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An exploration of what performance can do to expand conventional representations of becoming a mother. Maternal bodies and processes of pregnancy, childbirth and sustenance have historically been depicted in art and literature as variously uncanny, abject, grotesque, monstrous, and hybrid.
Societal conventions and myths around what makes a good or bad mother have limited the representations of maternal ambivalence and labour. Lived experiences of matrescence as depicted by mothers themselves have remained almost invisible with little exposure in galleries or mainstream art and media. Challenging complex and disparaging representations, or the erasure and invisibility of experiences of matrescence altogether, contemporary mother/artists working in the field of performance use their live bodies to subvert dominant images of conventional myths of motherhood.
Using strategies of mimesis, liveness, embodiment, relationality, and performativity to render their own matrescent bodies, these artists explore historically pejorative theoretical concepts and aesthetics in new, feminist ways. This book frames performance as a site where becoming a mother can be understood as both a becoming and an unbecoming to expand understandings of matrescence.
This is a profound and original book adding an important perspective to the field of maternal performance scholarship. Matrescence and Performance is a highly thoughtful investigation of maternal artmaking, and a joy to read. Laura Bissell manages to skilfully bring together analysis of works by emerging and established artists and place this alongside personal and embodied accounts of spectatorship and the author’s own maternal experience. Bissell expands and challenges what it means to become mother in a deeply affective manner – moving, challenging and delighting in equal measure. Through an engagement with diverse perspectives from both art practice and feminist theory, including live and digital performance, the book opens up and enlarges matrescence in a manner that is generous, political, and original.
— Professor Emily Underwood-Lee, University of South Wales, UK.
Dr Laura Bissell is a performance-researcher, writer, and arts educator and has had her research, creative writing and poetry published in journals and anthologies. Laura is an Athenaeum Research Fellow at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and is co-editor of the International Journal of Performance Art and Digital Media’s special edition 'Matrescence and Media' with Jodie Hawkes and Elena Marchevska.
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Becoming – Matrescence and Performance
1 Staging Myths of Motherhood
2 Uncanny Matrescence: Doubling and Splitting
3 Matrescence Re-enacted: Feminist Mimesis
4 Sustenance
5 The Grotesque
6 Performing Multi-species Maternal(s)
7 Expanding Matrescence
Conclusion: Unbecoming