Narrating motherhood as experience and institution: Experimental life-writing in Mary Kelly’s "Post-Partum Document" (1973–79)
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Date
2015
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Adam Mickiewicz University
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Abstract
This article explores American visual artist Mary Kelly’s autobiographical work Post-partum document
in reference to the politics of life writing. Resorting to Lacanian psychoanalysis, a pastiche
of scientific narratives and other (auto-)narrative strategies, in her work Kelly documented the first
five years of her son’s life from his weaning from the breast until the day when he wrote his name.
By documenting her child’s development, the artist also recorded the process of her own formation
as a maternal subject, a formation gradually worked out through an evolving relationship with her
son. In her work, the artist made vivid the incompatibility and limitations of various narrative frameworks
in retelling a fundamentally relational experience that verges on the mental and bodily, and
which is necessarily mediated by the patriarchal ideology. This article analyses Kelly’s conflicting
narrative strategies that fail to successfully represent the mother-child formative relationship and
which demonstrate the mother’s ideological alienation. It reads Kelly’s work politically, exploring
the ways in which Post-partum document’s (auto-)narrative voices address questions and dilemmas
of the feminine/maternal subject, the subject’s formation, and the limits of its (self-) representation
within patriarchy. The article argues that Kelly challenges the traditional autobiographic genre by
attending to her lived experience as a mother and the culturally repressed maternal desire.
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Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document, feminism, feminist art, the maternal, autobiography, life writing, representation, relationship
Citation
Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, vol. 50.2-3 (2015), pp. 111-125
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0081-6272