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Mothers, Militarization and War: Quebec in Afghanistan

ABSTRACT Even though Quebec society is often defined as pacifist and antimilitarist, scripts of militarization are deeply embedded in its social fabric. In order to explore this controversial contention and problematize the construction of elements of Quebec’s pacifist identity, this article focuses on the figure of mothers grieving their soldier-children killed in combat and on the politics of the performances of motherhood in Quebec and Canada. We first turn our attention to the very idea of militarization and the role of mothers in it. We then examine the traditional figure of the militarized grieving mother in Canada through an exploration of Remembrance Day ceremonies. Finally, we focus on the efforts to resist this construction of militarized motherhood in an antimilitaristic video released by the Fédération des femmes du Quebec in October 2010. The different reactions to these two opposed performances of motherhood suggest that motherhood in Quebec is militarized, and demonstrate that seemingly pacifist societies can be profoundly militarized.