Laura Bissell: Performing Matrescence

‘Matrescence – the time of mother-becoming’ (Raphael, 1975) describes the physical, psychological, and emotional changes that occur. Is matrescence both a becoming and an unbecoming? How do mother/artists who make autobiographical performance grapple with ambivalent experiences of motherhood? Performance can provide a space to re-write myths of motherhood, asking whose experiences remain unseen or are deemed unstageable and who gets to claim the term matrescence at all. Challenging complex and disparaging representations, or the erasure and invisibility of experiences of matrescence altogether (as in pregnancy loss and infertility), contemporary artists working in the field of performance use their live bodies to subvert dominant images of conventional myths of motherhood. In this Exchange Talk, maternal bodies which have been variously depicted as monstrous, grotesque, feral, abject, and uncanny are reconsidered, reclaimed and reimagined through examples of performances created by contemporary artists. Using strategies of mimesis, liveness, embodiment, relationality, and performativity to render their own bodies, these artists explore historically pejorative theoretical concepts and aesthetics in new, feminist ways.

Content warning: this talk makes reference to experiences of pregnancy loss and infertility.