Matrescence and Performance

Challenging the myths, silences, and stereotypes of motherhood through the live body in performance.

Matrescence and Performance examines what performance can do to challenge and expand conventional representations of becoming a mother. Across art history and literature, maternal bodies, along with the processes of pregnancy, childbirth, and sustenance, have often been cast as uncanny, abject, grotesque, monstrous, or hybrid. Societal conventions and myths about “good” and “bad” mothers have further constrained the depiction of maternal ambivalence and labor, leaving the lived experiences of matrescence largely invisible in galleries, mainstream art, and media.

Bringing together the work of artist mothers in contemporary performance, this book shows how live bodies can subvert dominant myths and disrupt the erasure of maternal experience. Through strategies of mimesis, liveness, embodiment, relationality, and performativity, these artists reframe historically pejorative concepts and aesthetics in new feminist ways. Performance becomes a site where becoming a mother is understood as both a becoming and an unbecoming, opening up a richer and more nuanced vocabulary for matrescence. Interdisciplinary in scope, this volume will appeal to students and scholars across the arts and cultural studies, as well as a wider readership interested in artist mothers, feminist art practices, and lived experiences of matrescence.
 

Laura Bissell is a performance researcher, writer, and arts educator. She is an Athenaeum Research Fellow at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.