Re-enactment, Re-performance, and Feminist Mimesis in Maternal Performance

Description

The performances created by mother/artists examined in this paper use mimesis (in various ways) to rewrite the patriarchal, stereotypical and apolitical narratives of motherhood through mimetic doublings, parodies, and re-enactments.
Through analysis of Jodie Hawkes’ repliKation of Kate Middleton’s matrescence (Playing Kate, 2017-19) and 21Common’s mother and teenage son re-enactment of pop-star Sia’s music videos The Ballad of the Apathetic Son and His Narcissistic Mother (2017), I argue that there is such a thing as feminist mimesis. Through parodic perversions of the culturally normative expectations of motherhood, performances created by mother/artists act as a way of challenging political hegemony through humorous, heightened, excessive, and feminist means. The analysis of these performances as feminist expands on Diamond’s discussion of mimesis in which she moves away from ideas of imitation and an authentic relationship between the ‘real’ version and its mimos, instead emphasising the political potential of mimesis to question the truth in restaging the ‘same’. According to Diamond, as a concept mimesis is indeterminate: ‘representation, imitation […] neither separately captures it’ (1997: v), however, she sees its political function as an alienation device, in the style of Brecht, inviting audiences to witness the familiar seen anew. This paper asks: how can performances of matrescence have a ‘productive’ relationship to the real, not reproducing the same but inviting a questioning and challenging of narratives of maternal experiences? I argue that re-performing experiences of matrescence enact feminist mimesis and in ‘making strange’ (Šimić and Underwood-Lee, 2021: 21) re-imagine and expand understandings of the term.

Period	16 Mar 2025
Event title	Museum of Motherhood Conference 2025: 20th Anniversary Conference
Event type	Conference
Location	United StatesShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International