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If interpellations are repeated baptismal operations they may be connected to the uncertainty of paternity.  As second births into the circle of ideology, interpellations would figure a reproductive consciousness.  Althusser's point that interpellation constrains a specular subject would not be unconnected to what Donna Haraway describes as a

"regulatory fiction" basic to Western concepts of gender [which] insists that motherhood is natural and fatherhood is cultural:  mothers make babies naturally, biologically.  Motherhood is known on sight;  fatherhood is inferred. ( Haraway 135)

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The gendered distinction between nature and culture, itself an ideological product, if read back into Althusser's theorizing about ideology leads first to the psychologistic claim that specularity is a compensation mechanism for unseeable paternity.  Secondly, such reading back of the gendered distinction leads to a structural insight, namely, that continuity is aligned with reversibility.

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Althusser ties the principle of continuity to a reversible structure through grounding the reproduction of the specular subject upon the Oedipal scenario.  As does the psychoanalytic drama, the ideological interpellation of the individual as subject depends upon the passage between two domains.  Dyadic specularity is both the narrative outcome of this passage and the means for its accomplishment.  The act of interpellation is a return of recognition.  The hailing and hailed not only mirror each other, they cause each other to be.  Structure and effect interlock in a perpetuum mobile.

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This perpetual motion machine is fancifully rendered by the mechanical illustrations that accompany E.P. Thompson's disquisition on Althusser in "The Poverty of Theory".  Digressing further into the delights of explicating Thompson's ekphrasis of the "orrery of errors" will not unfortunately unravel the tangle of twos.

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When gendered distinctions are considered, the construction of a specular relation replicates in its form a previous dyadic structure.  The shift from maternal to paternal identification assumes the fundamental unit of human interaction remains (if it ever was) the dyad.  Recall the opening fable of "Freud and Lacan".  The expectation of a prodigy is marked by the central presence of many competing fathers but only a single mother.

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The assumptions present in this unique scenario are applied by the philosopher to more than exceptional cases.  Althusser reduces the tension of multiple interpellations in the story of the subject of ideology by appeal to a dyad.  The mother-child dyad belongs to the domain of nature, the domain of animal being.  The work of culture creates a second dyad in the name of the father, a dyad placed in the space of ideology.

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Haraway suggests that the "naturalness" of the mother-child dyad can be called into question.  The dyad in both domains, culture and nature, is an imaginary construct of ideology.

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An impervious mother-child dyad also inhabits the theorizing of Mary O'Brien.  Her investigations into the social relations of biological reproduction are as strongly marked by the regulatory fiction described by Haraway as are Althusser's into social reproduction.  She as he does stresses appropriation in the name of the father.  Like his, her work links continuity to reversibility.  However, instead of the evil eye of specularity, one finds the magic of connective touch.  Whatever sensory modality it may be grounded upon, superstition founds both their material analyses.  It is, as any superstition, sophisticated.  It is an ethnoscience of perception.  It is not unconnected to an ethnoscience of reproduction (n4). 

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O'Brien imports her sensory bias from a text she otherwise examines most critically ­­ a passage in Hegel's early theological writings.  Mention of Hegel's fragment on love appears in a bibliography of suggested readings concluding an essay published in 1976 "The Politics of Impotence".  The following year, under the auspices of the Group for Research On Women (GROW) of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, appears a study of Hegel wherein the fragment on love is discussed at length.  Just over a decade later, the GROW paper is reprinted with slight revisions in Reproducing the World, a collection of essays by O'Brien.

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Her treatment of this text is the basis from which she develops her exposition of the dialectics of reproduction.  Hegel is a pretext to her own model.  What she finds in Hegel is a description of a process.  What she discovers he lacks is a description of the gendered consciousness that is conditioned by that process.

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Description and its correction, her key rhetorical move, generates the scientificity of the account.  Evidence indicates that the corrective she offers is actually the filter through which the description attributed to Hegel is initially constructed.  The heuristic value of her model may remain undamaged;  the power of its persuasiveness, not.  The whole appeal to an authority now corrected and updated following the world-historical advent of universally available contraceptive technology becomes untenable.  It is through a particularly vulnerable periodization of the historical conditions of the relations of reproduction that she reads Hegel.  It will come as no surprise that O'Brien's periodization is conditioned by a dyad or more precisely is animated by dyadic designs.  Despite her appeal to dialectic, she reifies the couple, most notably in her reading of the German philosopher.  In a nutshell:

Hegel notes that reproduction is a process of "unity, separated opposites, reunion. " What he is referring to is the unity of the man and woman in copulation, which he discreetly calls "love," and the separation and reunion of the respective seed of the lovers, creating a new entity that is both part of but separate from its progenitors.  The new seed both is and is not the unity of the parents. ("Feminist Theory and Dialectical Logic" 105-106)

Many items in this description are not to be found in the Hegelian fragment from which they are said to derive.  The vocabulary of newness is not in Hegel.  His outlook is retrospective.  Indeed, in the translation used by O'Brien, one finds a note immediately after the statement concerning the nature of the process that O'Brien claims refers to reproduction.  The note indicates that Hegel had added then struck "The child is the parents themselves. " (Knox 308) The paradoxical statement can be explained by the sentence that follows where Hegel states "the lovers separate again, but in the child their union has become unseparated." (n5) 

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