1. Colonial production of bodies through public health promotion: whiteness, normality, utility

In this section, I show how public health promotion in colonialism is directed at the production of bodies. The maternal body plays a critical role in this production because of its necessarily productive nature through reproduction, and because of its role in facilitating the healthy development of future citizens. This figures the maternal in terms of utility and this utility is promoted through responsibilization of mothers for the health of their children.

I start with the premise that “the maternal” is a racializing code in colonialism. This is to say that its transmission, its possibility and its practice are instrumental to the racializing project of colonialism, which takes whiteness as its center. To say that whiteness is the center is to articulate that whiteness is akin to a dispositif of normality; to put it in more symbolic terms, whiteness is the line which colonial citizens must pace, and their whiteness is measured according to their divergence from it. Al-Saji raises the distinction between whiteness’s inside and outside as one of the normal and abnormal. In a reading of McWhorter’s account of whiteness’s association with normality in biopolitical racism, Al-Saji writes:

This means that the construction of the maternal body as the white-normal concerns a meticulous management of—policing—both ways of normality and the construction of its outside, its abnormality. This policing, I later show, is not only through external surveillance and management through public health prescriptions, but also through the habituation of mothers so that they self-police, through meticulous self-surveillance and management.

Insofar as it concerns “normality,” racism is not merely discursive. The perpetuation of the colonial state depends on the actual material production of bodies; it is invested literally in the growing, birthing, and disciplining of bodies, which are to later become citizens and economic units for the measure of Commonwealth prosperity. Disability may thus be understood as the specter that haunts maternal public health messaging, because the recommendations are for the optimization of biological, cognitive, and psychosocial development of the individual as a future contributor, qua citizens, to the reproduction of the colonial state. Through the racially neutralized normative schema of the gestational body and its necessity for the production of an ostensibly “healthy” infant/child, a pathological body is instituted. This pathological body is any body which deviates from the normal/normative of the body politic, and is therefore not useful to the colonial state. George Yancy, addressing what he refers to as the “value-creating power” of the racially neutral normative body schema, writes that it disciplines and shapes black bodies/selves in such a manner that they come to “discover” the “truth” that their moral and physical deformation is inherent (Yancy Reference Yancy and Yancy2004, 121; see also Weiss Reference Weiss2015). Joel Michael Reynolds observes (Reference Reynolds2022, 60) that “Deaf/disability studies likens disability experiences to that of race, while race theorists describe their own oppression as disability.” Race and disability are structurally connected frames of reference, because racialization involves a judgment of ableness or capacity. Shelley Tremain, analysing Foucault’s claim of “racism against the abnormal” alongside Ladelle McWhorter, describes the disability dispositif as one that works with the racialization process to mark bodies as abnormal. Tremain (Reference Tremain2017, 71) writes that “within modern racist regimes of power, nonwhite skin and non-Christian religious and cultural affiliation are marked as abnormal, but so too are (for example) low IQ test scores, seizures, cleft palates, intersex, trans identity, and same-gender coupling.” Pathologization is symbiogenetic with health: in producing discourse about healthy behavior and bodies, we necessarily produce a reverse account about pathological behavior and pathological bodies.

The construction of the white maternal body as the maternal body requires the management of the maternal itself, as well as the assured management of transgressive, non-conforming maternal bodies. This indicates that the maternal body which is the subject of policy is a racial body rather than a neutral anybody. Public health promotion therefore does not target all mothers, despite its generalizing discourses; it must be understood as expressing the state’s investment in whiteness, and thus in the white-normal mother insofar as she embodies this whiteness. Other public health directives can then target any population failing to embody the white maternal (see McWhorter Reference McWhorter2009, 237–38). To this point, “pathologization” of the Indigenous condition, including motherhood, works as a form of silencing (keeping outside the mode of representation): in a joint submission to the Inquiry into missing and murdered First Nations women and children by Sisters Inside and the Institute for Collaborative Race Research (McQuire et al. 2022, 12), Amy McQuire speaks of pathologization as “the ‘acceptable’ discourse that is most palatable to white agendas and white witnesses.”Footnote ⁴ This suggests that mothers who transgress the norms of the white maternal body are rendered, sometimes in advance, by public health policy as unusable for the project of nation-building.

Given my use of the maternal body rather than simply the maternal, and on the basis that “whiteness” may be misconstrued as a reference to a phenotype, it is important to make clear what I mean by bodies that transgress from the white maternal body. Frantz Fanon (Reference Fanon1967, 32) wrote “This racism that aspires to be rational, individual, genotypically and phenotypically determined, becomes transformed into cultural racism. The object of racism is no longer the individual man but a certain form of existing.” Whiteness is the only possible way of existing within colonialism, and thus colonialism is the regime for the sustenance of its own particular form of existing. This particularity is constructed not only based on what is included, but also based on what it is not, or what is its constitutive outside. Colonialism requires this constitutive outside and so must keep it out but not only by mere social forces, for social forces are not merely social but are also material. This means that what happens conceptually, socially, and politically also transmits and is transmitted materially. It is in this sense of the material that this paper refers to the white maternal body. The direction to health, the direction of public resources, the regimes of intervention qua disciplining and policing are ways of organizing living bodies; and since the central concern for maternal public health messaging is reproduction and the production of healthful—understood as “normal” “able” bodies—then public health policy’s interest is in bodies and not subjects. The commitment of colonial politics to the cerebral rationality of life depends, unironically, on the management of unruly bodies.

In so-called Australia, it is not hard to see why: the declaration of terra nullius requires the erasure of any remnant signs of those who dwelled in these lands before they were colonized. Madi Day writes of Australia as a settler colonial state, as distinguished from colonial, as a process of “actual” “elimination.” Because post-colonizing is not a stable static condition, but an ongoing process of relationship, it involves positioning of subjectivities in differential relationships according to the goals of the colonial project (Moreton-Robinson Reference Moreton-Robinson2015). To this point, an important distinction Day makes to the recontextualizing of Lugones’s colonial/modern gender system to the so-called Australian context is the distinction between colonialism—a term used by Lugones—and settler colonialism. Day writes:

This elimination is by many means—not only actual, but social, cultural, and ideological. An important factor in this process of supersession is the construction of bodies, and the maintaining of some bodies outside of the mode of representation, in effect eliminating them from the discourse. Silencing, McQuire writes quoting David B. MacDonald (Reference MacDonald2021), “makes the dispossession of land, the violence inflicted on Indigenous bodies, languages, and cultures largely irrelevant in how contemporary settler society is understood” (McQuire et al. 2022, 12).

By engaging in an analysis of public health messaging as a mechanism of gendering, I hope to take some initial steps to show how the primary problem of public health intervention into the bodies of women is not simply its intrusive management of women’s bodies, but its construction of the white maternal body as the “normal” body, and its constitutive outside as the abnormal to be targeted by different oppressive measures. This construction is a mechanism toward the end of supersession, because it signifies political investment into progenitor relationships and thus “bloodline descendancy.”Footnote ⁵

Public health promotion is highly prescriptive because normality is predicated on the prescription of a particular way of life, and the prohibition of other ways of life. This is demonstrable in the extremely prescriptive nature of maternal public health messaging, which intervenes even into the ordinary daily communicative exchanges between children and their caregivers. For instance, NSW Health offers suggested scripts for dialoguing with one’s 6–12-month-old, including:

These scripts demonstrate intensive and intrusive interest into the otherwise private, personal exchanges between a caregiver and a child, prescribing very specific forms of exchange as well-suited to the cognitive and linguistic development of a child.Footnote ⁷ That a caregiver is instructed through scripts to interact with their child in certain ways indicates a very restrictive conception of the caregiver–child relation and dictates how they ought to spend their time together. It accordingly restricts the meaningfulness of the relation to one in which the caregiver’s role is to be an instrument for the child’s healthy development. This emphasis on the optimization of development displaces other possibilities of the relation and devalues non-instrumental caregiver–child relations and those cases in which some forms of development are unobtainable or meaningless.Footnote ⁸

The problem is far greater than the cultural specificity of the prescriptions but lies with the extent of intervention and prescription as forms of control. This form of public health promotion directs even the most minute interactions such as how one puts one’s infant to sleep, or how one spends ordinary time connecting with their child, a connection would otherwise be imagined as private and protected from state presence. To make even these spaces targets for intervention suggests that the production of bodies through public health relies on a habituation of individuals that is so thorough that it reaches even into their private and personal interactions. If the messaging is to be ideally followed, then the individual caregiver enacts it multiple times daily such that they embody it as habit.

Habit is fundamental to the way in which the embodied subject seamlessly self-produces themselves and the bodies in their care. Helen Ngo describes the transmission of white supremacy through bodily habits (2022), arguing that white supremacy transpires as a banality, a term borrowed from Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” according to which evil transpired not as a matter of strategy or perniciousness, but according to seemingly mundane and organized thoughtlessness. What makes white supremacy and its racist habits so normal is its own whiteness—where whiteness indicates normality, as earlier shown. As many have argued, whiteness is itself invisible and unseeable (Frankenberg Reference Frankenberg1993; Sullivan Reference Sullivan2006; Ahmed Reference Ahmed, Alloa, Kaushik and Chouraqui2019); after all, that which is unremarkable is that which is normal, and that which is normal is that which has become habitual. The unremarkable character of colonial violence underpins the political culture of Australia: one that, Ngo remarks, “refuses to see First Nations communities as having any epistemic, political, or legal authority; that refuses to treat problems of Indigenous incarceration, deaths in custody, massive health and wealth disparities with the urgency they demand” (Reference Ngo2022, 10).

Ngo argues that the banality of white supremacy transpires because our bodily habits and ways of being sustain it. From Arendt’s assertion that “most evil is done by people who never made up their mind to be either bad or good” (Reference Arendt1971, 438) arises the demand to consider how evil can, as Ngo puts it, “reside within the plain, ordinariness of socio-political life, and second, its arising from the failure to extract oneself from the pernicious dogma of the day” (Reference Ngo2022, 6–7).

This failure to extract oneself from the dogma of the day may be, in part, because habit is cultivated through affective investment in the practices of mothering. Indeed, the dogma of the day with respect to mothering is signified by responsibilization of mothers for the health of their children, and the praise they receive when their child appears to be “doing well.” Arendt’s treatise on the “banality of evil” is a rethink of moral responsibility. Reading Arendt, Judith Butler writes that standard approaches to thinking responsibility assume “that some set of actions should ideally be taken, and that the failure to act in certain ways is a failure of responsibility.” In Butler’s view, not only does this obscure institutional responsibility, but it also produces a kind of narcissistic preoccupation with one’s own moral standing. This individualizes responsibility, leading to the equivocation of one’s (or one’s child’s) well-being with fulfillment of their moral obligation. It makes responsibility inward-looking, cast in terms of personal (or maternal) virtue. Mothers are consequently framed as good moral actors for enacting health messaging. Consistent with Arendt’s reading of Eichmann, this breeds the kind of blind moral compliance to the present political regime, because one looks no further than one’s own situation within one’s own household, rather than to the conditions which produce suffering for others.Footnote ⁹ This inward-looking form of moral responsibility is exacerbated by the intrusive and intensive nature of these directives, because they demand preoccupation with what would otherwise be mere moments in the caring relationship; for instance with how much and what one might or ought to say when out on a walk with one’s child. This form of preoccupation with self-vigilance is a habit of self-surveillance; in it, one becomes preoccupied with what one is doing and what one ought to do to optimally care for one’s own child.

Thus, for health promotion to be effective, it must be continuous with the way that the embodied subject imagines itself in general life. This expresses the basic phenomenological commitment that the meaningfulness of any given action is derived from its emergence within a world. Rosalyn Diprose writes that “meaning is both instituted (dependent upon being ‘exposed to’ an already meaningful world) and instituting (involves ‘initiation’ of the new, the opening of ‘a future’)” (Reference Diprose2010, n.p. original emphasis). This world is not only historical situatedness, but thrownness, an existential structure according to which one is affectively invested and involved in their cultural and political situation.

2. Naturalizing sex, naturalizing motherhood: domesticity as colonial mechanism

As I have said, the bodily subject of public health messaging enacts this messaging only insofar as it is meaningful to them. In the ordinary sense, we might envisage this to be because of a crude notion of maternal care, according to which mothers simply aim to do their best for their children; but this notion rhetorically manifests the responsibilization produced by the construction of the maternal that I presently analyze. Rather the individual maternal bodily subject willingly enacts health messaging because of a range of colonial mechanisms that construct gender in terms of the maternal, and this construction facilitates a naturalizing of maternal responsibility. In this section, I show that motherhood is naturalized through a schema of colonial mechanisms: the naturalization of sex, colonial notions of domesticity and the private household, and the nuclear family structure. By offering a historical—qua genealogical—account of how these interpretations have been mechanized in colonialism both generally, and specifically through the colonization of so-called Australia, I show how articulations of the maternal are contingent and the result of colonial power.Footnote ¹⁰ This counters the dehistoricizing tendency of colonial knowledge-making practices, which obscures how the prevalent notion of the maternal is rooted in these mechanisms of colonial nation-building. Following that, I will show how maternal public health messaging subsequently functions as colonial power to control dominant populations through their habituation, as well as to justify increased intervention into Indigenous and other marginalized mothers and caregiving structures.

Naturalizing sexual dimorphism is both an output and mechanism of colonialism; part of this naturalization is a dehistoricization of sex to present it as an essential biological category. This dehistoricization has the effect of obscuring that ostensible knowledge about sex and sexuality is the outcome of conflicts over power, including material conflicts over the organization of labor and reproduction. As the central and predominant category for making sense of identity and social norms in colonized worlds, binary gender did not have the same significance to uncolonized groups but came to be imposed as a mechanism of colonial power. Oyěwùmí writes that “Western dominance in the documentation and interpretation of the world … facilitated by the West’s global material dominance” (Reference Oyěwùmí1997, 32) makes binary gender appear where it did not exist. As an imposition of the European gender system, Oyěwùmí writes that “the creation of ‘women’ as a category was one of the first accomplishments of the colonial state” (Reference Oyěwùmí1997, 123–25), as a definition of “those who do not have power; those who cannot participate in the public arena” (Reference Oyěwùmí1997, 34). This reveals how the category of “woman” functions beyond the organization of sexual and reproductive labor to a designation from and to men, thus organizing relations and duties between men and women. Accordingly, the colonial gender system is not limited to the mere organization of reproduction but serves to subordinate women in the broader scope of life, organizing their social relations among each other, primarily according to their relations to men.Footnote ¹¹

Of the ongoing colonial project in Australia, Carlson, Kennedy, and Farrell (Reference Carlson, Kennedy, Farrell, Walter, Kukutai, Gonzales and Henry2023, 416) describe the “fictive naturalness” that heteronormative inscriptions of precolonial sexual and gender identities enjoy under colonization, and the confinement of a “spectrum of Indigenous genders and sexualities” by Western heterosexualist categories. The naturalizing of heterosexualist categories is mechanized by the commitment to essentialism characteristic of colonial knowledge-making, which Moreton-Robinson argues is a form of strategic essentialism that enables the colonizer to make itself “the definitive measure of what it means to be human and what does and what does not constitute knowledge” (2015, 12).

A key mechanism of the dominance of the colonial worldview is the mythicization of Europe, and non-European cultures as antecedent and primitive. It is broadly agreed that Europe’s status as the capitalist centre of the world was pivotal to its colonizing of the rest of the world. J. M. Blaut writes that colonialism is the process of a “Eurocentric diffusionism,” based on numerous principles, two of which are: that “Europe naturally progresses and modernises” and that “Non-Europe naturally remains stagnant, traditional, unchanging” (Reference Blaut1993, 260). Blaut explains that the centralization of European intellectual and spiritual life as the dominant modes of interpretation of the world secures the ideology that Europe owes nothing to the non-European world, even if the process of colonization is sustained by the capital exploitation of “non-European labor” (Reference Blaut1993, 261). Developing Anibal Quijano’s notion of primitivity, Maria Lugones explains that Europe was “mythically conceived as preexisting colonial, global, capitalism” and that this mythical conception set up other human groups to be “mythically conceived not as dominated through conquest … but as an anterior stage in the history of the species, in [a] unidirectional path” (Reference Lugones2007, 192). This means that highly complex organizations of Quijano’s named four basic elements—sex, labor, collective authority, and intersubjectivity—and the conflicts involved in these organizations, remained obscured in dominant understandings of how the modern, colonized world came to exist (Lugones Reference Lugones2007). This obscuration is instrumental to the dominance of a naturalized understanding of sex/gender, and thus the secondary obscuration of how these categories impact women of color and white women differentially according to the organization of relations of reproductive and sexual labor. Lugones counters Quijano’s classification of sex as a basic element; she writes that he “assumes patriarchal and heterosexual understandings” of sex, which primarily naturalize sexual dimorphism and the heterosexual, patriarchal structuring of sexual relations (Reference Lugones2007, 189–90).Footnote ¹²

Indeed, one major contribution of Quijano is his account of how the sexual enslavement of women of color was built on the fidelity of women to their sexually free men. This Eurocentric structuring of sexual relations ensured access of white men to women of color, while establishing the bourgeois family unit. McClintock observes similarly that “sexual purity emerged as a controlling metaphor for racial, economic and political power” (Reference McClintock2013, 47). This coheres with MacKay’s (Reference MacKay2021) observation that the instrumentalization of motherhood for health promotion mobilizes the sexual objectification of mothers qua women to the white heteropatriarchal gaze. Sexual enslavement of some women therefore is rooted in sexual purity, which is figured in terms of marriage, as a colonial and spiritual institution. This explains why the naturalization of gender has accordingly been associated with the displacement of spiritual plurality, and the de-centering of iterations of “Mother Nature” as spiritual being, in favor of one supreme male being, in a triadic relation of Father, Son, and Spirit. The spirit, in Western Christianity, is said to be “borne” of the relation between Father and Son, as the potency and spirit of that relation, centering masculine progenitive relationships.

The forced induction of Western religious practices, O’Sullivan (Reference O’Sullivan2021, 3) writes, functions to “exclude and demonise relationships that fall outside of linear family structures” where linear entails “progenitor to direct issue” (Reference O’Sullivan2021, 2). O’Sullivan demonstrates how gender assignation at birth—as a matter of naturalization of gender—is an imposition of the European family system on Indigenous organization of relationships to decimate kinship structures outside of the progenitor relationship, including ancestral relationships. Through the naturalization of gender, family relationships are commodified as means to the continuation of the colonial state: they are taken as instruments to ensure the reproduction of future colonial citizens. The nuclear family entails a mother who is a woman, a father who is a man, and a child, who is genetically related, and is subsequently “coded male or female to ensure a continuation of the gender roles assigned and the commodified reproduction of their future descendants” (O’Sullivan Reference O’Sullivan2021, 1). This privileging of genetic progenitive relation—or perhaps “bloodline descendancy”—is associated by O’Sullivan with what Moreton-Robinson identifies as “possessive investment in whiteness” (Moreton-Robinson Reference Moreton-Robinson2015, 76, cited in O’Sullivan Reference O’Sullivan2021, 2).

Insofar as genetic progenitive relations are privileged in the colonial system, maternal responsibility becomes naturalized. This is because the maternal relation gets interpreted through biology, rather than in terms of social, affective, or material labor of care.

The private domestic household, as an outcome of colonial relations to land as property, supports the protection of nuclear marriage. Childhood becomes centered in this domestic sphere, as do progenitive rather than economic relationships. Faulkner (Reference Faulkner2016, 53) shows how “home” and “child” become highly sentimentalized notions that are mutually embedded, under which the white child becomes a project of “hope of a future white Australia” (55).

This process accompanied the feminization of the household, according to which women as wives and mothers became both property and resource, supported by public health messaging as early as the mid-to-late 1800s. At the time, chief among public health concerns was infectious disease, and so “germ theory” through the “domestic science movement” emphasized the role of housewives and mothers in maintaining vigilance over the hygiene of their home as a way of optimizing the health of the household (Tomes Reference Tomes1998).Footnote ¹³ Pala and Kenny (Reference Pala and Kenny2024, 4) link this earlier cultivation of hypervigilance about germ health and hygiene to more recent public health messaging about the maternal gut microbiome, moving vigilance from the home to the body itself. Colonial Australia was formed in response to germ-phobias. Faulkner writes that

Accordingly, the British Social Hygiene Council’s Propaganda Committee, responsible for imperial education of the British colonizing state, expressed several goals, among which was the “promot[ion of] an attitude of mind towards questions of Sex that attaches individual responsibility to the exercise of the racial instinct,” and to “emphasise the responsibility of the community and the individual for preserving or improving, by educative and social measures, the quality of future generations” (Bashford Reference Bashford2003, 173). Women’s citizenship is formed according to their contribution as mothers responsible for the cultivation of future generations.

The priority of genetic progenitive descendancy takes the form of a profound investment in heteroromantic domestic relationships, both in the law—for example the federal interest in protecting marriage as a social relationship having privilege over other forms of relationship and dependency—and in the organization of land and property.Footnote ¹⁴ Moreton-Robinson associates the figure of the home as possession with the post-colonizing state. Noting how Australia’s white possession and power is constructed through the logics of capitalism, she argues that the possession of private property is contingent on the denial of Indigenous sovereignty, writing that:

Buying a home figured as the Great Australian dream and a capstone achievement for colonizer-settlers and migrant-settlers alike, and a story of “the hard work and determination of these early migrants that developed the nation” (5). The family home also figures centrally in the imaginary of Australian colonialism: Patricia Grimshaw and Graham Willett (Reference Grimshaw, Willett, Grieve and Grimshaw1981, 152) “the Australian family was born modern,” as the development of the “nuclear family” (an economic unit defined by very narrow kinship terms) had already taken place in Europe as a precursor to settlement.

Women’s citizenship as mothers and migrant citizenship may be alike on these terms: rewarded for playing their part in the colonial project and for playing it well. Reynolds (2022, 59) describes medical “glance” of the nationalist agenda as a process of migration management, one “which took those ‘unusable’ for nation-building and left out or sent back those ‘unusable’ for nation-building.” This discourse of hard work and achievement is founded on the colonial English system of proprietary rights, and the non-extension of those rights to Indigenous people through the legal fiction of terra nullius, as well as through migration assessments based on the degree of “European appearance,” as Moreton-Robinson (Reference Moreton-Robinson2015, 5) notes of the former Australian ambassador to the Philippines in the 1970s explaining that “mixed race applicants would be approved [for migration to Australia] if they were 75 percent European in appearance,” a calculation based on facial measurements, checking skin color, and “gaz[ing] into their eyes”.

The figure of the private family home is thus sanitized of the violence of colonial dispossession. The family home as a private structure functions as not only a mechanism for the organization of gender, but through imposition of British proprietary law alienates women from each other and from extended, nonheterosexualist organizations for caregiving; thus O’Sullivan writes that the colonial system “asserts a reproductive kinship, and denies a place for relationships outside of linear reproduction [such as adoptive, foster or distant relative care] which then becomes framed as a break in the integrity of the idea of family” (2021, 2). This alienation of women from other women and from extended kin has the outcome of further centralizing responsibility for caregiving with mothers, who end up in a situation of being materially and ideologically isolated in their caregiving practices through the walls of the private home and the ideological distinction between the mother’s care and the care given by others who now must “enter” the home from the outside.

3. The making of the white maternal body: docility-utility and institutional habituation

I have thus far shown that the maternal body is a privileged site for the construction of gender, as well as for the construction of bodies because of its unique relationship to reproduction. As Foucault and others have contended, the naturalization of an association of sex with gender and heterosexual desire is indeed a cultural construct with the goal of state interest in reproduction (Foucault Reference Foucault1980; Butler Reference Butler, Benhabib and Cornell1987; Diprose Reference Diprose1994). This interest in reproduction makes the gestational body the most crucial site for the naturalization of sex, since it is the site of reproduction. This suggests that the enactment of the maternal can also be a site for abolitionist praxis, since the maternal is the crux of heterosexualist white patriarchy. Having established that the naturalization of sex is a mechanism of the state targeted at its reproductive objectives, I now show how the construction of the white maternal body transpires materially through bodies through public health promotion.

In Society Must Be Defended, the publication of a series of lectures he gave in 1975–76, Foucault argues that a scientific notion of race arises in late eighteenth-century England as a consequence of the intersecting emergence of disciplinary knowledge and regulatory mechanisms of population control. A key aspect of Foucault’s thought is the politicization of ontology. As I showed in the previous section, the naturalization of sex and sexuality is achievement through their dehistoricization, which figures them as essential rather than historical contingent categories. Biological understandings of sex, being dehistoricized, de-particularize knowledge of sex and reproduction; this obscures the way that institutional understandings work in the interests of colonial power. Genealogy therefore counters this dehistoricization in order to reveal the way that medical or scientific concepts do not refer to natural phenomena that merely exist awaiting discovery but instead denote political relations of power as their effects (Oksala Reference Oksala2010, 450). This “politicization” of ontology, in Oksala’s terms, necessitates a denaturalization of scientific and medical knowledge and reorients the question toward the political work that the knowledge does. Foucault’s genealogical method is not intended to merely produce a genealogical account of how things come to be in the ordinary sense of genealogy; instead, his approach embeds within it the ontological claim that discourse does not simply mediate or negotiate reality, for instance, by representing only one part of it or representing it imprecisely, but rather that discourses constitute realities.

Discourses do not simply constitute our worldview or beliefs about reality, but they also configure material realities, among them the body as a material lived subjectivity. It is therefore not the case only that messaging directed at the gestational body and at the maternal in early childhood articulate a discourse about the maternal and about the life of the child, but in their incitement to enactment institute a range of ontological “facts” and bodies habituated to those ostensible facts.

Foucault’s description of the docile body is one in which the body is positioned as an object and target of disciplinary power. He writes, “A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved” (Reference Foucault1977, 136). This did not refer to a mass of bodies; for its success, disciplinary techniques had to consider “the scale of control,” not disciplining bodies “wholesale” but ‘retail,’ individually; of exercising a subtle coercion (Reference Foucault1977, 137). Institutional discourses as power discourses undertake disciplinary techniques in order to form bodies through a docility-utility frame: as the body becomes more obedient—docile—it so becomes more useful, and the reverse is also true (Reference Foucault1977, 138). Disciplinary mechanisms make “possible the meticulous control of the operations of the body, which assured the constant subjection of its forces and imposed upon them a relation of docility-utility” (Reference Foucault1977, 137).

Disciplining opens bodies up to a second register of modern/liberal societies: biopower, a register that can be enriched by this distinction between colonialism and settler-colonialism.Footnote ¹⁵ Biopower refers to the idea that modernity is characterized by a biopolitics of the “species body”: whereas intervention through public health discourse may refer to individual bodies as disciplining, this disciplining is encompassed by biopower, which signifies a broader regime comprising what Foucault refers to as “interventions and regulatory controls” that exercise the “power to foster life or disallow it” in the interests of maintaining, not so much individual bodies, but the “biological existence of a population” (Foucault Reference Foucault1980, 137–39). Among these are public health, regulation of heredity, and preemption of risk, but there are others. As a mechanism of biopower, a key function of disciplining of bodies into docility-utility is the transformation of disordered bodies into “ordered multiplicities” (148), a classification of individuals according to taxonomies under which we can generate knowledge about them (148) that supports greater docility-utility.

This signifies an important difference between women within and outside of the mode of representation, while accommodating their mutual oppression: for women within the mode of representation, this can constitute their availability for exploitation as gestators, potential gestators, and caregivers, but for women outside of the mode of representation, they and their progeny are not even considered useful—thus Day’s distinction between the colonial and settler-colonial states: within the latter, there is simply no place for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women.

Foucault did not see this disciplinary power as merely negative, but simply as a matter of how subjectivities are constructed. In the case of white maternal bodies and white children, this disciplining might in principle promote healthful behaviors, but it does in any case shape their subjectivities and construct the racialized bodies of its outside—those that are left out of the mode of representation, or who cannot engage or achieve, as well as those who willfully resist enactment of the white maternal that public health promotion incites.

More crucially, insofar as public health messaging articulates an ideal of caregiving and the life of the child centered around the idealization of health and development, it prescribes a particular way of life and of existence that is totalizing. As I have said that this is not merely discursive, but a material process in which individual subjects actively participate, we ought to be vigilant to the totalizing power of public health messaging as it regards maternal and child health. As encompassed by “biopower,” public health messaging that is to the advantage of some bodies is advantageous to the project of the biological existence of a “particular” population. Docile bodies are not merely passive, but also engage actively through their utility, and their participation in disciplining through observation and surveillance.

This active engagement in the cultivation of one’s own docility can be understood in terms of habituation; this not only affirms the body’s own existential dynamics, but also makes the body a site of resistance to this colonial construction. Through habituation, embodiment subtends institution. Institution is a dynamic process through which institutions are constituted by the various practices taken up by their inhabitants—the instituting-instituted—who take up and enact new forms and meanings. This is why embodiment subtends institution. Bodily habituation is, to put it in Butler’s words, a “stylized mode of repeating” that pre-reflectively decides the meaning of a given situation (Butler Reference Butler1988, 519). The maternal body in this domain is both instituted by white supremacy as well as instituting white supremacy, since it necessarily entails the production of bodies and the reproduction of social norms.

Early his Collège de France lectures, Merleau-Ponty remarks that “time is the very model of institution” (Reference Merleau-Ponty2010, 7). Merleau-Ponty gives an account of institution as one in which “the world” read with and against Heidegger’s notion of world, is the “collective historical past” (Morris and Maclaren Reference Morris and Maclaren2015, 127) such that the world constitutes the subject—a manner somewhat akin to Heidegger’s account of Dasein as being-in-the-world, but in which the embodied and institutional constitution of Dasein is glaringly absent. Since the world is the collective historical past and it constitutes the subject, then the way in which we presently understand and make sense of ourselves through institutional knowledge is grounded in this collective historical past. This means that the acts we undertake, or our orientations, are instituted: our “openness to a cultural world” as Merleau-Ponty (Reference Merleau-Ponty1968, 212) puts it in, is grounded in our embodied enactment of instituted acts which reproduce their institutional norm.

Merleau-Ponty declares in Phenomenology of Perception that “Existence [is] perpetual incarnation” (Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty2002, 192) and he will explain this perpetual incarnation in terms of the constituting force of the world on the subject in The Visible and the Invisible. With respect to breastfeeding one’s infant-by-birth, for example, in the moment of undertaking such an act, one is both enacting and reproducing a historically instituted norm as well as participating in its reproduction. The particularity of the act nevertheless remains intact because it belongs to a specific body-subject in relation and is thus lived as one’s own through one’s flesh. To make a discourse incarnate, one must enact it bodily. This opens the possibility for resistance, but this possibility of resistance is grounded in the body itself as having its own dynamic openness, and in us as temporal subjects whose relation to the past is not static, but ecstatic. In an echo of Heidegger’s ecstatic temporality, Merleau-Ponty regards the subject’s relation to the world as “ek-stase”:

Therefore our subjectivity is not predetermined, whether by a pregiven body or a pregiven history, for we can revisit the past, and the past is also subject to revision through present perceptions. As Merleau-Ponty writes,

This invites us to look to the past as a space of temporal openness, rather than as a set of historical events which have determined us irretrievably. It suggests that bodies harbor within them this ecstatic horizontality, which makes it possible for them both to be habituated and to be a site of resistance to and revision of that history. Looking to the past reveals how institutions inscribe an ontologically “natural” type of maternal-child embodied relation and naturalize maternal responsibility as the privileged site for the nurturing of colonial futures.

In the temporal structure of institution, however, the subject remains already underway by way of inertia, having already been produced before they engage in this self-production through bodily habituation. Merleau-Ponty writes:

The subject’s own ecstatic relation to the world makes it such that the subject is both instituting and instituted. Even before the subject becomes maternal through enactment of institutional messaging and habituation, the production of the maternal subject is already underway. The past qua historical situation means that the pregiven “what” of “the maternal” throws itself forward to the present subject; it puts the enactment of the maternal “en route,” it “initiates,” and sets underway the subject’s future comportment. This makes the temporal span of maternal health messaging significant to the production of the white maternal body. As I shortly show, this span commences pre-gestationally and is directed even to those bodies assigned female at birth but who may not intend to be mothers and continues into childhood.

Because the construction of the white maternal body emerges out of multiple entwined colonial mechanisms, it fosters such a coherent and exhaustive account that allows the public health promotion to which I now turn to so thoroughly incite women qua mothers to become habituated. Foucault writes that the docile body “becomes skilful and increases its forces” in response to disciplinary mechanisms (Reference Foucault1977, 136). This increased skill and utility is the result of disciplining mechanisms enacting a kind of coerced habituation upon the body, through “constant coercion”; and “close supervision of the processes of the activity” (Reference Foucault1977, 137). In the case of public health promotion, the multiple sources of the information that occur from pre-conception on the potentially gestational body, all the way through to the early years of childhood, converge to articulate that maternal body as the privileged site for establishing the best possible future for a homogenized offspring. The temporal sequence of this messaging aids this, because it commences pre-gestationally and extends beyond postpartum, with responsibilization of the maternal as its core principle. This temporal sequence puts the maternal subject underway through “inertia,” according to which the actions themselves are already underway before they are undertaken—thus instituted—and they set in place, lurching into the future, later actions or enactments—thus instituting.

First, the messaging commences pre-conception on the potentially gestational body in ways that are beyond what the scientific consensus is: one example, for instance, is the Australian Federal Government funded “Every Moment Matters” campaign of the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education, whose slogan is “The moment you start trying [to conceive] is the moment to stop drinking.” Another example is pregnancy planning information for HealthDirect, an Australian Federal Government health information resource, whose information fact sheets suggest that the pre-conception period—a very lengthy “3 to 6 months prior to pregnancy”—“is the time to make life changes that can help boost fertility, reduce problems during pregnancy and assist in recovery from birth.”Footnote ¹⁶ A resource from the Australian Government Department of Health and Aged Care lists health advice for the pre-conception phase that includes in addition to standard advice to increase folic acid and iodine intake, such lifestyle prescriptions as “Keep stress levels down,” “maintain a healthy weight,” and “The health and weight of the baby’s father is important too—eat healthy and be active together.”Footnote ¹⁷ This kind of messaging continues through the pregnancy, and then gets very ramped up during the birth, postpartum, and early childhood period through birth and breastfeeding instruction, as well as parenting advice. For example, Pala and Kenny (Reference Pala and Kenny2024) have argued that recent interest in the microbiome has spurred excessive responsibilizing of mothers through the dissemination of parent guidelines. Examining the role that this information plays in shaping the maternal experience in the Australian context, Pala and Kenny (Reference Pala and Kenny2024) write that under these health guidelines, “the biological becomes conflated with the social and gendered pressures on the mother become biologized.” Maternal microbiome management is articulated as a way of managing the future development of the child, in addition to the way that epigenetic discourses figure the “mother” as the central mediating figure of the environment of the child, as argued by numerous science researchers (Kenney and Müller Reference Kenney, Müller, Meloni, Cromby, Fitzgerald and Lloyd2018; Richardson Reference Richardson2017, Reference Richardson2021). Breastfeeding guidelines in the Australian context, as with other Western colonized contexts, stress unique immunological, physiological, and cognitive development of breastfed infants, as well as it being supportive of improved psychosocial well-being all the way through to adulthood. Of the British context, MacKay (Reference MacKay2021, 64) argues that health promotion related to breastfeeding combines different values and ties them to women’s bodily practices as mothers. The NSW Government “Breastfeeding your baby” document suggests, under the subheading “Best for baby” that the “close interaction during breastfeeds encourages mutual responsiveness and attachment,” that “Breastfeeding lowers the risk of being overweight, obesity and diabetes in childhood and adulthood,” and astonishingly, that “Babies who are breastfed have higher IQ scores and better jaw development.”Footnote ¹⁸ It is important here to note that exclusive breastfeeding, which is promoted as best practice according to Australian health guidelines, establishes a caregiving relationship in which the breastfeeding parent is disproportionately and centrally responsible for being responsive to the infant and small child and that this ongoing relationship, if the ideal is “achieved” so to speak, facilitates the habituation of the breastfeeding person, typically the gestational parent, to become distinctly attuned and thus responsible for the immediate as well as future well-being of the infant. Breastfeeding instantiates an investment into this well-being, when it is undertaken in response to these guidelines. So, the breastfeeding parent is habituated not only physiologically but also temporally and affectively to be distinctively attuned and epistemically privileged to the welfare of the breastfed infant. On habituation’s force, Merleau-Ponty writes, “You don’t learn the formula intellectually first”: for instance, in dancing “it is the body which ‘catches’ (kapiert) and ‘comprehends’ movement” (Reference Merleau-Ponty2002: 165). This suggests that a mother doesn’t acquire habits of attunement to their child through a conscious decision or acknowledgment of their responsibility, but rather that they “catch” this attunement through enacting it. Although it is common rhetoric of Western thought to idealize maternal responsibility by referring to pseudo-psychological terms of attachment, “maternal instinct” or “maternal intuition” or romanticized accounts of maternal affect, on an account of habituation, the maternal body’s enactment of responsibility comes to form that responsibility within her. This is where world and body meet for Merleau-Ponty, in that the world becomes embodied within the subject through habituation. This dialogue between Merleau-Ponty and Foucault on the performance of institutional prescriptions on the body appears to support Foucault’s assertion of the utility of docile bodies. The more docile a body becomes, the greater its utility, but this docility can be said to be a matter of becoming further habituated, such that the body’s performances become more seamless and productive toward their prescribed end. In breastfeeding, for instance, this occurs even it seems at the molecular level, since a better “attachment” both physical and psychological is said in scientific research to yield higher volumes and better quality of milk; this psychological attachment is measured, for example, through “maternal attachment style” and “emotional exchange with one’s baby” (Kim Reference Kim2019; Linde et al. Reference Linde, Lehnig, Nagl and Kersting2020). The inverse, it would seem, is that apparent “bad mothers” who fail to perform the expansive regime of behaviours required to attain this apparently superior attachment then make less milk, or worse milk; greater docility yields greater utility.

Close supervision is maintained through various processes. First, in Australia, is the child health network, which organizes and maintains a series of non-essential check-ups with a registered health nurse, through a combination of in-home visits and clinic attendance at various checkpoints in the child’s first years of life. This is also followed by the Child Information Sharing Scheme. This habituation continues into early childhood and youth, through messaging based in the “Developmental Origins of Disease” framework. One strategic direction in the NSW Government “Healthy Safe Well Strategic Plan for Children, Young People and Families 2014–2024” is “Early Intervention” which identifies various public institutions as responsible for early “triage care for vulnerable families.”Footnote ¹⁹ This triage ranges from something as minimal as typical routine check-ups with the earlier mentioned Child Health Network to something as intrusive as “established targeted programs for children who we know need sustained or whole-of-family care.”Footnote ²⁰ Intervention is targeted not at treatment but at prevention for “at risk” children or those “need[ing] extra support” because of “factors that may impair parenting capacity or healthy development of the child.”Footnote ²¹ These factors are not specified explicitly, though the document makes more than 20 negatively framed references to Aboriginal mothers or babies, and less than half that number of references to other social factors such as disability, cultural or linguistic diversity, or geographic rurality.

4. Child removal in the colony and the investment in white maternal’s outside

The construction of the white maternal body through public health promotion is neither incidental nor benign. It is a central mechanism through which settler-colonial power is naturalized, reproduced, and sustained in so-called Australia. As this paper has shown, public health discourses do not simply seek to improve individual well-being; rather, they intervene at the level of ontology, materializing bodies through the body’s own temporal capacity, so that, through their active participation in their own habituation, maternal subjects align themselves with the goals of colonial futurity. This production of the white maternal body as the normative body of maternity grounds the representation of other expressions of caregiving and gender as transgressive and so facilitates the oppressive apparatus of the colonial state for correction or elimination. In this way, maternal health promotion is revealed not as a neutral or benevolent practice but as a racializing and gendering apparatus for state violence, including material oppressions of surveillance, control, and child removal (see n. 2). However, on the basis that bodily subjects actively participate in the process of institution of the maternal, they are not determined irretrievably. The body itself becomes the grounds for the possibility of resistance to the totalizing function of institutional interpretations about care.

To biologize the maternal is to obscure its racializing force. If it is the case that Australia’s political institutions are geared toward the best health outcomes for their populations, and that these health outcomes are best secured through an apparently unique and distinctive connection between a well mother and her child, then it would follow that resources and infrastructure would be directed toward supporting that relationship. The extent of investment in the maternal in public health promotion instead appears uncanny, though not if we understand white supremacy’s investment not only in whiteness, but in its constitutive outside, a task this paper has endeavored to take some initial steps towards. Differential treatment of BIPOC mothers and children in settler-colonial Australia is facilitated through the colonial construction of the maternal as rooted in whiteness. Al-Saji (Reference Al-Saji2010, 5) writes that “The ‘outside’ is … representationally and practically needed for the operation of white biopower.” The white maternal, subject to hyper-management to maintain whiteness as the “normal,” is part of a schema of mechanisms that maintain nonwhite bodies as pathological and available targets for racist intervention.