SUCK ME IN

IntroductorY Text

My research questions how the Internet can imagine (m)otherhood as simultaneously phantasmatic and real, extraordinary and ordinary and how maternality can be configured in relation to sexuality, silencing, trauma, anxiety, community and otherness. Maternality [1] describes the condition of (m)otherhood, or the condition of becoming maternal [2], but also supports the etymological root of the word maternal, which indicates “a first or native language [3]”: a “mother tongue”.  Through artworks my research designates a space for a temporary loss of language for the (m)other, at the point of maternality, through a play on words from “mother tongue” to “(m)other tongue-tie”.

For my doctoral research, I deliberately coincided my conception, pregnancies and births of two babies to form my project.  This has afforded me a site of subjective, intuitive and embodied productivity from which to formulate questions around (m)otherhood. I use the term (m)otherhood, with the ‘m’ in brackets, as a way of opening up multiple and differing bodies of a maternal subject or people who identify as (m)others or parents. This encompasses all kinds of family set ups, including adoption, foster care, single parent families, families after breakdown, lesbian parents, trans parents, Seahorse parents, IVF parents, egg and sperm donation, surrogacy.

My research has been embodied research: I have created a body of work around my own subjective experience of (m)otherhood in real time – living it, exploring it, excavating it, documenting it and seeking to understand it theoretically but also visually, poetically and expansively. I have used the doctorate to stage my own visceral corporeality – my leaking, bleeding, unruly, unstable body – as researcher and researched. Attached to my hand, is my iPhone, which has formed an extended bodily limb. The screen of my phone, always switched on and connected to the Internet (or temporarily offline in aeroplane mode), has meant that I have not been able to separate an online experience from my body. Through the project, I conceive a new configuration of maternality, that is inextricably linked to online experience, that is rendered through a register of “maternal tongue-tie”, and where the (m)othering body is particularly “tied” to others.  The artworks themselves become sites for speech production, questioning how maternal voice can be “spoken” but also “heard”.

My experience of working through (m)otherhood has taken place in a highly specific context of funded doctoral research within a university. This position has been one of privilege and safety, where I have operated from within an academic community at University of Oxford, as well as a secure and supportive family structure. This has allowed for a specific theoretical discourse to emerge, marked by the economies of this position. For example, this is one of the only instances as an artist where it is possible to claim a period of paid Maternity Leave. Furthermore, the project uses the structure and institutional framework of doctoral research as a site for the production of maternality. I have not just produced work “about” my version of (m)otherhood but rather used the doctorate as a site to “produce” the experience. My body has become the object of study and my subjective implication in its observation has caused breaches, leaks, tensions and contradictions to erupt into the doctoral project. This has created a complicated space to work from. As Lisa Baraitser, psychosocial theorist and founder of international interdisciplinary research network Mapping Maternal Subjectivities, Identities and Ethics (MaMSIE) writes:

Maternal subjectivity presents us with particular philosophical and ontological conundrums, not only in terms of the pregnant and lactating body that is both singular and multiple, disturbing notions of unity and bounded self, but also because maternity is an experience that […] is impossible to anticipate in advance, one that unravels as it proceeds, and that one is always chasing the tail of, never become expert at, or even competent, and that always eludes our attempts to fully understand it [4].

This presents a conflict in that doctoral research is itself a quest for expertise but, in this case, it is precisely the never becoming expert, that is at the heart of the maternal subject with which my research is concerned. When I experienced a form of “maternal tongue-tie”, I was metaphorically rendered unable to speak and it is this moment of failed transmission that operates to frame concerns around the provocation between embodied experience and doctoral research and the fault lines between the two.

Throughout my research, I have tracked and performed the urge to reach out to other people in an effort to create gatherings of (m)others and others around me. In fact, my maternal body has demanded and craved a kind of social extension, and I have sought to form social structures around me in order to stage and excavate inconsistencies arising from my experience of (m)otherhood. In this way, with my (m)othering body as interlocutor, the doctoral project and academic spaces have operated as occasions for this communing, whether it has been invented within the texts and videos, or forced together, by staging artworks and seminars in existing community spaces both within and outside the University. This drive within the research has pushed me to formulate a version of a (m)other, that registers the complexity and ambivalence of intersubjectivity and draws out and layers together tensions between and within different subjects, communities, online and offline spaces and social structures.

I have used “fattened” and “flattened” as terms of poetic value which articulate different formations of weight in relation to bodies, spaces and generations. “Fattened” infers an expanded state of corporeality, one of buoyant pregnancy, full cream milk or overwhelming online experience. It is a fleshy space of saturation, fecundity and (re)productivity. “Flattened” is thinning and tongue-tied; it connotes anxiety, loss or isolation, often experienced in the digital contemporary. My research forces an intimacy between these two binaries as they overlap and leak into one another, mirroring the equivocal maternal body where limits are constantly breached and shifting. In the project, fattening and flattening occur simultaneously but also loop to follow my own shifting between pre-pregnant, pregnant and post-pregnant states. The loop structure also reflects an anxious assimilation of the imperatives of doctoral research, to be “fattening” by adding more research, more weight, more knowledge, as well as “flattening”, streamlining and editing to create precise information channels. This looping methodology produces a configuration of maternality that does not represent an accomplishment of fattening and flattening, or a linear development from one to the other, but a constant oscillation between the two, in which “becoming expert” recedes behind the operations and effects of layering, cutting, repeating and interrupting.  

I use the practice of searching and scrolling as a potential alternative for physical community, or domesticity, and as a model of self-care, a means through which to understand bodily transformations, such as the trauma to lactating breasts from infant tongue-tie. NHS literature defines this relatively common condition in babies as follows:

Tongue-tie (ankyloglossia) is where the strip of skin connecting the baby’s tongue to the floor of their mouth is shorter than usual […]. It can restrict the tongue’s movement, making it harder to breastfeed […]. Tongue-tie can also sometimes cause problems for a breastfeeding mother. Problems can include sore or cracked nipples, low milk supply, mastitis [5].

My first baby suffered from tongue-tie and, as a consequence, I developed mastitis, which is the painful inflammation and subsequent infection of the breast, caused by blocked milk ducts. My research draws on my experience of suffering from mastitis during Maternity Leave and my sense of metaphorical tongue-tie and invisibility during this time.

Pump (2017), Hangry (2016) and Jude (2020) develop my experiences into different thematisations of (m)otherhood seen through the lens of tongue-tie. In Pump, through the character of a stripper suffering from mastitis caused by breastfeeding her tongue-tied baby, I ask how, when the flow of gendered, bodily liquid is compromised, the unhealthy or under-performing body can still be experienced as having value. In Hangry, my maternal aunt’s traumatic caesarean section leaves her speechless when the anaesthetic fails. The recounting of her narrative is revisited through a fictional police interview, splicing trauma and violence together. Jude explores a traumatised maternal subject in an extended state of metaphorical tongue-tie, complicating an idea around maternal embodiment, voice and silencing. Jude tells the story of a former Rebbetzin [6], (m)other and drummer and their exclusion from an Orthodox Jewish community as they come out as non-binary and acknowledge their sexuality. As a practicing Jew myself, and a practicing artist, this work navigates the relationship between my own version of a tongue-tied maternal figure and that of another (m)other, in a precarious holding together of different practices and performances of self, online and offline. As an active member of the community from which Jude Rose is excluded, this work has a particular bearing on my own activity as a Jewish (m)other researching what it means to “speak” through tongue-tied maternality. The artwork itself becomes the site for speech production to occur, speech that encompasses drumbeats, song and image, allowing a figuration of (poly)vocal maternality to emerge.  

These three works are the culmination of five years of artistic research, building on ideas developed and worked through in earlier videos and performances, including The Furtility Dancer in the Wet/Dry Technology Desert (2015), Cashino Desert (2015), Second Trimester (2015) and Third Trimester (2016), which foreground issues of maternal kinship, practices of community, anxiety and the relationship between (m)otherhood and the Internet.  

My research also consists of a creative writing practice, which is represented by Wake Up Your Brain. This text is made up of layers of fictional, inventive prose, as well as reworked “found” texts from a variety of sources, including scripts from my videos, my medical notes, online forums and apps. My written project sets up a dichotomy between a pre-Internet generation of (m)others and that of a highly mediated post-Internet age of (m)others whose access to the bodily is invariably interrupted and informed by an online experience.  This is a double-edged experience for (m)others of my generation, allowing unprecedented access to information but also fertile ground for neurosis, paranoia and anxiety.

Finally, the body of work itself exists online and offline, spanning academic institution, contemporary art space and the online “mamasphere”, demonstrating the tense interconnectedness of offline and online spaces, networks and imaginaries intrinsic to the new configuration of maternality produced by the project. The website www.fattened.net [7], constitutes an online space of exhibition and point of access for the texts and portfolio of artworks, which also have offline “lives” in situated screenings and performance installations. The extended “offline” version of Jude will be screened at LUX, the contemporary arts agency for moving image, in North London. On the website, the trio of artworks – Jude (extract), Hangry and Pump – are grouped under the “Screen” menu; four further moving-image works – The Furtility Dancer in the Wet/Dry Technology Desert, Cashino Desert, First Trimester and Second Trimester – are presented under the “Stomach” menu. Wake Up Your Brain, under “Scroll”, is free flowing scrollable prose, incorporating data output from pregnancy apps, edited scripts from the moving image works, my sung medical notes, an imaginary Internet support group, and an augmented reality course for surgeons on breast reconstruction, cut with reflections on tongue-tie, doctoral research, breastfeeding and other (m)others such as Mary Kelly. “Mastitis Shop” is a potential space of exchange, rendered dysfunctional through failed transaction, frustrating attempts at straightforward consumption. A printed “download” of the website, handed in to the Examinations School and later to be deposited in the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford, performs as an “offline” version of the project; it exists as an interrupted form, echoing lapses and glitches in transmission, flow and articulacy that both trouble and facilitate becoming (m)other in my research.

www.fattened.net participates in the online sphere used and addressed by my research, including the “mamasphere” of blogs and parenting websites. The project is searchable, scrollable and visible to other (m)others researching pregnancy and maternity, who may also be accessing the online resources I have referred to throughout the project. My website’s keywords - maternality, tongue-tie, “mother”, (m)other, mastitis, doctoral research - are scanned by search engines, which list my research project amongst other websites and resources aimed at (m)others. The project critically performs within this field of (m)other learning and presumes a different kind of “public” access in its mode of publication, to that of the printed and digital versions of the thesis that will be held in the library, and screenings of the moving image works in gallery settings. In having the research online, my own offline relationships are opened to transformation and compromise. For example, those able to access my research online “include” members of the community that have “excluded” Jude Rose, whose self-narrated story is explored in the moving image work Jude.

TRACKING, SHARING & LEAKING: THE INTERNET & ANXIETY

I stumbled into conception, together with and through my phone and its connection to the Internet. My (m)otherhood made its first appearance on my screen.

During my research, I used different apps to track and monitor my body, sharing my intimate information with this technology. Sites such as Instagram, pregnancy tracking apps, parenting websites and “Mummy Blogs” were all spaces I occupied, where emotional and economic value is mined in different ways. Within these spaces, a commercialisation and harvesting of information became intertwined with my digital body. Here, the extraction of value is via a specific type of labour, produced by my body that is contributing content as well as consuming the technology. For example, my “Glow App” logs my sexual activity, health, moods, ovulation and menstrual cycles, through a series of daily questions and technological rituals. The text from this app becomes a meta data set of useful, personalised ingredients which I use to track my emotional and physical health. At the same time, the intimate information that I input is invested to create political and material currency for the corporate structures it belongs to – that of advertising and data sold for commercial gain.

The social anthropologist Deborah Lupton investigates the relationship between women’s health and technology platforms in her paper ‘Mastering Your Fertility’: The Digitised Reproductive Citizen (2015). She configures a female body that is subject to an engagement with an expanding offering of fertility and women’s health technology platforms. [8] Lupton is critical of a narrative of obedience that emerges through this technology, particularly in terms of the sharing or giving up of personal information, which in turn creates a heightening of “performed” female fertility and reproduction. This analysis is crucial for my research in relation to how intimate digital data is appropriated and reproduced for other forms of mined value (advertising, statistics, research) and how online systems co-opt bodies, rendering them as public versions of reduced data. Personal data is expropriated for different purposes, often made public when shared online, or otherwise leaked between or through different online platforms. My research is concerned with modes of self-disclosure and self-care through these technological activities, where maternal bodies are often measured in relation to productivity and success, and how these roles and tensions are subverted and disrupted. For example, in The Furtility Dancer in the Wet/Dry Technology Desert, I investigate how content sharing platforms provide a supposed “safe” space for users to form virtual communities exchanging intimate narratives, advice and support. However, these platforms are often sites of conflict, surveillance and exclusion; voices within these communities can be judgemental and entrench normative power systems. Like other sites online, there is a false feeling of safety, encouraging people to disclose private information to others they do not know and where anonymity is not respected.   

In Wake Up Your Brain, I create a fictionalised version of a thread relating to tongue-tie, extracted from a private group on Facebook called “Babies, Babies, Babies”. This piece of writing, titled Privacy Policy, draws on and exaggerates the style and tone of comments in the real thread, but reconfigures and re-invents the users and their shared content. I use this research to question expectations of the “good mother” / “yummy mummy” and subversive “bad mother” / “slummy mummy” and how bodies who have entered the realm of (m)otherhood then perform care for both their babies and themselves. Within the “mamasphere”, which includes Mummy Blogs, Facebook and other online platforms, the identity of (m)otherhood becomes (re)constructed through a digital subjectivity. As Kate Orton-Johnson writes in Mummy Blogs and Representations of Motherhood: ‘Bad Mummies’ and Their Readers (2017):  

While mummy bloggers represent a rather homogeneous and narrow demographic in terms of ethnicity, class, and sexuality, they are a non-normative voice that provides a more variegated picture of motherhood than offline mothering materials[…]They have been hailed as sites of female activism and rebellion in making the personal political and in making visible diverse, alternative, and candid narratives of motherhood [9].

In the Summer of 2018, my local bathing ponds in Hampstead Heath, North-West London, became the focus of protests by anti-trans feminists, when a small group of women, dressed up as men, came together to demonstrate against the proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act. This demonstration was devised and organised through the online network Mumsnet, the largest parenting website in the UK. The enactment in a physical location of transphobic messaging and organising online, serves to illustrate the power that online communities hold, but also the complex leakage between online and offline spaces. In Jude, the scenes of submersion in water and bathing hint at this event, which was also provocative for a number of local Orthodox Jewish people who use the ponds [10]. Although Mumsnet, and other networks such as Facebook, have produced conditions which have often allowed discrimination and transphobic rhetoric to proliferate [11],  the Internet also provides opportunities for users to fulfil utopian potentials, using different online platforms as radical spaces for transformation. The artist micha cárdenas writes about one such experience, which informs their video Pregnancy (2016):

On a popular social media website, I found a closed group for trans women’s fertility. The group was small, with only eight members, about half of whom actively post. Yet it was here that I learned that I could simply buy a microscope to monitor my own fertility, and that I absolutely had to wear baggy clothes if this was going to work [12].

According to a recent study, increased Facebook usage correlates to a decreased experience of well-being: “Mothers who were more prone to seeking external validation for their mothering identity and perfectionistic about parenting, experienced increases in depressive symptoms indirectly via greater Facebook activity.” [13] This increased anxiety relates to the way parents perform on Facebook, uploading photographs of their newborns into online profiles and engaging in comment threads and discussions. Parents may be seeking real knowledge lacking in other areas; for example, tongue-tie screening is excluded from the routine new-born check before discharge from hospital, so I searched for and found diagnostic information online that confirmed my first baby was suffering from the condition. However, there is evidence that increased social presence and activity online heightens deep anxiety, through a continual need for online affirmation and social capital [14].  

Lupton also emphasises that within the remit of reproductive technology, there is a lack of acknowledgement of users who are considered to be “risky”, in that they may not necessarily fit into the heteronormative or stereotypical models of the “digital citizen”. My research supports an idea of a body at risk, a body that leaks and does not comply with these predisposed systems and structures that dominate online platforms. According to Lupton, these technologies “promise to discipline, aestheticise and contain the risks and anxieties concerning the messiness, unpredictability (and sometimes discomfort or pain) of the menstruating, ovulating, pregnant or labouring body” [15]. The data is also constantly shifting: as more is updated and it becomes fluid, there is the risk of a different type of digital leakage, mirroring what happens when there is a security breach and information is “leaked” without permission. In The Furtility Dancer in the Wet/Dry Technology Desert leaked data and leaked bodily fluids cause anxiety and threaten to destabilise fertility and productivity. In this work, a technology start-up incubator office leaks into a body on the cusp of pregnancy. In Jude, a swimming pool, an aquarium and the social media screen leak into one another, forming overlaid liquid grids. The liquid in Jude is a signifier of physical and online immersion, but also religious and symbolic codes. Swimming is used by Jude to symbolise and actualise their own re-birth as non-binary, but the emancipatory image of the swimming pool is also complicated by Jude’s voiced description of ritual immersion, with the Jewish custom of visiting the religious bathing pool, known as mikveh [16].

I build on anthropologist Charlotte Kroløkke’s ideas around “reproflow” [17], the concept of reproductive bodily liquids moving across geographical boundaries and through different bodies. Within my visual research, I relate this wet aesthetic to maternal womb space but also to the “flow” of data we experience virtually, as well as working as a substitute, enlarged liquid screen. For example, in Pump, the milk seen in the video becomes a contested symbol of intimacy and anxiety, which, like the stripping or performing body, is economised and commodified. When the flow of liquid is compromised, for example from mastitis, I question how the unhealthy or under-performing body can retain a form of value. In Pump, the images and the dialogue do not flow as they would in a conventional linear narrative, echoing the effects of clogged bodily ducts in mastitis or stunted speech in tongue-tie. 

In Cashino Desert, the narrative centres on a pregnant protagonist travelling or flowing between the cityscape of Las Vegas and the Nevada Desert. In this moving image, the voyaging pregnant body is imagined as precarious and subject to the anxiety of loss. The protagonist seemingly visits Las Vegas as a tourist, enjoying casinos and famous landmarks, but their enjoyment is haunted by the underlying threats to happy gestation of losses such as miscarriage, abortion, stillbirth, prematurity and maternal mortality. I use “aeroplane mode”, the temporary offline mode on smartphones, as a metaphor for bodies leaving cyberspace. My research is concerned with this offline status and its relationship to travel and leakage particularly in relation to reproductive tourism. In contrast Lucy Beech’s film Reproductive Exile (2018) is structured around a never-ending motorway journey, traversing the complexities of reproductive science and its implications to a reproductive “industry”, where invisible bodies and human and animal bodily matter, cross between geographical borders and “working” bodies, collapsing non-human and human together. Through an increase in availability of Assisted Reproductive Technology, infertile bodies are tempted into crossing geographic borders and countries in order to partake in fertility programmes, thus becoming “unthawed”, fertile bodies, often in warmer countries. There are economic and political implications to these activities as Marcia C. Inhorn writes in ‘Assisted’ Motherhood in Global Dubai: Reproductive Tourists and their Helpers (2010):

In the global reproscape, issues of bodily commodification are paramount, given that reproductive tourism may be undertaken explicitly to procure human gametes, both sperm and eggs, which are disassociated from men’s and women’s bodies and increasingly sold on the open market. Furthermore, various ‘assistants’ – ranging from sperm and egg donors to gestational surrogates to childcare workers and servants – are implicated in the processes of global reproductive tourism in ways that have rarely been examined [18].

The project incorporates and reformulates graphic languages of maternality found online, from flattened pregnant emojis to the sanitised, saccharine pink fonts used in pregnancy tracking apps, where pregnancy and maternity is commercialised, marketised and often presented in relation to the screen gaze. In reproducing this language, I also contest it with a painful, embodied counter discourse. For example, prints on the website’s “Mastitis Shop”, juxtapose this graphic language with images of inflammation and infection. The commercial dysfunction of the shopfront, where actual exchange is blocked, embodies the project’s themes of blockage, disobedience and under-performance. “Mastitis Shop” also counters the phenomenon of celebrity (m)otherhood and its proliferation online, feeding off and seeping into wider consumer culture. In 2018, during Kylie Jenner’s pregnancy, she took gestational time offline and then re-emerged, presenting a highly constructed, visible, viral video announcing the birth of her child. Jenner, then aged 19, is an extremely mediated, post-Internet visible presence, particularly within the USA, and her cultural reach with members of her own generation, means that she performs a very specific and privileged version of an imaged, networked teenage, “working” mother. Here, maternal identity is formed through being looked at and consumed, marketed as something to increase popularity and influence. For Jenner, “Maternity Leave” signals self-imposed time offline, constructed and produced through their online performance, through video, through an occlusion.

Imogen Tyler writes about the elastic, reflective quality of stretched antenatal skin, as both container but also a surface to reflect a gaze, in relation to Demi Moore who was photographed by Annie Liebowitz in 1991 for “Vanity Fair”. Tyler writes:

The use of light, to reflect on Moore’s skin, directs the spectator’s gaze to the surface of the body in such a way as to emphasise the external form of the pregnant body rather than its (imagined) contents. In representing a clearly differentiated body, but not an individual one, Moore is positioned as a subject who is the embodied site of her own transformation and gestation. It is thus the visual emphasis on the surface of Moore’s body in this photograph that enables us to think through the skin as the site of pregnant subjectivity [19]. 

This cover image, which was censored at news-stands, paved the way for a fascination with pregnant celebrity (m)others: Serena Williams, photographed by Annie Liebowitz in 2017 for “Vanity Fair”; Beyoncé, photographed by Awol Erizku for Instagram in 2017. However, the proliferation of pregnant selfies, magazine stories and reality documentaries all follow this contemporary obsession, with Instagram still censoring images of naked, pregnant people. If skin is the site for maternal subjectivity, then Catherine Opie’s photographic print Self Portrait/Nursing (2004), expands and complicates this idea. The self-portrait of Opie breastfeeding her toddler, (tattooed) skin-on-skin, in a Madonna and child position is elaborated by the scarred word “pervert” etched into her body from a previous work Self-Portrait/Pervert (1994), concerning her queer identity. In my project, it is the screen that becomes a kind of skin, which is open to infiltration and interruption, and which signifies the “line” between online and offline. In Third Trimester, my pregnant skin is distorted in colour but also stretched. The reddened, infected skin of breasts and chests in “Mastitis Shop”, spreads to other visualisations in the project, as a diffuse pinkness that inflames the screen in video works, or backs the screen as solid colour on the website. The underwater coral tentacles in Jude work to bother and interrupt the integrity of the “portrait” screen. In my work, the “skin” as screen is layered, interrupted, agitated and breached.

The Internet was an important way that I formulated the tracking of a life in Jude. I use Jude’s Facebook profile as a way of documenting their refusal of a particular definition of (m)otherhood that comes out of the Orthodox Jewish community, which enshrines heterosexuality as the norm and motherhood as women’s principle destiny. Jude originates from the community that I belong to and identify with – an Orthodox Jewish community in North West London [20]. I came to know Judith (their name at the time) from a distance, when they were my Rabbi’s wife at the synagogue. Following the sudden disappearance of Judith from our shared offline community, we became “friends” on Facebook and it was in this online context, that I began witnessing the transformation of their identity. I started making this work in the final stages of my second pregnancy and when I was about to start another period of Maternity Leave, feeling a strong desire to make connections and form a relationship, outside my domestic sphere. I wanted to explore the leakage between our online and offline relationship and expand on the encounter between our connected and disconnected bodies and versions of maternality. Internet “scrolling” becomes an important aesthetic but also symbolic decision within the work, where scrolled Facebook pages layer and bleed into the narrative unfolding around a transformation of identity, shared and documented online.

TONGUES & BREASTS: SEXUALITY, SILENCING & TRAUMA

Their tongue on my breast. My breast in their mouth.

I have used tongues and breasts to formulate visual and symbolic juxtapositions of erotic, articulating, performing maternal bodies butted up against traumatised, silenced maternal bodies. In Pump, a sexualised breast and a lactating breast are conceived as a single object of production, performance and pain. In Catherine Elwes’ video There is a Myth (1984), the artist’s baby son is shown repeatedly kneading her breast, until milk seeps out of the nipple erecting an erotic but also familial charge. This is not the case for all people. For example, in Jude, the protagonist articulates their struggles with breastfeeding, which they describe as a way of losing or giving up their identity. For them it is an experience of loss. Splitting open these experiences indicates how varied, rather than unitary they are. In my research, I draw from Luce Irigaray’s formative writing on sexual difference, to understand multiplicities of identity in relation to (m)otherhood and a conflation of sexuality with the maternal subject. This is further complicated in an online environment, where maternal identity is presented via virtual advertisements for breast pump or fertility monitoring apps and breastfeeding selfies. In Pump and Cashino Desert, a layered maternal identity is configured through images of the lactating breast being simultaneously caressed and punished or a semi-naked pregnant body on the side of a vehicle. In the versions of (m)otherhood I construct through the research, pleasure and pain, an erotic body and a maternal body cannot be separated. The project’s entangled configuration of maternality counters simplistic, monolithic constructions of the maternal that often feature in popular culture, advertising and online.

My project intersects with other works by women artists reconstructing and deconstructing the politics and imagery of breastfeeding. For example, Aimee Gilmore’s Milkscape (2016) was made when a bottle of her expressed breastmilk spilled in the studio onto a huge piece of polyester sheet, forming a curdled imprint into the fabric. What is originally a “wasted” bottle of milk production, becomes in this instance, the material for another form of production - an artwork. The work of breastfeeding a baby is also the focus of the moving image work Charity (2017) by Kate Davis. It features an archive of images of nursing women from a range of art historical, allegorical and religious sources, juxtaposed with scenes of domesticity and a (m)other’s voice describing the activity of breastfeeding as employment without contract or salary, agreed working hours or job description. In Pump, the milk is produced through the pumping technology, removing the ostensibly embodied relationship between baby and breast. Here, breastmilk becomes a matrix of pressure and anxiety, where the dysfunction of the breast is both a point of “failure” for the body, but also provides for another kind of production as an artist.  

My first baby was born with tongue-tie, although in the first few weeks following his birth, I was not aware of this. Green-poo nappies became hypothesising sites of anxious reckoning that something was not quite right. My health visitor and GP ignored my questions relating to his green poo, as did friends and family that I repeatedly asked [21]. After frenzied and continual online research, I eventually located “the answer” on an obscure section of a website, which informed me that in fact green poo is an indicator of tongue-tie described in the British Medical Journal as follows:

The tongue is a highly mobile organ made up of longitudinal, horizontal, vertical, and transverse intrinsic muscle bundles. The extrinsic muscles are the fan-like genioglossus which is inserted into the medial part of the tongue and the styloglossus and hyoglossus into the lateral portions. The sub-lingual frenulum is a fold of mucosa connecting the midline of the inferior surface of the tongue to the floor of the mouth. Tongue tie is the name given to the condition arising when the frenulum is unusually thick, tight, or short. There are many variations and differing degrees of severity[…]The resurgence of interest in breast feeding has been accompanied by a lively debate about the significance of ‘tongue tie’ or ankyloglossia. Symptoms attributed to tongue tie include nipple pain and trauma, difficulty in the baby attaching to the breast, frequent feeding, and uncoordinated sucking. These problems may result in the mother deciding to terminate breast feeding prematurely, slow weight gain for the baby, and even hypernatraemic dehydration. Speech defects have also been attributed to tongue tie [22].

My baby’s tongue-tie had to be cut and the “problem” of green poo was resolved but, as a result, my breasts had become engorged, red and infected and I quickly gave up breastfeeding. During these first few weeks of Maternity Leave, my infant’s tongue-tie became a signal for sensitivity I was feeling around “leaving” my doctoral work. For me, leaving my community of fellow researchers, for a different form of labouring, felt silencing and occluding. I became “tongue-tied” alongside my baby. Paradoxically this became the richest period of research for me. Officially, I had “interrupted” my doctoral research, but this interruption became the problematic site I needed to work from to produce a new configuration of maternality.   

Lisa Baraitser articulates the complexities of maternal interruption in her book Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption, where she describes the “constant attack on narrative that the child performs: literally breaking into maternal speech” [23].  In the text, Wake Up Your Brain, I relate this idea of “breaking into” to a treatment of tongue-tie, through the cutting or the breaking of the lingual frenulum, while extending this to explore an online disruption that a (m)other experiences, of continual checking, sending, saving, refreshing, searching, refreshing. In Irigaray’s This Sex Which is Not One (1985), she refers to the “violating penis” as the “violent break in” [24] to the essentialist female body. Within my moving image and text, I echo other types of breaking in or cutting into a body that are experienced through pregnancy and birth, such as the cutting during a caesarean section, an episiotomy or the cutting of the umbilical cord to the baby. Throughout my research I have used the aesthetic operations of the cut and cut-out, which have appeared in my videos, as accompaniment to text and on the website. In Second Trimester, fast-paced words and cut-out Google-found images of almond milk cartons are layered over my pregnant “bump”, where the rest of my body has been cut away. I use the configuration of the cut-out to interrupt narrative, such as the bombardment of text and collaged images in Pump. These interruptions to the visual surface of the moving image (its “skin” screen) correspond to the subjective experience of being cut off from my symbolic identity as an artist and researcher during Maternity Leave, and a heightened sense of precarity, of internal conflicts and splits. Jude describes their own experience of alienation and exclusion from their community as a form of being “cut off”.

Social theorist and sociologist Imogen Tyler, in Reframing Pregnant Embodiment (2000), also describes a sensation of being tongue-tied in relation to her pregnancy: “Silence and the desire to laugh, to make a noise, to create disorder, are quite specific reactions to what I perceive as the impossibility of either speaking or as being heard as what I am. I am tongue-tied” [25]. This “impossibility” to speak generates a lack of agency, mirroring the silencing of women in public or institutional spaces, which have historically refused to acknowledge the needs of pregnant people or lactating women [26]. When this occurs, a type of flattening out or silencing takes place, like a digital erasure of data, which traumatises the maternal subject.  In my research, a muting of a pregnant or (m)othering body does not only occur sonically or audibly, but can extend digitally, to flatten out or eradicate the entire image or presence of an actual (m)other. This erasure is explored in the audio work Hangry, in which, paradoxically, the (m)other is unseen but can be heard speaking about their experience of maternal voicelessness during a caesarean section. In Third Trimester, the (m)other voice is here substituted by a computerised voice, generating script pertaining to the third trimester [27] of pregnancy, sourced from the “Pregnancy+ App”. However, the bizarre online counsel - “Packing hospital bags” or “As your bump grows bigger you may find it difficult to shave your legs!” - becomes a glitch that breaks into the fantasised judgemental refrain: “You are so stupid! What have you done?”, resonating with my “offline” gestational self-doubt and anxiety.

Imogen Tyler points to the occlusion of the (m)other with the advent of foetal imaging and women’s health, reproductive and social apps, where extreme technology makes the foetus the subject, to the exclusion of the (m)other, as a way of systemising information so that it is easily accessed or understood.  For example, in ultrasound medical technology, it is the image of the baby, not the (m)other, that is recorded. I extend this further to online apps, where the image of the foetus becomes translated to familiar fruits and vegetables, as a way of organising information so that it is easily accessed. In Cashino Desert, “The Strawberry”, becomes a signifier of the baby in the womb. In this system, the image of the womb itself, and by extension the (m)other, is eradicated when peri-natal organic produce appears rendered in the form of floating cut-outs.

BIRTHING OURSELVES: COMMUNITY & OTHERNESS

Not only the babies, but some of the (m)others too, have developed tongue-ties.

In Wake Up Your Brain, I draw from writing that is found in pre-Internet feminist theory with particular reference to the legacy of Adrienne Rich. I position Rich, a woman, (m)other and Jew, as my metaphorical grand(m)other and use Of Woman Born (1976) as a starting point for an exploration of (m)otherhood as generative material through which to rethink (m)otherhood’s political potential as radical performance. I question how the Internet might distort the experience or economy of (m)otherhood as potentially radical and transformative into a private experience, where personal validation is sought and where an online mode of networking is co-opted for personal opportunities. Reading Of Woman Born was quite strange for me, as I questioned how a book on (m)otherhood, written a decade before I was born, could feel so pertinent. However, it is still the case that the power held by women is often lost in the transition to becoming a (m)other. Rich writes: “If motherhood and sexuality were not wedged resolutely apart by male culture, if we could choose both the forms of our sexuality and the terms of our motherhood or nonmotherhood freely, women might achieve genuine sexual autonomy (as opposed to ‘sexual liberation’)” [28]. For Rich, the institution of motherhood is a violence that needs to be eradicated in patriarchal society. These problems occur at the origins of “mother/daughter” relationships, where patriarchy forces an opposition between the two. I use the space of this generational opposition to think through an entangled, embodied, digitally connected maternal subjectivity, questioning how this opposition might produce something altered or new.

The artist Mary Kelly has become another important point of reference. She too has been an embodied maternal researcher and has also worked around maternal loss of language. Kelly works within a Marxist-feminist and psychoanalytical framework, a framework this project does not reproduce. Rather, in Wake Up Your Brain, I position Kelly as a predecessor, in relation to maternal and artistic (re)production, language and speech, as I work through concerns around the politics and exchange of (m)othering bodies in the online world. In Kelly’s Antepartum (1973) and Post-Partum Document (1973-79) she was able to articulate the maternal figure, rather than the child or the (m)other/child relationship, through exploring a process of imposing subjective language onto gendered identity. As Rosemary Betterton writes: “In “Documentation II; Analysed Utterances and Related Speech Events” 1975 – Kelly records her son’s acquisition of language, recognising that this not only constituted his subjectivity but also signified ‘her own negative entry into language and culture’, as he began to communicate without her maternal mediation” [29]. The (m)other becomes the fantasised subject, through the loss of her own language and within a heterosexual, domestic economy.  My kinship with Kelly is formed through our mutual loss of speech, at the point of becoming maternal. In my project, it is Maternity Leave, which provides the richest period for my research, using the metaphor of “maternal tongue-tie” to comprehend this symbolic loss of language that I experience. 

In Wake Up Your Brain, I use fragments of quotations from a range of different sources, anonymous in the body of the text, but named within the footnotes. These do not function as conventional quotations but rather as self-consciously appropriated language. The fictional space of writing allows for an invented community of women from different generations who appear to speak together: “she said”, “they said”, “we said”. “We” breaks down within the text, complicating the idea of a unified “we”, and indicating differences and antagonisms between people and groups of people. The text stages an interrelation between an institutional “we”, seen for example in NHS material, and a communal “we”, presumed, for example, by religious communities or social networks. Where women are mentioned by name in the text, they are deliberately singled out as individual speakers within the invented “group”. When referencing Sigmund Freud, I substitute his name with the names of the women in his family from different generations: Amalia, Peppi, Sally, Bella, Anna, Regina, Marie, Esther. These names operate as a team of women, similar to the production of a gathering of women (“nurses, girlfriends, midwives, soldiers, artists, yoga instructors, hypnotherapists, wives, beauty therapists, models, actresses, businesswomen and ballet dancers”) who accompany the character of “The Girl” in Cashino Desert.

My use of interlinearity - the paratactic placement of borrowed lines - creates a tissue of writing, which has a Jewish aesthetic and history, and is known as melitzah, understood in Biblical terms, as making a new use or double meaning. My god(m)other Tamar Garb describes a letter written to Freud by his father, when he gifted him a copy of the bible on his thirty-fifth birthday. The letter was made up entirely from melitzah, from quotations, fragments and phrases from the Hebrew bible [30].  This is suggestive for my research, in terms of a reproductive body metaphorically generating new life out of existing genetic and bodily matter. I have engaged this reproductive playfulness as a way of complicating the different voices in the writing, but also to bury the quotations, as a textual form of tongue-tie. This is further extended in terms of the images that are embedded in Wake Up Your Brain, which function as visual quotations; they are appropriated images derived from online searches, which I have cut-out and “doctored”. 

Naming and lineage have particular poignancy within the project, especially where the failure or impossibility to communicate the work of maternality between generations, enacts a kind of generational tongue-tie. Rich writes about her (m)other’s name, Helen, being of significance to her. I use the name “Helen”, my name, my great-grand(m)other’s name and my metaphorical great-grand(m)other’s name as a symbol within the text, to represent a fantasised, knowing (m)other character, such as the real-life ENT Consultant Mrs Helen Caulfield, who attempts to impart medical knowledge, and to invoke Hélène Cixous’s call to arms with the metaphor of “white milk” as ink to generate writing through the body [31]. In Jude, the transition from “Judith”, their given name, to “Jude”, their chosen one, visually appears from hand-written school reports and writing on the back of photographs to Facebook profile updates. Speculum of the Other Woman (1985) by Luce Irigaray is referred to as “Hotel Luce”, which I use as a cross-generational cypher to playfully imagine how my body performs when having a vaginal examination during pregnancy. I use the invented username “@MRY” to refer to Mary Kelly, signifying a future, networked version of her identity and work. The name Mary is particularly relevant (although coincidental): a Marian name, relating to the Virgin Mary / the Mother Mary or Madonna figure. Kelly gave her son her last name “Kelly” as his first name, so that her name became integral to his identity. I use an invented version of her name to produce a future version of the identity of Kelly, contrasting with the anonymous use of quotes throughout my text. I see Second Trimester as a daughter to Antepartum where both pregnant abdomens perform for a camera. Where Kelly’s stomach is recorded by Super 8mm film, my stomach is captured on my iPhone camera, invoking a sense of technological, intergenerational connection and update; my iPhone, an extended bodily limb used as a camera to produce the video, is also the point of connection with the Internet where Second Trimester and the imaginary @MRY are situated.  

Lisa Baraitser uses the embarrassment of the naming of a child by a (m)other as a way of theorising a specifically maternal encounter with otherness. She writes:

Not only must I birth the baby, but I must author it too? […] The child is a stranger to his name. […] And I am deeply implicated in making what is strange in him familiar, in fixing him in language before he even knows what language is. […] One way to begin thinking about maternal subjectivity as an ethical subjectivity is through providing an account of maternal alterity – maternal encounters with inassimilable otherness, seen here in the figure of a child [32].

In my research maternality, which is a constantly performative, expansive state of becoming, reveals social bonds to be precarious and volatile. Jude is an artwork that threatens to dismantle my ties to the community in which I have grown up and into which I am also integrating my children, risking a different sort of maternal leakage or rupturing that troubles my inherited identity and sense of belonging. Jude is not distanced research, but thoroughly implicates me as an artist and (m)other. For this work, it was my intention to give Jude Rose agency in the film and for them to create the soundtrack, as a way of taking ownership. The drumming operates as another form of Jude’s voice, becoming a heartbeat piercing the skin of the narrative, from beneath the surface. Jude’s removal of self from their community was both a trauma but also a point of freedom.

My project stages the difficulties of articulating and defining my position and identity as a researcher and artist. Using my own body as a site has forced tensions with my family, friendships, and with my children to surface and butt up against my desire to protect them from exposure in the artworks I produce and show publicly. This brings out distinct pressures and contradictions within the work. As Irina Aristarkhova writes in Suspending (Feminist) Judgement (2018): “The private, like the body, is an unruly site for politics. […] Indeed, when our own deep, uncontrollable, personal desires are concerned, we rarely act in line with whatever political choices we think should be made” [33].  I have discovered that the (m)othering body as a working site is particularly “tied” to others. For example, in Jude, I take my (m)othering body to meet that of another, but in doing so produce a work that threatens my own family’s community ties that are personal, social, religious and inherited. 

Repeatedly in the research, I used my pregnant body as a medium. In particular, live performance became a method for exploring the heightened intensity of a live event and its intersection with the temporal pressure of pregnancy; I had a finite number of gestational days to produce this research.  In November 2015, I staged a performative and public version of Cashino Desert, which I deliberately timed to coincide with my third trimester. The performance consisted of a large-scale projection of Cashino Desert, with the sound played live by three musicians. The performance began with my pregnant body lying in a pink lit birthing pool, directly underneath the screen. Leaving the pool, I began voicing the lyrics of the song, accompanied by the musicians. With a microphone in my hand, my performing, pregnant body was not tongue-tied: the voice was loud and clear. The public event, mediated by my performing pregnant body, became the site for forming a temporary community comprising audience, musicians, foetus and “(m)other-to-be”. In this way, I imagined the performance operating as an exaggerated, “amplified” rehearsal for the impending labour and birth. Members of the audience became surrogates for the birth companions and medical staff who attend the labour; video technology substituted for the medical “backdrop” and equipment; the birthing pool and low lighting are typical props in an expectant (m)other’s “natural” birth plan; and the microphone (an extended bodily limb) worked as a stand in for the mobile phone, still online and switched on during the birth.  

In Cashino Desert, a narrative around the threat of loss and impending doom is configured through a pregnant body travelling between spaces (desert, city, casinos, online, offline). In the performance version, this threat of loss registers as the potential risk to (m)other and baby in labour and birth. As a pregnant woman approaching her due date, I propelled my body into a state of vulnerability by performing in such a physically energetic and exhibitionist way. As my blood pressure rose and my heartbeat accelerated, I imagined that my baby was alert to the intensity of the moment. The risks of pregnancy were co-opted into the risks of the performance and the fantasies of synchronicity and teamwork that prevail in discourses around “natural” birth, were here played out in a pseudo pop concert format. I wanted there to be two bodies performing: my own pregnant body and the foetus in my womb, performing in sync. It was in this moment of seemingly dangerous broadcast, that the precise moment of research happened, constituted by a social encounter with my pregnant body.   

The social “event” of labour, and the way it organises “becoming a mother”, is explored further in research generated from my hospital birth notes recorded during my first labour. The process of recording detailed birth notes is formal and procedural and a copy is routinely given to the “mother” on discharge from the hospital. The birth notes were used to create a song, Maternal Transfer Summary (2016-2019), which sits within Wake Up Your Brain. A post-partum performance version of Maternal Transfer Summary took place at The Showroom, London, and during a research seminar at University of Oxford. Having learnt the birth notes by heart, the text entered part of a performative, linguistic psyche, where my voice and maternal body became a physical representation of this institutional medical text.  The act of singing my birth notes became a way of reflecting on an experience of birth as mediated by the professional staff present in the room (the midwives, nurses and doctors). Reclaiming the text through performance was a way of contesting the logic of this information, taking ownership of it and reimagining the power dynamics of the event. The performance questioned the idea of “Transfer” and how in the duration of labour, the “Maternal” is “Transferred” to the “mother”. In what ways does one become “Maternal” and how is this act of becoming, a political, social or experiential, bodily act? Receiving the birth notes, together with the baby, was proof of this “Transfer” but a “Summary” seemed an extremely limited way of formalising or confirming the events that had occurred during labour. On the website, Maternal Transfer Summary is a script to be listened to, as opposed to scrolled like the rest of Wake Up Your Brain, allowing maternal speech to infiltrate this fictional text as a voice that is “heard”.

As this project has developed, more and more material has been produced and weight has been added to a corpus, becoming fatter by the day with more videos, texts, sounds, performances and babies. This fattened corpus is also flattened, becoming a screen within which and on the surface of which the work can be situated. In tracking and interacting with multiple online and offline bodies that collide historically, visually, politically and theoretically, I have learnt that the virtualisation of bodies and their representation through electronic systems are heightened when in relation to an (in)fertile, pregnant, lactating or (m)othering body. The construction of (m)otherhood in a digital age is an entangled condition, where a push and pull between occupying online space and offline space is amplified, meaning that there is a continual disruption of power at play: both opening up a space for (m)otherhood to be performed, but also often rupturing or occluding a maternal body all together. The project constitutes a new configuration of embodied and performed maternality, via the Internet, and through a metaphor of “maternal tongue-tie”.

[1] The term “maternality” has also been used by the curator Catherine McCormack in a recent exhibition “Maternality” at Richard Saltoun Gallery, London (2020), bringing together a range of practices from the 1970s to the present, foregrounding questions around representations of (m)otherhood by women artists. Edited versions of Second Trimester, Third Trimester and Pump were tested out in this context alongside works by Judy Chicago, The Hackney Flashers, Aimee Gilmore, Carmen Winant and Helen Chadwick.

[2] Oxford English Dictionary, “maternality”, accessed 5 September 2019, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/114948?redirectedFrom=maternality#eid.

[3] Oxford English Dictionary, “maternal”, accessed 5 September 2019, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/114947#eid37808507.

[4] Lisa Baraitser, Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption, (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 22.

[5] “Tongue-Tie”, The NHS Website, accessed 29 October 2019, https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/tongue-tie/.

[6] Rebbetzin is a Yiddish term meaning Rabbi’s wife.

[7] This is the first time a doctoral project in the form of a website has been submitted to the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. This has meant that the digital preservation team will create a new policy on submitting and archiving website-based theses.

[8] Deborah Lupton, “‘Mastering Your Fertility’: The Digitised Reproductive Citizen”, in Negotiating Digital Citizenship: Control, Contest and Culture, ed. A. McCosker et al. (London: Rowman and Littlefield, forthcoming), accessed 13th January 2017, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2679402

[9] Kate Orton-Johnson, “Mummy Blogs and Representations of Motherhood: “Bad Mummies” and Their Readers”. Social Media + Society 3:2 (2017), accessed 14 January 2018, https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305117707186

[10] “Strictly Orthodox women 'to take action' against opening Hampstead Heath Ladies Pond to transgender swimmers”, The Jewish Chronicle, 23 May 2019, accessed 5 January 2020, https://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/strictly-orthodox-women-to-mobilise-against-opening-hampstead-heath-ladies-pond-to-trans-swimmers-1.484633

[11] For more on Mumsnet allowing transphobic rhetoric and other discrimination on its platform, see Woodhead, Hannah, “Has Mumsnet become a hub of online transphobia?”, Huck, 30th April 2018, accessed 2 January 2020,
https://www.huckmag.com/perspectives/opinion-perspectives/mumsnet-transphobia-online/

[12] micha cárdenas, “Pregnancy: Reproductive Futures in Trans of Color Feminism”, Transgender Studies Quarterly 3, 1-2 (2016): 48–57, accessed 20 September 2019, https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-3334187

[13] Sarah J Schoppe-Sullivan, et al., “Doing Gender Online: New Mothers’ Psychological Characteristics, Facebook Use, and Depressive Symptoms.”, Sex Roles 76, 5-6 (2017): 276, accessed 10th January 2018, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-016-0640-z

[14] Ibid.

[15] Lupton, “‘Mastering Your Fertility’: The Digitised Reproductive Citizen”, 9.

[16] For further discourse around mikveh and sexuality, see Shira Schwartz, “Performing Jewish Sexuality: Mikveh Spaces in Orthodox Jewish Publics”, in Performing Religion in Public, eds. C.M. Chambers, and S.W. du Toit. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), doi.org/10.1057/9781137338631_12

[17] Charlotte Kroløkke, “The Golden Egg: The Business of Making Mothers through Egg Donation”, in The Motherhood Business: Consumption, Communication, and Privilege, ed. Anne Teresa Demo, et al. (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2015), 28-51.

[18] Marcia Inhorn, “‘Assisted’ Motherhood in Global Dubai: Reproductive Tourists and their Helpers”, in The Globalisation of Motherhood: Deconstructions and Reconstructions of Biology and Care, ed Wendy Chavkin, and JaneMaree Maher. (London: Routledge, 2010), 181.

[19] Imogen Tyler, “Skin Tight: Celebrity, Pregnancy and Subjectivity”, in Thinking through the Skin, edited by Sara Ahmed, and Jackie Stacey. (London: Routledge, 2001), 78.

[20] Jude addresses gender, sexuality and identity in relation to Jewish community specifically through the lens of (m)otherhood. Other artists’ projects exploring intersections between Jewish identity and gender include Oreet Ashery’s Self Portraits as Marcus Fisher (2000), a series of iterations of photography, interventions and performance, constructed around Ashery’s alter ego as an Orthodox Jewish man; Sarah Davidmann’s project Ken. To Be Destroyed (2011); and Yael Bartana’s series of photographs Herzl (2015) which uses cross-dressing as a performative configuring of her own Jewish identity in relation to Israel and Zionism and as a way of thinking through the spaces between truth and fiction. The subject of Jewish trans-identity has been recently presented in the popular Amazon online series Transparent (2014-2017).

[21] Or maybe they couldn’t hear me.

[22] D. M. B. Hall and M. J. Renfrew, “Tongue Tie”, British Medical Journal: Archives of Disease in Childhood, 21st November 2005, accessed 6th March 2018, http://adc.bmj.com/content/archdischild/90/12/1217.full.pdf

[23] Baraitser, Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption, 15.

[24] Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 24.

[25] Imogen Tyler, “Reframing Pregnant Embodiment”, in Thinking through Feminism, ed. Sara Ahmed, (London: Routledge, 2000), 291.

[26] In the United Kingdom, despite the Equality Act of 2010 stating that businesses should not discriminate against breastfeeding (m)others, breastfeeding in public and at work is still often seen as taboo. See also: Kate Palmer, “Tamara Ecclestone breastfeeding pictures: Why were they controversial?”, BBC News, 10 February 2017, accessed 10 February 2017, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-38932320 and “Mothercare told mum 'stop breastfeeding'”, BBC News, 1 November 2016, accessed 1 November 2016, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-kent-37836574.

[27] Trimesters are three-month periods, used to indicate the three stages of pregnancy. The final “fourth trimester” is used to describe the post-partum period.

[28] Adrienne Rich, “Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution”, (New York; London: W. W. Norton, 1986), 184.

[29] Rosemary Betterton, Maternal Bodies in the Visual Arts, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 52.

[30] Tamar Garb, “Reisemalheurs” in Vivienne Koorland: Reisemalheurs (Travel Woes), Freud Museum, London 2007.

[31] Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”. Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs 1, 4 (1976) 875-893.

[32] Baraitser, Maternal Encounters, 24, 26.

[33] Irina Aristarkhova, “Suspending (Feminist) Judgement” in Once and Future Feminist, Boston Review, Forum 7 (2018): 7, 53.