Online Conference (will be recorded) University of Bolton 22 and 23 April 2021 9am - 16:30 (GMT)
This interdisciplinary online conference, featuring keynote speaker Dr Andrea O’Reilly (York University, Toronto), aims to address spaces of scholarly and creative enquiry from which the figure of the mother has, historically speaking, been missing. Dr. O’Reilly’s own work on matricentric feminism notes the neglect of the mother in academic feminism. This conference comes out of an investigation into canonical academic feminism; similarly, art history as a scholarly discipline has largely excluded maternal art, resulting in a tradition of critique in which representations of maternity have existed in an occluded space – a forced instance of feminist separatism. This conference is invested, then, in exploring ‘the missing mother’ in these, and other, disciplines. We are interested, as Dr. O’Reilly suggests, in feminism(s) both on and of maternity; in considerations of the social, psychic and symbolic order of the mother; in activism; in social and political manifestations of motherhood, the mother, mothering and the maternal. We acknowledge and value the manifold and invaluable contributions to this field of the professional and scholarly communities involved in midwifery and medical discourses; for the purposes of this conference, however, we would like to hear from those disciplines from which the maternal has been historically absent.
With contributions from scholars, makers and researchers across a wide variety of disciples, presentations will be in the form of both traditional papers and alternative modes of presentation. They will include performance, music, creative writing and discussions, on aspects of motherhood and maternity that will include the following areas:
- neoliberalism and the segregation of mothers
- the social, creative and intellectual isolation of the mother
- forgotten/erased histories
- the mother as political and social experience,
- art/literary depictions of the mother/maternity/motherhood
- aging and feminism
- maternal invisibility
- femininity and maternity/motherhood
- the voice(s) of the mother in subcultures
This is a copied post. For the original post and further information on The Missing Mother, visit the website here
Contact M.Mullaney@bolton.ac.uk
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