Becoming/Unbecoming: Matrescence in Performance

Maternal bodies and processes of pregnancy, childbirth and sustenance have historically been depicted in art and literature as variously monstrous, grotesque, abject, and uncanny. Societal conventions and myths around what makes a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ mother have limited the visibility of maternal ambivalence and labour. Moving beyond these problematic representations, contemporary mother/artists working in the field of performance use strategies of mimesis, liveness, embodiment, relationality, and performativity to render their own maternal bodies and to explore historically pejorative theoretical concepts and aesthetics in new, feminist ways.

‘Matrescence - the time of mother-becoming’ (Raphael,1975) describes the physical, psychological, and emotional changes experienced during the significant transformation that occurs. When you become a mother, do you become something else? Is matresence also an unbecoming? How do mother/artists who work with autobiographical material to make performance grapple with oscillating experiences of maternal subjectivity in their work? The term matrescence is used rather than parturition as not all people who become mothers go through childbirth and the terms maternal and motherhood have the potential to essentialise and ostracise (Šimić & Underwood-Lee, 2016: 6). Same sex couples, trans women, women who adopt a child or use a surrogate may not go through the physical act of childbirth but can experience matrescence and are important as part of an intersectional feminist approach.