An experimental essay on the Virgin Mary, Christianity, and motherhood. In Stabat Mater, “Julia Kristeva simultaneously theorizes, narrates, and enacts the discourses of the (m)other. Unlike most psychoanalytic theorists, who focus on the mother as object for the child, Kristeva here emphasizes the mother as subject, the mother's own experience of her maternity and of her relation to her child and her own body (and to her own mother). Kristeva attempts to create more a discourse of maternality-for-the mother than of maternality-for-the-other. But in order to do so, she must also examine what she sees as perhaps the most powerful Western symbol of maternality-for-the other, the Virgin Mary.”