Narrating motherhood as experience and institution: Experimental life-writing in Mary Kelly’s "Post-Partum Document" (1973–79)

dc.contributor.authorWierzchowska, Justyna
dc.date.accessioned2017-08-30T07:59:44Z
dc.date.available2017-08-30T07:59:44Z
dc.date.issued2015
dc.description.abstractThis 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.pl_PL
dc.identifier.citationStudia Anglica Posnaniensia, vol. 50.2-3 (2015), pp. 111-125pl_PL
dc.identifier.issn0081-6272
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10593/19239
dc.language.isoengpl_PL
dc.publisherAdam Mickiewicz Universitypl_PL
dc.rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccesspl_PL
dc.subjectMary Kellypl_PL
dc.subjectPost-Partum Documentpl_PL
dc.subjectfeminismpl_PL
dc.subjectfeminist artpl_PL
dc.subjectthe maternalpl_PL
dc.subjectautobiographypl_PL
dc.subjectlife writingpl_PL
dc.subjectrepresentationpl_PL
dc.subjectrelationshippl_PL
dc.titleNarrating motherhood as experience and institution: Experimental life-writing in Mary Kelly’s "Post-Partum Document" (1973–79)pl_PL
dc.typeArtykułpl_PL

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Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu
Biblioteka Uniwersytetu im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu
Ministerstwo Nauki i Szkolnictwa Wyższego