The Making of the White Maternal Body: Public Health Promotion and the Colonial Production of Bodies

Abstract This paper examines how public health promotion in colonial Australia figures the maternal body as an instrument for the production of whiteness for the perpetuation of the colonial state. In the context of a paradox between the institutional valuing of motherhood and institutional practices of systemic child removal and violence against women and mothers, I argue that public health promotion should be understood as a mechanism for the production of the white maternal body. I first establish the coloniality of public health promotion, arguing that its purpose is the production of bodies for the sake of colonial futurity, and that it so functions as a racializing code. Next, I offer a genealogical account in which the emergence of maternal subjectivity is shown to be the product of the colonial struggle for power; the white maternal body is thus produced through a schema of colonial mechanisms, among them the naturalization of sex, the feminization of the domestic sphere, the institutional establishment of the nuclear, heteroromantic family, and the British colonial notion of private property. I finally analyze how the white maternal body is subsequently materialized through the body’s own existential-temporal capacity for habituation.