Davis discusses how African-American women were extorted from their children during slavery and how in turn they were seen as surrogate mothers – nannies – of more privileged white children.
4Īpproaching motherhood in terms of legislation and social issues, and contemporary art history respectively, Angela Davis and Andrea Liss constitute a fertile literary background on this subject. Discussing the work of Argentinian artist Nicola Costantino (born in 1964), Sophie Halart overcomes the limits of a European point of view, expanding the discussion on motherhood and femininity in relation to the Argentinian context and history. Betterton’s book, which deals also with miscarriage and abortion, her investigation privileges a focus on the white maternal body only, embracing exclusively a western perspective.
With a strong interest in the psychic development of the maternal subject, Betterton draws upon Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution and, most importantly, on the theory of abjection offered by Julia Kristeva, who gives useful accounts of psychoanalytical theories of the maternal. Rosemary Betterton’s book Maternal Bodies in the Visual Arts investigates the practice by which the maternal “becomes embodied” in the European visual tradition. 2Īspects of motherhood have already been discussed by several scholars.
Free from the Catholic iconography that, from the fourteenth century onwards, has presented the pregnant woman in the guise of the “Madonna del Parto”, the female body in the work of these artists takes on novel, tragic, and creaturely qualities that portray maternity as an almost brutal phenomenon this generates a dialectic of opposing but intertwined tropoi: the miracle of life against death, maternal love against violence. Marta María Pérez Bravo (born in 1959), Johanna Hamann (1954–2017), Barbara Carrasco (born in 1957), and Josely Carvalho (born in 1942), among others, challenge the collective imaginary of maternity as blissful and cheerful, proposing instead a crude representation of the body. Trembling with the shock of such a traumatic image, we can easily tell that the photograph captures a self-portrait of artist Marta María Pérez Bravo during her pregnancy.Īs witnessed for example in the recent exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 curated by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Andrea Giunta (Hammer Museum, Los Angeles Brooklyn Museum, New York Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo), a dystopian representation of pregnancy seems to emerge in the practice of several Latinx and Latin American women artists from the very end of the seventies onwards. Her hand firmly holds a large knife pointing towards her swollen belly. “The maternal body has a paradoxical status as both natural and exceptional, a sanctioned yet highly circumscribed form of female embodiment like the nude, it is both a powerful cultural idea and a bodily state, but one which is unstable and open to multiple meanings.” 1Ī naked woman is on the verge of stabbing her own pregnant womb.