mothering, and the ways in which mothering discourses are negotiated in everyday life by women, men and children. One response to this problem can be found in what O’Reilly (2003) identifies as a distinction between the institution of motherhood and the experiences of mothering. As noted earlier, this distinction was introduced by Adrienne Rich in her ground-breaking treatise Of Woman Born (1976). For Rich, the experience of mothering refers to the multiple subjectivities associated with mothering. The institution of motherhood is characterized by dominant discourses and social practices of how “normal” mothers and families should feel and behave and is accompanied by social policies that assume and reproduce these discourses.