Contested Bodies and Imperial Logics: Orwell’s 1984 and the Maternal Commons as Recovery of the Imago Dei
Contested Bodies and Imperial Logics: Orwell’s 1984 and the Maternal Commons as Recovery of the Imago Dei

Summary/Abstract: The imago Dei, understood as the relational and embodied image of God, is increasingly distorted by the imperial logics that shape contemporary gender debates. Drawing on George Orwell’s 1984 as a diagnostic framework and employing a constructive theological method integrating biblical witness, historical analysis, and relational anthropology, this study identifies two converging imperial logics: the Patriarch-Enforcement Complex (PEC) and the Expert-Dependency Complex (EDC). Though distinct in method, both advance a common project: the regulation of bodies, the severing of maternal and relational bonds, and the reorganization of human life around control rather than communion. Winston Smith’s severing from maternal memory in 1984 names the deepest mechanism of this logic: the erasure of the relational bonds through which the imago Dei becomes visible. Over five centuries, from colonial Christendom to modern technocratic governance and digital platforms, these systems have progressively marginalized the maternal dimensions of the divine image. Against this imperial logic, this study proposes the Maternal Commons as a third path, rooted in Illich’s understanding of the vernacular commons, Ruddick’s maternal epistemology, and kenotic Christology. The Maternal Commons receives the contested body without condition as a bearer of the imago Dei that empire cannot revoke. Its fourfold practice, preservation, growth, acceptance, and release, enacts the relational capacities that imperial systems seek to destroy. The oldest word for freedom, amargi, return to mother, names the logic the Maternal Commons enacts: humanity’s most enduring alternative to imperial control.

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