Performing Maternities
Performing Maternities (Book)
Political, Social and Feminist Enquiry
By giving voice to these women and men, this book honours the diversity of maternities, and validates new academic and creative methods in figuring herstory as a patchwork intersection of voices across and through time – simultaneously acknowledging difference and diversity as well as commonality. 32 b&w illus.
Edition
Performing Maternities is a collection of essays, creative work, images and scripts which emerged out of an online international symposium held at Brighton University in November 2020. Collectively, the contributors challenge, celebrate and share the normative, the queer, the transgressive, the joy and the pain of performing maternity. The book asks key questions about the construction of maternal identities and mythologies in the contemporary world, the ways these impact on indivduals in different social, economic and sexual identities, and the ways in which - as mothers, writers, artists, parents and grandparents -we can challenge and address those identities.
Kate Aughterson is an independent scholar, who has taught in UK universities for the past 30 years and published in areas including feminist theory, early modern culture and contemporary women’s fiction.
Jess Moriarty is principal lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Brighton, UK, where she is course leader on the Creative Writing MA and co-director of the Centre for Arts and Wellbeing.
Introduction
Maternal Performance: relations and embodiments
Experiencing and Knowing from a Mother/Child ‘Us’’
Still Mothering: Reflections on Life, Death, and Love through the Eyes of Bereaved Mothers.
Mothering in the Peripheries: An autoethnographic account of the challenging matrescence of a neurodivergent woman
Tensions of Maternity
Remember Me? Creative Conversations with Clothes
Birth Trauma: Mythical epic
A(n) (Artificial) Womb of One’s Own, or the Clash Between Mothers’ Reproductive Justice and the Rhetorics of Science Fiction
Seeds from my Grandmother’s Womb
‘Delivering Across Geographies: How Faith, Age, Friends, and Space Carry Birthing’
These Nipples are Wasted
Macomère Narratives: Mothering in higher education
“Bitter-Sweet Embrace”: Documentary film
Comadreando: Entangling the web of our lives
Interrogating Constructions of Good/Bad mothers through popular Spanish culture. The case of Concha Piquer
Looking for Laura
Maternal Bodies in the Garden: Transit Spaces
