Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9781835952269

Table of Contents

Reviews

Matrescence and Performance offers a much-needed new feminist lens for understanding the complexities of motherhood, written from a perspective of deep understanding, sensitivity and theoretical expertise. Bissell walks the reader through a wide array of works, from live art to theatre, to reconsider ingrained mythologies, stereotypes, and assumptions, and consider all facets of the maternal experience, from pregnancy and childbirth to loss, infertility and refusal. -- Dr Lucy Weir, Reader in History of Art, University of Edinburgh, UK. This is a profound and original book adding an important perspective to the field of maternal performance scholarship. Matrescence and Performance is a highly thoughtful investigation of maternal artmaking, and a joy to read.  Laura Bissell manages to skilfully bring together analysis of works by emerging and established artists and place this alongside personal and embodied accounts of spectatorship and the author’s own maternal experience. Bissell expands and challenges what it means to become mother in a deeply affective manner – moving, challenging and delighting in equal measure. Through an engagement with diverse perspectives from both art practice and feminist theory, including live and digital performance, the book opens up and enlarges matrescence in a manner that is generous, political, and original. -- Professor Emily Underwood-Lee, University of South Wales, UK. Laura Bissell’s expansive feminist analysis of matrescence in performance offers an innovative and necessary lens for understanding the complexities and ambiguities of motherhood. Written from a perspective of deep understanding, keen sensitivity and theoretical expertise, Matrescence and Performance: Becoming/Unbecoming walks the reader through a wide array of works by contemporary artists working in performance, from live art to theatre. By considering matrescence as alternately monstrous, grotesque, feral, abject and uncanny, Bissell asks us to reconsider ingrained mythologies, stereotypes and assumptions around motherhood. At times confronting, and ultimately deeply moving, Matrescence and Performance carefully considers all facets of the maternal experience, from pregnancy and childbirth to loss, infertility and refusal. Bissell’s nuanced and absorbing engagement with topics often misrepresented or under-explored is essential reading for researchers working on feminist contemporary performance practice. -- Dr Lucy Weir, Reader in History of Art, University of Edinburgh, UK.

This is a profound and original book adding an important perspective to the field of maternal performance scholarship. Matrescence and Performance is a highly thoughtful investigation of maternal artmaking, and a joy to read.  Laura Bissell manages to skilfully bring together analysis of works by emerging and established artists and place this alongside personal and embodied accounts of spectatorship and the author’s own maternal experience. Bissell expands and challenges what it means to become mother in a deeply affective manner – moving, challenging and delighting in equal measure. Through an engagement with diverse perspectives from both art practice and feminist theory, including live and digital performance, the book opens up and enlarges matrescence in a manner that is generous, political, and original. -- Professor Emily Underwood-Lee, University of South Wales, UK. Laura Bissell’s expansive feminist analysis of matrescence in performance offers an innovative and necessary lens for understanding the complexities and ambiguities of motherhood. Written from a perspective of deep understanding, keen sensitivity and theoretical expertise, Matrescence and Performance: Becoming/Unbecoming walks the reader through a wide array of works by contemporary artists working in performance, from live art to theatre. By considering matrescence as alternately monstrous, grotesque, feral, abject and uncanny, Bissell asks us to reconsider ingrained mythologies, stereotypes and assumptions around motherhood. At times confronting, and ultimately deeply moving, Matrescence and Performance carefully considers all facets of the maternal experience, from pregnancy and childbirth to loss, infertility and refusal. Bissell’s nuanced and absorbing engagement with topics often misrepresented or under-explored is essential reading for researchers working on feminist contemporary performance practice. -- Dr Lucy Weir, Reader in History of Art, University of Edinburgh, UK. Matrescence and Performance: Becoming/Unbecoming introduces a wide range of topics that explore the duality of maternal experience, while expanding beyond biological maternals into more-than-human existence. In this powerfully argued book, Bissell takes a clear feminist position when discussing matrescence in art and explores the feminist blind spot around matrescence; a much-needed perspective. This is a splendid addition to maternal discourse that celebrates creativity and artistic agency.  -- Dr Elena Marchevska, Professor of Artistic Research, London South Bank University

Author Information

Dr Laura Bissell is a performance-researcher, writer, and arts educator and has had her research, creative writing and poetry published in journals and anthologies. Laura is an Athenaeum Research Fellow at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and is co-editor of the International Journal of Performance Art and Digital Media’s special edition 'Matrescence and Media' with Jodie Hawkes and Elena Marchevska.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available