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Introduction

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This introduction debates the critical and creative interventions in notions of performance and maternities in both contemporary and historical instances, in particular asking how we identify with and construct maternal and familial communities through performance in its multiple guises – live, on stage, online, through the media – and how these communities can function ideologically - both affect and drive positive social, cultural and pedagogic change, and yet on occasion be damaging and restrictive. Performing a variety of diverse - and diverse notions of - Maternities is a current political, social and feminist enquiry - whose relevance at a time of neo-liberal and now post-Covid-19 social and economic flux cannot be understated.

Thinking about maternity as performativity enables us to see that this embodied, common, global experience is not a simple biological given, but a complex network of ideological, cultural, historical and economic demands and discourses and behaviours, By framing some of those experiences through a lens of ‘performance’ we seek to both draw attention to the cultural constructions of maternity and motherhood and simultaneously suggest how writers, performers, artists and parents might use notions of performance as a kind of liberation from those constructions. This book participates in a contemporary and recent re-calibration of maternities by offering the notion of ‘performing’ maternities as both a lens and practice through which versions of maternity, matrescence, mothering and sharenting can be viewed, debated and challenged.

Keywords: Adrienne Rich ; bell hooks ; Birth ; Consciousness ; Feminism ; Maternities ; Maternity ; Matrescence ; Performing ; Women's Voices

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References

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References

  1. Anzaldua, Gloria ([1987] 2012), Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books.
     [Google Scholar]
  2. Athan, Aurélie (2020), ‘Reproductive identity: An emerging concept’, American Psychologist, 75:4, pp. 445–56.
     [Google Scholar]
  3. Baraitser, Lisa (2008), Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption, New York and London: Routledge.
     [Google Scholar]
  4. Barkataki-Ruscheweyh Meenaxi and Lauser, Andrea (2013), ‘Performing identity politics and culture in Northeast India and beyond’, Asian Ethnology, 72, pp. 189–97.
     [Google Scholar]
  5. Borthelo, Teresa and Ramos, Iolanda (2013), Performing Identities and Utopias of Belonging, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.
     [Google Scholar]
  6. Butler, Judith (1990), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York and London: Routledge.
     [Google Scholar]
  7. Caplan, Paula J. (1989), Don't Blame Mother: Mending the Mother-Daughter Relationship. New York: Harper & Row.
     [Google Scholar]
  8. Chodorow, Nancy (1999), The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, 2nd ed., Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  9. Cixous, Helene (2008), White Ink: Interviews of Sex, Texts and Politics, New York: Columbia University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  10. Connelly, Cyril (1938), Enemies of Promise, London: Andre Deutsch.
     [Google Scholar]
  11. Dally, Ann (1983), Inventing Motherhood: The Consequences of an Ideal, Tel Aviv: Shocken Books.
     [Google Scholar]
  12. de Beauvoir, Simone ([1948] 2011), The Second Sex (trans. C. Borde), London: Vintage Books.
     [Google Scholar]
  13. Demetriades, Greg (2005), Performing Identity/Performing Culture: Hip Hop as Text, Identity and Lived Practice, New York and London: Routledge.
     [Google Scholar]
  14. Epp Buller, Rachel (2019), Inappropriate Bodies: Art, Design and Maternity, Ontario: Demeter Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  15. Ettinger, Bracha (2005), The Matrixial Borderspace, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  16. Fanin, Maria and Perrier, Maud (2018), Reconfiguring the Postmaternal: Feminist Responses to the Forgetting of Motherhood, New York and London: Routledge.
     [Google Scholar]
  17. Green, Fiona Joy (2011), Practicing Feminist Mothering, Winnipeg: ARP Books.
     [Google Scholar]
  18. Hansen, Elaine Tuttle (1997), Mother without Child: Contemporary Fiction and the Crisis of Motherhood, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  19. Hill Collins, Patricia (1994), ‘Shifting the centre: Race, class and feminist theory’, in E. N. Glen, G. Chang and L. R. Forcey (eds), Mothering: Ideology, Experience and Agency, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 45–66.
     [Google Scholar]
  20. Hirsch, Marianne (1989), The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  21. hooks, bell ([1990] 2014), Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics, New York: South End Press.15
     [Google Scholar]
  22. Iragaray, Luce (1981), This Sex Which Is Not One (trans. C. Porter), Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  23. Jacobus, Mary (1995), First Things: The Maternal Imaginary in Literature, Art and Psychoanalysis, New York and London: Routledge.
     [Google Scholar]
  24. Juffer, Jane (2006), Single Mother: The Emergence of the Domestic Intellectual, New York: New York University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  25. Klein, Jennie (2019), ‘The mother without child/the child without mother: Miriam Schaer's interrogation of maternal ideology’, in R. Epp Buller (ed.), Inappropriate Bodies: Art, Design and Maternity, Bradford: Demeter Press, pp. 71–90.
     [Google Scholar]
  26. Knott, Sarah (2021), Mother is a Verb: An Unconventional History, London: Sarah Crichton Books.
     [Google Scholar]
  27. Kristeva, Julia (2014, ‘Stabat mater’, Poetics Today, 6:1&2, pp. 133–52.
     [Google Scholar]
  28. Marchevska, Elena and Walkerdine, Valerie (2021), The Maternal in Creative Work: Intergenerational Discussions on Motherhood and Art, New York and London: Routledge
     [Google Scholar]
  29. Mashile, Lebongang (2022), ‘Mama's war’, The Guardian, 16 February, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/feb/16/living-in-a-womans-body-mamas-war-an-original-poem. Accessed 4 December 2023.
  30. Maushart, Susan (1991), The Mask of Motherhood: How Becoming a Mother Changes Everything and We Pretend It Doesn't, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
     [Google Scholar]
  31. Morales, Helen (2020), Antigone Rising: The Power of Ancient Myths, San Francisco, CA: Bold Type Books.
     [Google Scholar]
  32. Nelson, Maggie (2016), The Argonauts, New York and London: Melvile House.
     [Google Scholar]
  33. O'Reilly, Andrea (2006), Rocking the Cradle: Thoughts on Motherhood, Feminism and Empowered Mothering, Ontario: Demeter Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  34. O'Reilly, Andrea (2009), Maternal Thinking: Philosophy, Politics, Practice, Ontario: Demeter Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  35. O'Reilly, Andrea ([2007] 2021), Maternal Theory: Essential Readings, 1st ed., 2nd ed., Ontario: Demeter Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  36. Phliips, Julie (2022), The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood and the Mind-Baby Problem, New York: Norton.
     [Google Scholar]
  37. Rabuzzi, Kathryn Allen (1988), Motherself: A Mythic Analysis of Motherhood, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  38. Rich, Adrienne (1976), Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, New York: W.W. Norton.
     [Google Scholar]
  39. Rose, Jacqueline (2019), Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty, London: Faber.
     [Google Scholar]
  40. Rothman, Barbara Katz (1994), ‘Beyond mothers and fathers: Ideology in a patriarchal society’, in E. N. Glenn (ed.), Mothering: Ideology, Experience and Agency, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 139–57.
     [Google Scholar]
  41. Ruddick, Sara (1989), Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace, Boston, MA: Beacon Press.16
     [Google Scholar]
  42. Sikes, Alan (2007), Representation from Versailles to the Present: The Performing Subject, New York: Palgrave Macmillan
     [Google Scholar]
  43. Šimić, Lena and Underwood-Lee, Emily (2021), Maternal Performance: Feminist Relations, New York and London: Palgrave.
     [Google Scholar]
  44. Shiva, Vandana (2020), Reclaiming the Commons; Biodiversity, Traditional Knowledge and the Rights of the Mother, Santa Fe: Synergetic Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  45. Snitow, Ann (1992), ‘Feminism and motherhood: An American reading’, Feminist Review, 40, pp. 32–51.
     [Google Scholar]
  46. Stephens, Julie (2011), Confronting Postmaternal Thinking, New York: Columbia University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  47. Thurer, Shari (1995), The Myths of Motherhood: How Culture Reinvents the Good Mother, New York: Penguin/Random House.
     [Google Scholar]

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