Writing Motherhood: An Embodied Understanding of our Own Oppression

CLASS DESCRIPTION

“Through our experiences of motherhood, we as mothers have come to an embodied understanding of our own oppression. We have felt it, even if we could not always name it. Furthermore, we have dreamed and written and shared about the possibility that mothering could be otherwise” Jennifer Lane, Everyday World-Making: Toward an Understanding of Affect and Mothering

In this lecture, Anna Johnson explores the ways in which motherhood, understood as broadly as possible, can bring us to an “embodied understanding of our own oppression”, revealing the ways in which mothers are othered, and endangered, by patriarchal, heteronormative, capitalist structures, and how this intersects with wider gender-based oppression.

We will draw upon theorists such as Rozsika Parker, Jacqueline Rose and Wendy Hollway, and how they build on the work of foundational maternal studies writers such as Adrienne Rich and Andrea O’Reilly, and how 21st century motherhood life writing responds to mothering under these conditions.

Via the work of writers such as Hannah Silva, Catherine Cho and Maggie Nelson, we will look at authors’ struggles to find language for motherhood experience, given the scarcity of precedence for writing honestly, first-hand about motherhood. We will see how, as “a social institution that functions ideologically and politically […] motherhood idealizes mothers” (Coulter, The Encyclopedia of Motherhood, 2010, p. 571) and how this idealised form of motherhood is not only unattainable because its expectations would be too much to ask of anyone and because it assumes a biologically based, heteronormative form of mothering, but also because the intense labour of motherhood is not recognised or supported, in practical terms, by capitalist, patriarchal structures of power.

As Lane succinctly puts it, “the demands made on mothers by the institution of motherhood are impossible to achieve, which accounts for why failure has come to be seen as an inevitable part of mothering. Moreover, to succeed within such an institution means to be deemed successful by inherently misogynistic, racist, and classist measures” (Everyday World-Making: Toward an Understanding of Affect and Mothering, 2018, p. 77).

In voicing the complexities of real, ambivalent motherhood, and the effects of the impossible demands made on mothers, the life writing texts explored here can be seen to break the silence around the ways in which mothers are oppressed by patriarchal, heteronormative, capitalist structures, and even to offer “the possibility that mothering could be otherwise” (Lane, Everyday World-Making: Toward an Understanding of Affect and Mothering, 2018, p. 78).

Engaging with these texts is deeply important in that it allows us to begin to separate motherhood from its social expectations and pressures, to consider the possibilities of mothering ‘otherwise’, and to begin to mobilise against the oppressive structures that damage the mental, physical, economic and creative health of those who mother.

ABOUT OUR LECTURER

Dr Anna Johnson (they/them) is a writer, poet and lecturer, and earlier this year completed their PhD in creative writing at Kingston University. Anna lectures in creative writing and runs writing workshops. They hold a first-class BA (hons) in History and Theory of Art, University of Kent and an MA in Fine Art, Central Saint Martins. Anna lives and works in East London.

Anna’s prose/poetry life writing practice, and research, centre around motherhood, haunting and failure, drawing on, amongst other things, disability theory, queer and feminist theory.

They have published widely, both academic and creative works, and their first full-length prose-poetry work (as Anna Brook), Motherhood: a ghost story, is out with Broken Sleep Books. They are also currently guest editor of Studies in the Maternal journal.

INSTAGRAM: @annaotheranna

WEBSITE: https://www.annabrook.co.uk/

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AUTUMN/WINTER TERM 2025

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Monday 13th October

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Monday 20th October

Anna Johnson (they/them)

Writing Motherhood: An Embodied Understanding of our Own Oppression

Monday 27th October

Luisa-Maria MacCormack (she/her)

tbc.

Check back for the second half of term…

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