Download or read book The Maternal in Creative Work written by Elena Marchevska and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-12-11 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Maternal in Creative Work examines the interrelation between art, creativity and maternal experience, inviting international artists, theorists and cultural workers to discuss their approaches to the central feminist question of the relation between maternity, generation and creativity. This edited collection explores various modes and forms of art practice which look at mothers as subjects and as artists of the maternal experience, and how the creative practice is used to accept, negotiate, resist or challenge traditional conceptions of mothering. The book brings together some of the major projects of maternal art from the last two decades and opens up new ways of conceptualizing motherhood as a creative and communicative practice. Chapters include intergenerational discussion of art practices in the 20th and 21st centuries, representations of breastfeeding and infertility in creative projects, the notion of the ‘unfit mother’ and childlessness, together with the experiences of women and men that take on maternal identities through many forms of kinship and social mothering. The Maternal in Creative Work will be essential reading for interdisciplinary students and scholars in cultural studies, gender studies and art theory and will have wider appeal to audiences interested in maternity, childcare, creativity and psychoanalysis.
Download or read book Reconciling Art and Mothering written by RachelEpp Buller and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reconciling Art and Mothering contributes a chorus of new voices to the burgeoning body of scholarship on art and the maternal and, for the first time, focuses exclusively on maternal representations and experiences within visual art throughout the world. This innovative essay collection joins the voices of practicing artists with those of art historians, acknowledging the fluidity of those categories. The twenty-five essays of Reconciling Art and Mothering are grouped into two sections, the first written by art historians and the second by artists. Art historians reflect on the work of artists addressing motherhood-including Marguerite G?rd, Chana Orloff, and Ren?Cox-from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Contributions by contemporary artist-mothers, such as Gail Rebhan, Denise Ferris, and Myrel Chernick, point to the influence of past generations of artist-mothers, to the inspiration found in the work of maternally minded literary and cultural theorists, and to attempts to broaden definitions of maternity. Working against a hegemonic construction of motherhood, the contributors discuss complex and diverse feminist mothering experiences, from maternal ambivalence to queer mothering to quests for self-fulfillment. The essays address mothering experiences around the globe, with contributors hailing from North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia.
Download or read book The Baby on the Fire Escape Creativity Motherhood and the Mind Baby Problem written by Julie Phillips and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2022-04-26 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An insightful, provocative, and witty exploration of the relationship between motherhood and art—for anyone who is a mother, wants to be, or has ever had one. What does a great artist who is also a mother look like? What does it mean to create, not in “a room of one’s own,” but in a domestic space? In The Baby on the Fire Escape, award-winning biographer Julie Phillips traverses the shifting terrain where motherhood and creativity converge. With fierce empathy, Phillips evokes the intimate and varied struggles of brilliant artists and writers of the twentieth century. Ursula K. Le Guin found productive stability in family life, and Audre Lorde’s queer, polyamorous union allowed her to raise children on her own terms. Susan Sontag became a mother at nineteen, Angela Carter at forty-three. These mothers had one child, or five, or seven. They worked in a studio, in the kitchen, in the car, on the bed, at a desk, with a baby carrier beside them. They faced judgement for pursuing their creative work—Doris Lessing was said to have abandoned her children, and Alice Neel’s in-laws falsely claimed that she once, to finish a painting, left her baby on the fire escape of her New York apartment. As she threads together vivid portraits of these pathbreaking women, Phillips argues that creative motherhood is a question of keeping the baby on that apocryphal fire escape: work and care held in a constantly renegotiated, provisional, productive tension. A meditation on maternal identity and artistic greatness, The Baby on the Fire Escape illuminates some of the most pressing conflicts in contemporary life.
Download or read book Inappropriate Bodies Art Design and Maternity written by Buller Rachel Epp and published by Demeter Press. This book was released on 2019-09-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection examines conflicting assumptions, expectations, and perceptions of maternity in artistic, cultural, and institutional contexts. Over the past two decades, the maternal body has gained currency in popular culture and the contemporary art world, with many books and exhibitions foregrounding artists’ experiences and art historical explorations of maternity that previously were marginalized or dismissed. In too many instances, however, the maternal potential of female bodies—whether realized or not—still causes them to be stigmatized, censored, or otherwise treated as inappropriate: cultural expectations of maternity create one set of prejudices against women whose bodies or experiences do align with those same expectations, and another set of prejudices against those whose do not. Support for mothers in the paid workforce remains woefully inadequate, yet in many cultural contexts, social norms continue to ask what is “wrong” with women who do not have children. In these essays and conversations, artists and writers discuss how maternal expectations shape both creative work and designed environments, and highlight alternative ways of existing in relation to those expectations.
Download or read book Media Work Mothers and Motherhood written by Susan Liddy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary and international volume offers an innovative and critical exploration of the impact of motherhood on the engagement of women in media and creative industries across the globe. Diverse contributions critically engage with the intersections and overlap between the social categories of worker and mother, and the work of media production and maternal caregiving. Conflicting ideas about, and expectations of, mothers are untangled in the context of the working world of radio, film, television and creative media industries. The book teases out commonalities between experiences that are evident across a number of countries, from Hollywood to Bollywood, as well as examining the differences between class, religion, maternal status and cultural frameworks that surround working mothers in various nation states. It also offers some possibilities for ways forward that can improve the lives of women workers who are also mothers. A timely and valuable contribution to international debates on equality, mothers and motherhood in audiovisual industries, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of media, communication, cultural studies and gender, programmes engaged with work inequalities and motherhood studies, and activists, funders, policymakers and practitioners.
Download or read book The Mother Knot written by Jane Lazarre and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A feminist classic and a valuable testimonial to the experience of mothering. Originally published in 1976 but still relevant today, this is a fierce, often funny, often painful description of Lazarre's first few years of motherhood.
Download or read book Womb Fantasies written by Caroline Rupprecht and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-31 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Womb Fantasies examines the womb, an invisible and mysterious space invested with allegorical significance, as a metaphorical space in postwar cinematic and literary texts grappling with the trauma of post-holocaust, postmodern existence. In addition, it examines the representation of visible spaces in the texts in terms of their attribution with womb-like qualities. The framing of the study historically within the postwar era begins with a discussion of Eero Saarinen’s Womb Chair in the context of the Cold War’s need for safety in light of the threat of nuclear destruction, and ranges over films such as Marguerite Duras’ and Alan Resnais’ film Hiroshima mon amour and Duras’ novel The Vice-Consul, exploring the ways that such cultural texts fantasize the womb as a response to trauma, defined as the compulsive need to return to the site of loss, a place envisioned as both a secure space and a prison. The womb fantasy is linked to the desire to recreate an identity that is new and original but ahistorical.
Download or read book Maternal Performance written by Lena Šimić and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-11-27 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maternal Performance: Feminist Relations bridges the fields of performance, feminism, maternal studies, and ethics. It loosely follows the life course with chapters on maternal loss, pregnancy, birth, aftermath, maintenance, generations, and futures. Performance and the maternal have an affinity as both are lived through the body of the mother/artist, are played out in real time, and are concerned with creating ethical relationships with an other – be that other the child, the theatrical audience, or our wider communities. The authors contend that maternal performance takes the largely hidden, private and domestic work of mothering and makes it worthy of consideration and contemplation within the public sphere.
Download or read book Mother Reader written by Moyra Davey and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2011-01-04 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The intersection of motherhood and creative life is explored in these writings on mothering that turn the spotlight from the child to the mother herself. Here, in memoirs, testimonials, diaries, essays, and fiction, mothers describe first-hand the changes brought to their lives by pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering. Many of the writers articulate difficult and socially unsanctioned maternal anger and ambivalence. In Mother Reader, motherhood is scrutinized for all its painful and illuminating subtleties, and addressed with unconventional wisdom and candor. What emerges is a sense of a community of writers speaking to and about each other out of a common experience, and a compilation of extraordinary literature never before assembled in a single volume.
Download or read book Performing Motherhood Artistic Activist and Everyday Enactments written by Amber E Jinser and published by Demeter Press. This book was released on 2014-12-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Performing Motherhood explores relationships between performativity and the maternal. Highlighting mothers’ lived experiences, this collection examines mothers’ creativity and agency as they perform in everyday life: in mothering, in activism, and in the arts. Chapters contain theoretically grounded works that emerge from multiple disciplines and cross-disciplines and include first-person narratives, empirical studies, artistic representations, and performance pieces. This book focuses on motherwork, maternal agency, mothers’ multiple identities and marginalized maternal voices, and explores how these are performatively constituted, negotiated and affirmed.
Download or read book Give and Take written by Katie Palfreyman and published by Demeter Press. This book was released on 2024-03-13 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Give and Take: Motherhood and Creative Practice explores the diverse ways contemporary artists navigate the unique tensions of motherhood in all its varied stages. Becoming a mother is a life-changing event that can give mothers greater perspective, drive, and inspiration for making art. But motherhood also takes time and energy from pursuing creative work. This fundamental challenge, this give and take, is explored through this book as it forefronts the art and lives of dancers, playwrights, musicians, visual artists, and creative writers. The book contains thirty-three first person narratives from practicing artists along with written analyses that place these artists' essays within the broader context of arts writing and scholarship about motherhood. The concluding section of the book includes overarching thoughts about how artist mothers can move forward despite structural inequality and cultural bias and includes a resource guide for practical support.
Download or read book Environmental Activism and the Maternal Mothers and Mother Earth in Activism and Discourse written by Olivia Ungar and published by Demeter Press. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology seeks to explore the complex, varied, and sometimes contradictory intersections between mothers, mothering, and environmental activism in discourse and in lived experiences. It is intended to look critically, and yet hopefully, at the ways in which feminist, Indigenous, and environmentalist challenges to the western, capitalist moral imagination are linked. It explores the reach of rape culture and the ways in which a capitalist, patriarchal society interacts with the earth as a feminine-personified identity. It also shares the hope available to all women through raising a coming generation and the great power to effect change. This work endeavours to share lessons from the Earth in resistance to the continued assaults of anthropogenic capitalist industry, and to inspire new ways to course-correct, to resist, to rise up, to create differently, and to foster evolution and revolution as mothers, as women, and as hearts and minds. This volume is curated to be a space for critical discussion about representations linking environmental activism, maternality, and "mother earth," as well as a venue for creative expression and art. In keeping with its intention to provide a space for discussion of a complex and varied array of perspectives on mothers, mothering, and mother earth, this is an interdisciplinary anthology. Contributions included hail from a wide range of disciplines and fields including psychology, sociology, anthropology, women's and gender studies, cultural studies, literary studies, as well as law and legal studies. Contributions from scholars working in the fields of social science are interwoven with creative contributions from academics, writers, and artists working in fields in the humanities.
Download or read book Representations of Motherhood written by Donna Bassin and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1994-01-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the maternal experience from the mother's point of view. The book questions a society that has devalued and sentimentalized motherhood, and presents images of generative and creative women who are also mothers. It also discusses the portrayal of mothers in art, film and literature.
Download or read book Maternal Bodies written by Nora Doyle and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-03-19 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the second half of the eighteenth century, motherhood came to be viewed as women's most important social role, and the figure of the good mother was celebrated as a moral force in American society. Nora Doyle shows that depictions of motherhood in American culture began to define the ideal mother by her emotional and spiritual roles rather than by her physical work as a mother. As a result of this new vision, lower-class women and non-white women came to be excluded from the identity of the good mother because American culture defined them in terms of their physical labor. However, Doyle also shows that childbearing women contradicted the ideal of the disembodied mother in their personal accounts and instead perceived motherhood as fundamentally defined by the work of their bodies. Enslaved women were keenly aware that their reproductive bodies carried a literal price, while middle-class and elite white women dwelled on the physical sensations of childbearing and childrearing. Thus motherhood in this period was marked by tension between the lived experience of the maternal body and the increasingly ethereal vision of the ideal mother that permeated American print culture.
Download or read book Virginia Woolf written by Gillian Gill and published by Houghton Mifflin. This book was released on 2019 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An insightful, witty look at Virginia Woolf through the lens of the extraordinary women closest to her. How did Adeline Virginia Stephen become the great writer Virginia Woolf? Acclaimed biographer Gillian Gill tells the stories of the women whose legacies--of strength, style, and creativity--shaped Woolf's path to the radical writing that inspires so many today. Gill casts back to Woolf's French-Anglo-Indian maternal great-grandmother Thérèse de L'Etang, an outsider to English culture whose beauty passed powerfully down the female line; and to Woolf's aunt Anne Thackeray Ritchie, who gave Woolf her first vision of a successful female writer. Yet it was the women in her own family circle who had the most complex and lasting effect on Woolf. Her mother, Julia, and sistersStella, Laura, and Vanessa were all, like Woolf herself, but in markedly different ways, warped by the male-dominated household they lived in. Finally, Gill shifts the lens onto the famous Bloomsbury group. This, Gill convinces, is where Woolf called upon the legacy of the women who shaped her to transform a group of men--united in their love for one another and their disregard for women--into a society in which Woolf ultimately found her freedom and her voice.
Download or read book The Maternal Digital Subjectivity and the Aesthetics of Interruption written by EL Putnam and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2022-04-21 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together philosophies of the maternal with digital technology may appear to be an arbitrary pairing. However, reading them intertextually through select creative practices reveals how both encompass an aesthetics of interruption that becomes a novel means of understanding subjectivity. EL Putnam investigates how the digital performances of certain artists, creators, and technologists rupture existing representations of the maternal, taking advantage of the formal properties of digital media. What results are interruptions of visual and aural constructions through an immanent merging of the performing body with digital technologies. Putnam bases her analysis on close examinations of the way certain makers use the formal properties of digital imagery, such as the gap, the glitch, and the lag, as means of rendering images of the maternal uncanny in order to challenge mediation, constituting an aesthetics of interruption. The result is a radical critical strategy for engaging with digital technology and subsequent understandings of the subject that defy current modes of assimilation.
Download or read book Bearing the Weight of the World written by Alys Einion and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The maternal body is a site of contested dynamics of power, identity, experience, autonomy, occupation, and control. Representations of the maternal body can mis/represent the childbearing and mothering form variously, often as monstrous, idealized, limited, scrutinized, or occupied, whilst dominant discourses limit motherhood through social devaluation. The maternal body has long been a hypervisible artifact: at once bracketed out in the interest of elevating the contributions of sperm-carriers or fetal status; and regarded with hostility and suspicion as out of control. Such arguments are deployed to justify surveillance mechanisms, medical scrutiny, and expectation of self-discipline.This volume helps to develop a more critical understanding of what it means to be an embodied mother. The materiality of maternity and its centrality to family and social life remains too often viewed as a ?fringe? subject, the province of feminists, activists, hysterical women. For too long, the maternal body has been subject to ?expert? advice, guidance, censure, and control. Those of us maternal bodies are at risk of being commodified and diminished, having our bodily realities reduced to mechanistic functions and our lived experience disregarded. From art to medical surveillance, from genetics to radioactivity, goddess to breastfeeding, poetry to Indigenous community, dance to body size, the critical eye of the academic and the lived experience of the mother bring into being in this work a body of understanding, of expression, of knowledge and the power and authority of the lived experience, through and about the embodied mother. This critical-creative work encompasses new insights, new research, and redeveloped perspectives which combine the personal with the pervasive and point to new meaning-making in critical motherhood studies via the medium of the maternal body.
