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5 Rewriting maternal femininity in Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document ‘[L]ittle girls are told their future is caring for people … ’ Sheila Rowbotham in Nightcleaners (1975)1 Post-Partum Document is an archive of objects that represent the pleasures Kelly’s maternal figure takes in caring for her child: infant clothing; soiled nappies; scribbled drawings; words, dialogues, and stories; letters and typesetting materials; pieces of blankets; and small gifts the child found in nature. These objects are marked by imminent losses, however, making the mother
In the late 1960s and 1970s, women artists in the United States and Britain began to make texts and images of writing central to their visual compositions. This book explores the feminist stakes of that choice. It analyses how Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero, and Mary Kelly worked with the visual dimensions of language to transform how women are perceived. To illuminate the specific ways in which these artists and writers contribute to the production of a feminist imaginary, Part I charts the correspondences between the artwork of Piper and the writings of Davis. It analyses the artwork she created in the late 1960s and 1970s, when she began using text to create artwork that moves between what Piper identifies as 'the singular reality of the "other."' Davis's writing exposes the fictions animating projections that the black female body is perceived to be a malleable ground upon which fears and fantasies can take visual form. Part II focuses on aggression and traces how its repression plays out across Spero's Codex Artaud and Solanas's SCUM Manifesto. It argues that in Post-Partum Document, texts and pieces of writing become fetish objects that Kelly arranges into visual and linguistic 'poems' that forestall a confrontation with loss. Part III demonstrates that the maternal femininity thought to naturally inhere in woman is also restricted and muffled, quite efficiently repressing the possibility that women could address each other across maternal femininity's contested terrain.
. It adds another textual layering Feminist desires and collective reading in the work of Laura Mulvey Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, dir. Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977. The Sphinx and Oedipus. to the film and contributes to the destabilisation of the image. Across the arc of Riddles, the voice becomes part of the film’s efforts to reimagine maternal femininity as it moves from the enclosed world of maternal domesticity, to the public worlds of work, and the possibility of writing a feminist imaginary. After this depiction of the Sphinx questioning the order of
in place: pathologising racial difference, repressing women’s aggression, and idealising maternal femininity. Though Piper, Spero, and Kelly are hardly ever read together, my aim here was to show that their artwork expressed a shared desire to transform how women in western culture have been habitually perceived. The visual appearance of language was crucial for bringing viewers into that collective project. The artwork Piper, Spero, and Kelly composed during this period of historical upheaval is rich, complicated, and dense. It creates visual and textual worlds
black-and-white photographs. In Post-Partum Document (1973–1979), Mary Kelly composed written charts, graphs, and diary entries on and within an array of textured surfaces to mime the discursive positioning of maternal femininity in psychoanalytic discourse and impede visual access to satisfying images of motherhood. Echoing the focus on textuality in the 1996 exhibition Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of 20th Century Art in, of, and from the Feminine, this sample from WACK! demonstrates how many women artists in the late 1960s and 1970s deployed text and
. We can recognise the clothes. In the first, Griselda is wearing a corduroy maternity dress that dates this image to the later stages of her first pregnancy in 1983. Using Julia Hirsch’s analysis, the choice of model for these images moves from the anecdotal – they came to tea and she was invited upstairs to be photographed, a willing party to Zygmunt’s new hobby – to the question: were the poses intended to be expressive of the idea of expectancy and maternal femininity? While familiars of the Bauman intellectual
herself over to the work of supporting male-dominated culture. The typology of the ‘Daddy’s Girl’ highlights the fact that women are conflated with maternal femininity. She is a template for ‘Mommy,’ the sign for the imperative that women attend to men’s infantile needs. According to Solanas, this is men’s greatest success: convincing women that they are meant to ‘bear and raise children and to relax, comfort and boost the ego of the male.’73 Making connections between ideas about women’s capacities for biological reproduction and the assignment to perform reproductive
text that divides itself, pulls itself to pieces, dismembers itself, regroups, remembers itself, [in] a proliferating, maternal femininity’ (84). / Does anyone think of Cixous as simple? Gilles Deleuze was perhaps the first to broach this idea, in his review of Neutre in 1972: The true originality of an author is only evident if one is able to adopt the point of view which the author has himself invented. From this point of view the author becomes easy to read and carries the reader along. This is the mystery: every truly new body of work
glimpse how a subject ‘in the feminine’ differentially orchestrates her constitutive gender-transgressing hysteria – her unstable-fluid and creatively destabilizing relations to both maternal femininity and paternal law – into creativity. At the beginning, I proposed an apparently fixed, binary and fetishistic opposition of sex symbol and art symbol: Marilyn Monroe and Jackson Pollock, movie icon and vanguard artist. The suggestion that masculine art is a form of masculine hysteria, that it might contain a destabilizing of the
stigma of motherhood had stuck … My work was virtually and sometimes conspicuously ignored in the 1950s.’65 The habit of conflating a woman with the roles of wife and mother manifested in a review of an exhibition of Spero’s work at 127 128 3.5 Typing the poetry of monsters the Chicago Avant Arts Gallery titled ‘Art Exhibition by Housewife Opens in Area.’66 Mummified evokes the silencing implied by such a reduction. The figure is muted by what Friedan identifies as the ‘problem that has no name,’ wrapped up in a limited notion of white maternal femininity, buried