Acts of displacement: Lea lublin's mon fils, may '68, and feminist psychosocial revolt

Abstract

In May 1968 the artist Lea Lublin displayed herself 'performing the everyday actions of care' for her son, who had been born the year before, throughout the 24e Salon de Mai in Paris. Lublin's action coincided with the protests, strikes, and occupations that effloresced across France that month, and resonated with a number of issues that would power the subsequent emergence of the Mouvement de libération des femmes. This article argues that Mon fils sits at the fulcrum of multiple strands of feminist debate in France. Spencer proposes that, while there are compelling connections between Lublin's work and Marxist feminist critiques of labour, motherhood, and childcare, Mon fils can also be understood in relation to feminist re-readings of psychoanalysis. Drawing on Julia Kristeva's theorisation of revolt as a psychological as much as a social phenomenon, and situating the work in relation to Lublin's later involvement in collective feminist art practice during the 1970s, Spencer contends that the work ultimately refuses to prioritise the materialist over the psychic, and instead understands the two processes as dialectically interdependent.