Inappropriate Bodies Art, Design and Maternity
Inappropriate Bodies Art, Design and Maternity

Author: Buller Rachel Epp

Publisher: Demeter Press

Published: 2019-09-01

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 1772582557

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This edited collection examines conflicting assumptions, expectations, and perceptions of maternity in artistic, cultural, and institutional contexts. Over the past two decades, the maternal body has gained currency in popular culture and the contemporary art world, with many books and exhibitions foregrounding artists’ experiences and art historical explorations of maternity that previously were marginalized or dismissed. In too many instances, however, the maternal potential of female bodies—whether realized or not—still causes them to be stigmatized, censored, or otherwise treated as inappropriate: cultural expectations of maternity create one set of prejudices against women whose bodies or experiences do align with those same expectations, and another set of prejudices against those whose do not. Support for mothers in the paid workforce remains woefully inadequate, yet in many cultural contexts, social norms continue to ask what is “wrong” with women who do not have children. In these essays and conversations, artists and writers discuss how maternal expectations shape both creative work and designed environments, and highlight alternative ways of existing in relation to those expectations.

Inappropriate Bodies
Inappropriate Bodies

Author: Rachel Epp Buller

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 397

ISBN-13: 9781772582574

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This edited collection examines conflicting assumptions, expectations, and perceptions of maternity in artistic, cultural, and institutional contexts. Over the past two decades, the maternal body has gained currency in popular culture and the contemporary art world, with many books and exhibitions foregrounding artists' experiences and art historical explorations of maternity that previously were marginalized or dismissed. In too many instances, however, the maternal potential of female bodies--whether realized or not--still causes them to be stigmatized, censored, or otherwise treated as inappropriate: cultural expectations of maternity create one set of prejudices against women whose bodies or experiences do align with those same expectations, and another set of prejudices against those whose do not. Support for mothers in the paid workforce remains woefully inadequate, yet in many cultural contexts, social norms continue to ask what is "wrong" with women who do not have children. In these essays and conversations, artists and writers discuss how maternal expectations shape both creative work and designed environments, and highlight alternative ways of existing in relation to those expectations.

Reconciling Art and Mothering
Reconciling Art and Mothering

Author: RachelEpp Buller

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 1351552015

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Reconciling Art and Mothering contributes a chorus of new voices to the burgeoning body of scholarship on art and the maternal and, for the first time, focuses exclusively on maternal representations and experiences within visual art throughout the world. This innovative essay collection joins the voices of practicing artists with those of art historians, acknowledging the fluidity of those categories. The twenty-five essays of Reconciling Art and Mothering are grouped into two sections, the first written by art historians and the second by artists. Art historians reflect on the work of artists addressing motherhood-including Marguerite G?rd, Chana Orloff, and Ren?Cox-from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Contributions by contemporary artist-mothers, such as Gail Rebhan, Denise Ferris, and Myrel Chernick, point to the influence of past generations of artist-mothers, to the inspiration found in the work of maternally minded literary and cultural theorists, and to attempts to broaden definitions of maternity. Working against a hegemonic construction of motherhood, the contributors discuss complex and diverse feminist mothering experiences, from maternal ambivalence to queer mothering to quests for self-fulfillment. The essays address mothering experiences around the globe, with contributors hailing from North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia.

The Maternal in Creative Work
The Maternal in Creative Work

Author: Elena Marchevska

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-12-11

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 1351209825

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The Maternal in Creative Work examines the interrelation between art, creativity and maternal experience, inviting international artists, theorists and cultural workers to discuss their approaches to the central feminist question of the relation between maternity, generation and creativity. This edited collection explores various modes and forms of art practice which look at mothers as subjects and as artists of the maternal experience, and how the creative practice is used to accept, negotiate, resist or challenge traditional conceptions of mothering. The book brings together some of the major projects of maternal art from the last two decades and opens up new ways of conceptualizing motherhood as a creative and communicative practice. Chapters include intergenerational discussion of art practices in the 20th and 21st centuries, representations of breastfeeding and infertility in creative projects, the notion of the ‘unfit mother’ and childlessness, together with the experiences of women and men that take on maternal identities through many forms of kinship and social mothering. The Maternal in Creative Work will be essential reading for interdisciplinary students and scholars in cultural studies, gender studies and art theory and will have wider appeal to audiences interested in maternity, childcare, creativity and psychoanalysis.

The Maternal, Digital Subjectivity, and the Aesthetics of Interruption
The Maternal, Digital Subjectivity, and the Aesthetics of Interruption

Author: EL Putnam

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2022-04-21

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1501364812

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Bringing together philosophies of the maternal with digital technology may appear to be an arbitrary pairing. However, reading them intertextually through select creative practices reveals how both encompass an aesthetics of interruption that becomes a novel means of understanding subjectivity. EL Putnam investigates how the digital performances of certain artists, creators, and technologists rupture existing representations of the maternal, taking advantage of the formal properties of digital media. What results are interruptions of visual and aural constructions through an immanent merging of the performing body with digital technologies. Putnam bases her analysis on close examinations of the way certain makers use the formal properties of digital imagery, such as the gap, the glitch, and the lag, as means of rendering images of the maternal uncanny in order to challenge mediation, constituting an aesthetics of interruption. The result is a radical critical strategy for engaging with digital technology and subsequent understandings of the subject that defy current modes of assimilation.

Maternal Performance
Maternal Performance

Author: Lena Šimić

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-11-27

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 3030802264

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Maternal Performance: Feminist Relations bridges the fields of performance, feminism, maternal studies, and ethics. It loosely follows the life course with chapters on maternal loss, pregnancy, birth, aftermath, maintenance, generations, and futures. Performance and the maternal have an affinity as both are lived through the body of the mother/artist, are played out in real time, and are concerned with creating ethical relationships with an other – be that other the child, the theatrical audience, or our wider communities. The authors contend that maternal performance takes the largely hidden, private and domestic work of mothering and makes it worthy of consideration and contemplation within the public sphere.

Artist-Parents in Contemporary Art
Artist-Parents in Contemporary Art

Author: Barbara Kutis

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-05-14

Total Pages: 182

ISBN-13: 0429886268

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This book examines the increasing intersections of art and parenting from the late 1990s to the early 2010s, when constructions of masculine and feminine identities, as well as the structure of the family, underwent radical change. Barbara Kutis asserts that the championing of the simultaneous linkage of art and parenting by contemporary artists reflects a conscientious self-fashioning of a new kind of identity, one that she calls the ‘artist-parent.’ By examining the work of three artists—Guy Ben-Ner, Elżbieta Jabłońska, and the collective Mothers and Fathers— this book reveals how these artists have engaged with the domestic and personal in order to articulate larger issues of parenting in contemporary life. This book will be of interest to scholars in art and gender, gender studies, contemporary art, and art history.

Plastic Capitalism
Plastic Capitalism

Author: Amanda Boetzkes

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2019-03-19

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0262039338

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An argument for the centrality of the visual culture of waste—as seen in works by international contemporary artists—to the study of our ecological condition. Ecological crisis has driven contemporary artists to engage with waste in its most non-biodegradable forms: plastics, e-waste, toxic waste, garbage hermetically sealed in landfills. In this provocative and original book, Amanda Boetzkes links the increasing visualization of waste in contemporary art to the rise of the global oil economy and the emergence of ecological thinking. Often, when art is analyzed in relation to the political, scientific, or ecological climate, it is considered merely illustrative. Boetzkes argues that art is constitutive of an ecological consciousness, not simply an extension of it. The visual culture of waste is central to the study of the ecological condition. Boetzkes examines a series of works by an international roster of celebrated artists, including Thomas Hirschhorn, Francis Alÿs, Song Dong, Tara Donovan, Agnès Varda, Gabriel Orozco, and Mel Chin, among others, mapping waste art from its modernist origins to the development of a new waste imaginary generated by contemporary artists. Boetzkes argues that these artists do not offer a predictable or facile critique of consumer culture. Bearing this in mind, she explores the ambivalent relationship between waste (both aestheticized and reviled) and a global economic regime that curbs energy expenditure while promoting profitable forms of resource consumption.

Give and Take:
Give and Take:

Author: Katie Palfreyman

Publisher: Demeter Press

Published: 2024-03-13

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 1772584967

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Give and Take: Motherhood and Creative Practice explores the diverse ways contemporary artists navigate the unique tensions of motherhood in all its varied stages. Becoming a mother is a life-changing event that can give mothers greater perspective, drive, and inspiration for making art. But motherhood also takes time and energy from pursuing creative work. This fundamental challenge, this give and take, is explored through this book as it forefronts the art and lives of dancers, playwrights, musicians, visual artists, and creative writers. The book contains thirty-three first person narratives from practicing artists along with written analyses that place these artists' essays within the broader context of arts writing and scholarship about motherhood. The concluding section of the book includes overarching thoughts about how artist mothers can move forward despite structural inequality and cultural bias and includes a resource guide for practical support.

The Routledge Companion to Motherhood
The Routledge Companion to Motherhood

Author: Lynn O'Brien Hallstein

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-11-04

Total Pages: 671

ISBN-13: 1351684191

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Interdisciplinary and intersectional in emphasis, the Routledge Companion to Motherhood brings together essays on current intellectual themes, issues, and debates, while also creating a foundation for future scholarship and study as the field of Motherhood Studies continues to develop globally. This Routledge Companion is the first extensive collection on the wide-ranging topics, themes, issues, and debates that ground the intellectual work being done on motherhood. Global in scope and including a range of disciplinary perspectives, including anthropology, literature, communication studies, sociology, women’s and gender studies, history, and economics, this volume introduces the foundational topics and ideas in motherhood, delineates the diversity and complexity of mothering, and also stimulates dialogue among scholars and students approaching from divergent backgrounds and intellectual perspectives. This will become a foundational text for academics in Women's and Gender Studies and interdisciplinary researchers interested in this important, complex and rapidly growing topic. Scholars of psychology, sociology or public policy, and activists in both university and workplace settings interested in motherhood and mothering will find it an invaluable guide.