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.
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
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.
