International Women’s Day: understanding the lived condition of motherhood

To mark International Women’s Day (8 March), Emily Underwood-Lee, Professor of Performance Studies at the University of South Wales, introduces extracts from her newly-published book, Maternal Performance: Feminist Relations.

Co-authored by Lena Šimić, Reader in Drama at Edge Hill University, the book 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.

Beginnings

This chapter focuses on the impossibility of ever beginning anew – born, as we are, into an ever developing social and family lineage. It maps the evolution of maternal studies, feminism and maternal performance in order to bring the private and domestic into the public and political spheres, and render maternal action worthy of consideration.

Loss

This chapter focuses on the inevitability of loss within the maternal. We draw on psychoanalytic formulations of grief to argue that to be open to an other is to be open to loss – the child will depart the mother’s womb and will ideally grow to adulthood and independence, and those that we are close to will one day die. And yet, within the traumatic experience of grief, we may find resolution through maternal performance, which allows us to understand our interdependence.

Pregnancy

Pregnancy is a time of transition: the mother and child are neither fully united nor yet separated. The mother can experience herself as both having an ever changing and unknowable embodiment that accelerates time and to be in a moment of stasis as she awaits the arrival of the child.

Birth

Birth is the moment at which not only a child, but also a mother, are born together into their new subjectivities. Birth is infinitely repeated through human history and yet each birth story will be unique. In this chapter we explore the relational narrative as a means of narrating birth as a moment of becoming together: the mother becoming with her child and the performer becoming through the audience’s act of witnessing.

Aftermath

In this chapter we explore artworks that have been made during the early days after the birth of a baby, when mother and child are coming to know one another as separate but linked individuals.

Maintenance

In this chapter, first drafted during the UK lockdown due to Coronavirus, we frame maternal maintenance through the lenses of labour, care and time, particularly concentrating on how both maternal life and maternal performance require that we keep going, keep repeating and endure in relation to an other.

Generations

In this chapter we question how to think about maternal generations, feminist generations, and artistic generations. We look back to those who have produced us and forward to those that we will produce, biologically and culturally.

Futures

Futures explores the unknown maternal that we might imagine and envisage. We assert that an openness to the uncertainty of maternal futures, enacted in public and with care beyond our biological families, and into the more-than-human worlds, offers an opportunity for radical responses to the current global situation.

New Beginnings

New Beginnings stands in place of the traditional conclusion as we seek to highlight that the maternal is cyclical and never-ending extending beyond ourselves through time and community. We contend that the maternal is always about thinking of ourselves in relation to our many others, be they our biological or chosen family or our global or inter-species kin.

Maternal Performance: Feminist Relations is available to buy online now.

Click here to listen to some of the mother artist interviews which contribute to the book.