Research and practice that challenges dominant narratives around motherhood.
Performing Maternities is a collection of essays, creative work, images, and scripts that emerged out of an online international symposium held at Brighton University in November 2020. Together, 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 affect individuals in different social, economic, and sexual identities; and how—as mothers, writers, artists, parents, and grandparents—we can address and challenge those identities.
Performing Maternities is a collection of essays, creative work, images, and scripts that emerged out of an online international symposium held at Brighton University in November 2020. Together, 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 affect individuals in different social, economic, and sexual identities; and how—as mothers, writers, artists, parents, and grandparents—we can address and challenge those identities.
Table of Contents
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
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