Price: $39.95
Page Count: 280
Publication Date: November 2024
ISBN: 978-1-77258-508-7
This is a significant collection of essays. Maternal absences are reclaimed, recovered; the silent and invisible brought to speech and sight. The scope of the work ranges from art, autoethnography, literature, to policy. As a reader, my knowledge was enriched – as was my emotional response. There is openness, passion, and fearlessness to the book, bringing a sharp focus to reveal an absence that should have been glaring.
- Sharon Kivland, Visiting Professor, Kingston University
The Missing Mother offers an exciting range of writings from different disciplines. Using a range of approaches the pace of the anthology is engaging and dynamic. The book incorporates visual arts, the law, social history and literature bringing in some urgent and often elided discussions around sex work and motherhood, childlessness and the social and literary contexts around it. The section on literature and the social expectations and histories of motherhood and patriarchy in Ireland is particularly illuminating as is the voice of artists. This book offers a refreshing and important counterpoint to the usual binary offer of either the elevation of motherhood or the undermining of mothers.
- Dr Rachel Garfield, Professor of Fine Art, Royal College of Art
Introduction, Andrea O’Reilly and Martina Mullaney
Mom’s Room, Victoria Bailey
Heart of Fool’s Gold, A. S. Compton
SECTION ONE: MISSING MOTHER IN SOCIETY
1. Absent(ed) Mothers in Ireland and elsewhere: Erasures of Maternity in Adoption Law, Policy, and Literature, Alice Diver
2. The Missing Maternal Body in the Narratives of Young Catholic and Muslim Mothers in Poland, Joanna Krotofil, Dorota Wójciak and Dagmara Mętel
3. The Missing Mother, Feminisms ghettoization of artists with children,
Martina Mullaney
4. Unseen and Unheard: How the histories of missing mothers informed The Aprons of Power performances, Rachel Fallon
5. Art's Otherwised Orphans: conceiving the disoeuvre, recognising art's cultural mothers, Felicity Allen
6. Mother Ireland and Missing Mothers: Staging Maternal Encounters in Alanna O’Kelly’s The Country Blooms – A Garden and A Grave (1990-1996), Kate Antosik-Parsons
7. The Re-Generative Potential of Myth in Re-Constituting the Missing Mother, Martina Cleary
SECTION TWO; MISSING MOTHER IN SELF
8. Critiquing, Correcting, Defying, and Displacing Normative Motherhood: Reading Five Narratives of Mothers Who Leave as Demon Texts: Hiroshima in the Morning by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, Patsy by Nicole Dennis-Benn, The Shame by Makenna Goodman, I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins, and When I Ran Away by Ilona Bannister, Andrea O’Reilly
9. The Missing Mother in King Lear, Emma Dalton
10. Fictions of Maternity: Reading and Re-writing the Mother in Three Narratives of the Abandoned Wife, Jill Marsden
11. Making Masculine Maternity Visible in A.K. Summers’ Pregnant Butch, Christa Baiada
12. Mother to the Other, Ciara Healy
13. Pregnancy, Postpartum, and OnlyFans: Missing and Absented Performances of Motherhood, Clara Kundin
Dr. Andrea O’Reilly is internationally recognized as the founder of Motherhood Studies (2006) and its subfield Maternal Theory (2007), and creator of Matricentric Feminism, a feminism for and about mothers (2016) and Matricritics, a literary theory and practice for a reading of mother-focused texts (2024). She is full professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University, founder/editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Motherhood Initiative and publisher of Demeter Press. She is co-editor/editor of thirty plus books on many motherhood topics including: Feminist Mothering, Young Mothers, Monstrous Mothers, Maternal Regret, Normative Motherhood, Mothers and Sons, Mothers and Daughters, Maternal Texts, Academic Motherhood, Mothers on Finding and Realizing Feminism and Mothering and Covid-19. She is editor of the Encyclopedia on Motherhood (2010) and co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Motherhood (2019). She is author of Toni Morrison and Motherhood: A Politics of the Heart (2004); Rocking the Cradle: Thoughts on Motherhood, Feminism, and the Possibility of Empowered Mothering (2006); and Matricentric Feminism: Theory, Activism, and Practice, The 2nd Edition (2021). Forthcoming titles include: The Mother Wave: Theorizing, Enacting, and Representing Matricentric Feminism , The Missing Mother, and Revolutionizing Motherlines. She is currently completing her monograph Matricritics as Literary Theory and Criticism: Reading the Maternal in Post-2010 Women’s Narratives. Matricritics as Literary Theory and Criticism: Reading the Maternal in Post-2010 Women’s Narratives.
She is twice the recipient of York University’s “Professor of the Year Award” for teaching excellence and is the 2019 recipient of the Status of Women and Equity Award of Distinction from OCUFA (Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations). She has received more than 1.5 million dollars in grant funding for her research projects including two current ones: “Millennial Moms” and “Mothers and Returning to ‘Normal’: The Impact of the Pandemic on Mothering and Families.”
Martina Mullaney
Martina Mullaney is currently Post-Doctoral Researcher on the Feminist Art Making Histories Project at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dún Laoghaire, Ireland. She holds an AHRC-funded Ph.D. in art from the University of Reading 2022. Her Ph.D. The Missing Mother by practice and thesis asks ‘How art on and of maternity can transcend its own audience? She convened The Missing Mother Conference in 2021 from which this publication comes. After the birth of her daughter, she initiated the project Enemies of Good Art 2009 a multi-disciplinary research project interrogating motherhood as experience and the art world. The project was executed through a series of public meetings, performances, lectures, and live radio discussions. Enemies of Good Art broadcast on Resonance 104.4FM between between 2021 and 2012. Events took place in London at; Tate Modern, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Southbank Centre and Chisenhale Gallery. In Europe at Tranzit Display Gallery in Prague, Czech Republic and Galerija Nova, Zagreb. She has worked on visual project with Balenciaga, Paris, The British Council, Sri Lanka and Georgia, Cork Film Center, Gallery of Photography Dublin and Ffotogallery, Cardiff, Wales. She is a recipient of the Red Mansion Art Prize, London and China. Her work has been exhibited with Yossi Milo Gallery, New York, Franekel Gallery, San Francisco, Artwall Gallery, Prague and The Mission Gallery, Swansea.
