Maternal Embarrassment: Feminist Art and Maternal Affects

Abstract

When I say I am writing a book about maternal bodies I get different very responses that range from interest to blankness, from enthusiasm to disgust, and I feel myself getting embarrassed. i I feel the need to clear the ground: 'It's not about mothering or natural birth or celebrity pregnancy…' I stammer and stop. This doesn't sound sufficiently detached. I am too close to it, still feeling embarrassed. I want to look at what produces this affective response-this maternal embarrassment-and whether it can tell me anything about responses to the maternal body and its visibility. What kinds of feelings are invested in (my looking at) maternal bodies in art? Why should they cause me (and others) to blush? Is this tied to what is un-representable in our attachments to the maternal body? I examine these questions in relation to the visibility of maternal artworks in feminist art practices of the late 1970s and early 1980s. In this paper I explore a specific historical moment in the cultural politics of feminism between 1973 and 1984, a decade that saw the emergence of feminist arts practice, exhibition and art-writing in Britain and, not incidentally, shaped my own attachment to the women's movement. How were maternal bodies represented within feminist arts practice? Whose bodies and in which places? What did maternal artworks try to make visible, and what were the constituents of looking at the time? I examine three bodies of work that expose the tensions involved in making the maternal visible in the context of feminism: Hackney Flashers Who's holding the Baby? (1978), Mary Kelly's works Antepartum (1973) and Post-Partum Document (1973-79), and Catherine Elwes With Child, 1983. Each of these works opened up an important space in the exploration of the politics of reproduction, although it should be recognised that this was still primarily the white maternal body. ii I shall argue that they were framed and contested in particular ways: in left wing publications that still prioritised class over gender; in institutions of art exhibition and criticism that were hostile to maternal art, particularly by feminist artists; and in feminist critiques of essentialism that rejected direct imaging of the maternal body.