Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (JMI - York University)
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Excremental Subjectivity: Presence, Absence, and Feces in Mary Kelly's Post-Partum Document
Get PDFA series of six “documents” that include a child’s clothing, scribblings, utterances, and shit-stained diapers, Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1972-1979) has long been considered an exemplary work about motherhood. The documentary and psychoanalytic process by which Kelly explores the changing nature of a mother’s relationship to her child varies between the objective and subjective. This article explores Documentation I: Analysed Faecal Stains and Feeding Charts of the Post-Partum Document—a section in which Kelly documents the weaning process by recording the foods introduced and the nature of the child’s bowel movements. Through close analysis, and in relation to psychoanalytic and childrearing literature, this article argues that these stained diaper liners act as indices of the child’s presence and absence, thus becoming what Jacques Lacan would term, an objet petit a for the mother. Close examination of these liners reveals the slippage between what is present, implied, and absent. Through Documentation I, Kelly provides evidence for the ambiguous and amorphous process of weaning, thus exposing maternal anxieties
The Maternal Subject in the Budding Britsih Novel: Considering Daniel Defoe's Fiction
No full textThis article attempts to create a three-part structure in which it can situate its more particular discussion of maternal subjectivities in the work of Daniel Defoe. In the first part, it looks at the British novel’s relationship to the representation of human subjectivity. It discusses the connection to the nonfictional form of the autobiography as well as to ideologies of individualism. The article argues that representing maternal subjectivity in fiction poses a unique challenge to the British novel’s form: the healthy relationality of the maternal subject is suppressed generically, as narrative requires a dominant character through which to create meaning. The second part looks at Defoe’s three major novels—Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and Roxana—and how the prefaces instruct the reader about how to receive the scandalous stories about these mother figures. This overview highlights Defoe’s interest in writing the gendered “other” and his difficulty in depicting a subjective relationality in Roxana without novelistic tragedy and narrative collapse. The third part involves a deeper reading of Moll Flanders, in which moments of Moll’s maternal inclinations are read against the larger picture of her denial of maternal obligations. Moll’s is a damaged child’s subjectivity, one that still craves a mother’s care, approval, and affection. The narrative structure requires that she stake a rhetorical claim that excises the subjectivities of others from the story. In concluding, the article argues that it is valuable to read Defoe’s early experiments with the formation of the maternal subjectivity in fiction because they show a sensitive awareness of the factors that enable the composition and transmission of maternal narrative within the genre of the novel
Leaving a Light on for Ash: Explorations into the Activist Mothering of Coralee Smith (Mother of Ashley Smith, 1988-2007)
Get PDFOver the last decades, scholars have investigated mothers’ roles in ensuring their daughters and loved ones unexplained disappearances and deaths by violence are publicized and acknowledged. Here, I draw from previous scholarship to explore whether there are commonalities between a mother’s quest for justice after her daughter’s death in a Canadian prison and other mothers who similarly demand accountability after a loss. The mother’s name is Coralee Smith, the mother of the well-known teenager and deceased prisoner, Ashley Smith. In this text, I work to theorize Coralee Smith’s agency by drawing parallels with other mothering actions to demand redress for disappearances and losses. In this text, I offer fresh insights to the mothering literature by focusing on activism by parents of criminalized children, rather than adding to the studies on criminalized mothers. Incarcerated mothers are the subject of recent scholarship, but little research is available on the experience of mothers who provide support to incarcerated daughters and who demand accountability following deaths in custody
