Tag: museum of motherhood

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Art Feminism

M.A.M.A. – Mothers ARE Making Art – New Installation(s)

WHAT: The ProCreate Project, the Museum of Motherhood and the Mom Egg Review are partnering for bi-monthly on-line presentations featuring M.A.M.A. – Mothers are Making Art.
WHEN: The 1st and the 15th of each month words and images will highlight the joy and the challenges of being both a mother and an artist.
WHERE: Online is the place! We will host works of art about mothers and mothers-to-be; featuring academic and creative writing in order to promote women internationally and generate cultural exchanges and opportunities.

WHY: We are determined to explore the extraordinary experiences of mothers and how, by means of channeling these new and powerful energies a person can cultivate both motherhood and art. However, support is needed and awareness must be raised to facilitate this process and to finally empower it.

We strive to give voice to all women, make acceptable room for “feelings,” sensations, and interpretations without judgment; we want to make space for mothers in the arts to display their work and move a conversation about “the art of motherhood” forward. DOWNLOAD THE PRESS RELEASE.

@ProcreateProj  @MOMmuseum @TheMomEgg #JoinMAMA

slide5This month features Lynn Lu (Pictured on homepage and above here) and Beck Tipper, whose writing is highlighted on the M.A.M.A. page here.

Paradoxes for the Virtual collaborative Skype performance with Birgitta Hosea on YouTube [LINK].
Lab451LONDON; Camden Image Gallery; London, UK. 2015
In a game of Exquisite Corpse, Lynn Lu (live) and Birgitta Hosea (projected from SKYPE) explore intimacy and the generation of interpersonal closeness across a virtual divide through a scored series of shared confidences.

-PREGNANCY AND AFTER MOTHERHOOD INSPIRED SEVERAL OF THE LYNN LU PERFORMANCES AND INSTALLATIONS-

Lynn Lu received a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University with a major in Sculpture and a minor in Graphic Design in 1999. In 1998, she studied with Christian Boltanski at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and at the École Marchutz in Aix-en-Provence. She earned her MFA in New Genres at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2002, and completed a PhD program (ABD) at Musashino Art University in Tokyo in 2008, on a full scholarship from the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 2010 she was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by the University of Newcastle in Australia.

Since 1997, Lynn has exhibited and performed extensively in the United States, Singapore, Japan, China, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia, Cambodia, Australia, New Zealand, UK, France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Estonia, Poland, Belarus, Czech Republic, Turkey, Greece, Argentina, and Canada.

See more about Lynn at ProcreateProject.com

MAMA_Logo_2015

To read Andrea O’Reilly’s piece on Feminist Motherhood go to our link here, and read her piece also live online at ProCreate Project.

Art and Performance by Nicola Canavan
Art and Performance by Nicola Canavan: Raising the Skirt

Raising the Skirt: ‘La mar es posa bona si veu el cony d’una dona’, is a Catalan belief in the vagina, translated as ‘the sea calms down if it sees a woman’s cunt’. (Images by Dawn Felicia Knox)
The gesture of lifting the skirt has been translated across the world. It is known as Anasyrma or Ana-Suromai (Ancient Greek), Anlu (Kom Communities) and many others. A flash of the cunt has been known to calm other forces of nature too, in Madras (India) women were known to subdue storms by exposing themselves. In other folklore Women could drive away the devils, evil spirits and warriors as seen in Fontaine’s ‘Nouveaux Contes’, all through the power and beauty of their cunts. ‘Raising the Skirt’ has influenced my practice for many years (www.nicolacanavan.com); by questioning notions of beauty and the status of women socially and culturally across many religions, and how this affects how the female body is translated across mass media; I feel it would be an important step back to go forward, to reclaiming the cunt as a powerful tool in assertion.

Categories
Classes

Mother Studies Summer Accelerated Class: A Student’s Reflections

As posted on the website, we are underway with the seven-week intensive course offered through the museum, “Introduction to Mother Studies.” The course explores key questions related to motherhood, feminism, and the family – issues that the museum seeks to bring awareness to as an institution of thought. We are happy to share a glimpse into week one of the course, which has delved into the rich foundational text, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution by Adrienne Rich, as well as a quick introduction to Sociology and a couple of short films about birth.

In Of Woman Born, Rich gives an in-depth historical, social, and economic context to motherhood.

Patriarchy would seem to require, not only that women shall assume the major burden of pain and self-denial for the furtherance of the species, but that a majority of the species – women – shall remain essentially unquestioning and unenlightened. On this “underemployment” of female consciousness depend the morality and the emotional life of the human family. Like his predecessors of fifty and a hundred and more years ago, [theorist] Hampshire sees society as threatened when women begin to choose the terms of their lives. Patriarchy could not survive without motherhood and heterosexuality in their institutional forms; therefore, they have to be treated as axioms, as “nature” itself, not open to question except where, from time to time, and place to place, “alternative life-styles” for certain individuals are tolerated (Rich 1986).

Below is a response paper to the reading/viewing assignments from week.

“Repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers” (Rich 1986). Though succinct, Rich has loaded this quote with key points of her thesis in Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. Embedded in it is Rich’s plea for women to reclaim consciousness and agency over their bodies, with special respect given to the institution of motherhood. The reference to Marx is intentional, as theory has pointed at capitalism as the root cause of the domestication of motherhood. However, as has been the primary feminist complaint of the father of socialism, Marx has overwhelmingly failed to account for gender in his observations of the proletariat – and this applies in the family, too. Though perhaps the reason for women’s reign over the domestic sphere, the subversion of women’s bodies occurs much deeper than in economics and cannot seek absolution from economics, as Engels would suggest. In Of Woman Born Rich maps the subjugation of women by the patriarchy and shows how this has extended to motherhood and the family.

If we understand sociology to be “the scientific study of human society – its institutions and people’s social behavior”, then borrowing Rich’s wisdom we will most certainly see patriarchal influences at work within medical institutions. The more egregious manifestations of this, of course, are in birthing practices that treat labor as an ailment in Western cultures, which she explores in the chapter, Alienated Labor (again, a nod to Marx). However, the less insidious assertions of male dominance in the medical field (but perhaps the most devastating) are in medical language itself. Anthropologist Emily Martin has devoted several publications to analyzing the use of masculine language when framing processes within human sexual reproduction. In the short medical video, “Fertilization,” we hear phrases describing the life-cycle of the sperm as “a perilous journey against incredible odds,” “strength,” and “swimming harder and faster” amid a backdrop of language that describes the female reproductive system as an “acidic environment” (Nucleus Medical Media 2013). Presumably, Rich would attribute this what she sees as men’s fear of women’s ability to bear new life and of “her apparent power to affect the male genitals.” So of course, in a routine video describing the fertilization of an egg, the women’s system would a hostile, acidic environment designed to hinder the powerful sperm facing incredible odds.

Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Rich

Rich says that with this intrinsic fear of women’s bodies came men’s decided action to shackle the divine worship of women’s power. Women’s bodies, once revered and worshipped as an aspect of the hunt – a matter of survival for Neolithic cultures – were later looked at as forces to be controlled. However, where Rich’s argument falls short for me is in its ability to situate the rise of patriarchal dominance across all the diverse cultures she mentions. In one instance, she talks about the devaluing of goddesses in ancient Greece and credits another theorist’s explanation for this:

He theorizes that this fear of maternal woman derived from the sexual politics of fifth-century Greece, where women were ill-educated, were sold into marriage, and had no role except as producers of children, the sexual interest of men was homoerotic, and for intellectual friendships a man sought out hetaeras…or other men. He assumes the mother to have been filled with resentment and envy of her sons, and in frustration, excessively controlling of her male children in their earliest years. Her feelings would have been experienced by her sons as a potentially destructive hostility which is later embodied in mythology and classical drama.

This is one theory of the social climate in ancient Greece that caused the transformation of goddesses’ role in mythology. But what, exactly, brought about the patriarchal awakening across other cultures, in the same time period?

It would seem that if repossessing our bodies would do more to boost women’s power than the overthrow of capitalism, we should know how to dismantle the very patriarchal notions that have caused it subdominance in the first place.

Categories
Dads Policy

Tango For Equal Rights

By, Jenny Nigro; social media intern for M.O.M.

M.O.M. social media intern Jenny Nigro
M.O.M. social media intern Jenny Nigro

I went to the library recently and took out an adorable book for the boy I nanny for. I’d read the book, And Tango Makes Three, before, but sharing it with him made it all the more special for me. The story is based on true events that took place several years ago at the Central Park Zoo. There, in the beloved penguin house, two male penguins began a years-long courtship and exhibited the nesting behaviors that are typical of expecting chinstrap penguin parents. Eventually, one of the zookeepers decided to give the couple their own egg to nurture and the penguins became the proud fathers to a fuzzy chick. They named her Tango because, as the book notes, “it takes two to make a Tango.” (Like I said, absolutely adorable).

No longer at the Central Park Zoo to visit, Tango’s daddies drifted apart over time and Tango was even said to have entered in a courtship with another female penguin. Their story (and subsequent book and play), though, has had a more lasting legacy – and has been the subject of much debate in family discourse. Some groups sought to ban the book immediately and protest the pairing of the penguins with their cherished little Tango egg. Others rallied around this model of parenting to assert that gay mating/parenting rituals do not defy the natural order.

The story of Tango’s dads shows us that different forms of courtship and parenting occur across nature, a phenomena which is also visible at the popular NYC Museum of Sex. MoSex, as it is shortened to, has devoted an entire exhibition to exploring the multi-faceted nature of animal sex and the “evolutionary benefits of non-reproductive sex for both individuals and social groups within the animal kingdom.” A recent visit to the museum led to my discovery of Tango’s story on display there. It turns out that our concepts of animal behavior, parenting instinct, and what it looks like to make a family have been overturned by one little chick.

With the nationwide legalization of gay marriage debate on-deck for the US Supreme Court, we will no doubt see more LGBTQ couples embark on their path to marriage and familyhood. So what can we expect for the family as we know it? Well, as research and public interest stories would indicate, most likely good things. A few years ago, a study that followed several children of lesbian couples over the span of two decades asserted that children of lesbians are psychologically better adjusted than their peers. And who can forget Zach Wahls’ touching appeal to the Iowa legislature to protect civil unions? Though little had been studied on children raised by two male parents, my sister recently did a scholarship review on studies that have looked at these models of parenting and they had similar findings: families with two daddies tend to have happy, well-adjusted kids.

So I look forward to seeing the next happy, well-adjusted generation of babies, both human and penguin, in a (hopefully) post-legalized marriage equality world. And maybe in this moment in history, it will take nine to make a tango…or at least a majority.

Categories
Featured

ICYMI: Mother’s Day Week in Review

Flyer_B&N_FinalAfter our two-week long Mother’s Day blitz, we at the Museum of Motherhood are feeling a range of emotions: engaged, curious, tired, brave, inquisitive, grateful, overworked, eager, empowered, loved, etc. (all of which resonate with the self-described experience of motherhood!). Our annual conference, and subsequent week of special readings/appearances at the Upper West Side Barnes & Noble and award ceremony for our Motherhood Hall of Fame were all a tremendous success! In case you missed any of the events, here’s a brief recap:

On Thursday, April 30 – Saturday, May 2, we grappled with concepts related to “New Maternalisms”, including visual depictions of motherhood, doula work, motherhood identity, maternal storytelling, mothers navigating disabilities, institutional barriers to motherhood, work-life balance, body/breastfeeding issues, and motherhood theory. We heard a keynote from Barbara Katz Rothman on “Mothers as Fathers.” Our own Joy Rose introduced the formation of her burgeoning field of Mother Studies and associated academic journal.

On Wednesday, May 7, we heard from Marjorie Kessler and selections of her compilation from a series of mom-centric authors, The Mom Egg Review.

On Thursday, May 8, we honored Ann Fessler and Amber Kinser with their induction to the Motherhood Hall of Fame. Both authors spoke about their pieces – The Girls Who Went Away and Motherhood and Feminism, respectively. We got a more in-depth perspective of their writing/research journeys through a Q & A session with both women following the recognition ceremony.

On Friday, May 9, we welcomed select authors from Listen to Your Mother, a collection of 56 soul-bearing essays on motherhood, childbearing, family, and parenting.

On Saturday, May 10, we got to meet family nutrition guru, Laura Fuentes. Laura shared insight on family food, children’s health, recipe development, and mom-trepreneurism.

Lastly as a special Mother’s Day treat, on Sunday, we had the privilege of hearing from back-to-back speakers. First, Katharine Holabird, author of the famous Angelina Ballerina series enchanted us with a glimpse into her whimsical world. Then, Susan Konig – editor, journalist, radio host, and writer – spoke about her new book, Teenagers and Toddlers Are Trying to Kill Me. Then, we celebrated Mother’s Day with a bang!

Written by: Jenny Nigro, MoM Online Intern

Categories
Featured

Shop online with B&N to benefit M.O.M. using this special code [CLICK]

During the week of May 6-15 purchase books using this CODE: 11455805  to make your purchases online and a portion of your purchase will go to benefit M.O.M.

Barnes-Noble-logo

 

__________________________ 
Please shop online and a percentage of your purchase will count toward a FUNDRAISER for M.O.M. Instructions:

May 6-15, 2015. Go to (www.bn.com/bookfairs) for ANY book purchase. Click the button “Start Shopping.” To benefit the Museum of Motherhood collect your purchases in the check-out process and in the Payment section, scroll down to the bottom where it saysCheck this Box if this is a Bookfair Order. When you check the box, type book fair ID#11455805 in the provided box. Questions about an order:800-962-6177 Thank You!

Here’s how it works:

  • Be sure to use the web address above (bn.com/bookfairs) to do your online shopping. Click on the button “Start Shopping Now.”
  • When you’ve finished selecting your purchases, click on your cart and begin the check-out process. In the Payment section, scroll down to the bottom where it says Check this Box if this is a Bookfair Order. When you check the box, type bookfair ID#11455805 in the provided box.
  • If you already have a BN.com account with a default payment method selected, you will only see a Checkout Summary screen.  To add the Bookfair ID to the payment page, you will need to click on the Change button on the right-hand side of the Payment Section. This will take you back to the payment page, where you will scroll down to the bottom of the page until you see “Check this Box if this is a Bookfair Order.” Check the box and enter our bookfair I.D. number, above.
  • After placing your order, you can log back into your Order Summary Confirmation to check to see if the Bookfair ID number is listed on your order. If it is, everything was done correctly.
  • If you do not see a Bookfair ID number, or if you realize that you placed your order without using our Bookfair ID number, please call Customer Service at 800-962-6177 as soon as possible. Provide your order number and our Bookfair ID number, and the representative will manually add your order to our Bookfair sales total.
  • Please note that some items, such as gift cards, ebooks, textbooks, magazines and Barnes & Noble Memberships are not included in bookfair sales totals. However, NOOKs are included! We earn 5% back on any NOOKs you purchase, so why wait to get those great NOOK HD and HD+ devices!

Thanks again for supporting our Bookfair!

– LIST of Reader’s Choice M.O.M. Essential Books 2015 w/Links [CLICK] – 

Categories
Featured

Motherhood Hall of Fame Event – 5/7

Motherhood Hall of Fame 2015; Amber Kinser, Ann Fessler
Motherhood Hall of Fame 2015; Amber Kinser, Ann Fessler

First and foremost, thank you to everyone who came out to our 2015 “New Maternalisms” conference held over the weekend at the CUNY Graduate Center and Manhattan College, and to all our empowering and uplifting speakers! We will continue to grapple with the issues and material raised over the course of the three-day series throughout the upcoming year. It’s a good feeling to be so knowledge-heavy! Following this insightful, invigorating, and thought-provoking journey, we’re moving full-speed ahead into the week of Mother’s Day and all the associated activities we have planned. We will continue to champion motherwork through a week-long book fair sponsored by Barnes and Noble to benefit the museum, a speaker/reading series to be held at the Upper West Side Barnes and Noble each day between May 6-May 10, and our annual Motherhood Hall of Fame event on Thursday, May 7 at the Upper West Side Barnes and Noble.

The Motherhood Hall of Fame induction ceremony will be hosted by the Museum of Motherhood’s Joy Rose and Manhattan College Professor of Sociology Roksana Badruddoja. The event will take place from 7-9PM on Thursday, May 7 at the Upper West Side Barnes and Noble (on the corner of 82nd and Broadway*). The evening will honor Ann Fessler and Amber Kinser through remarks, performances, a question/answer session, and readings/talks from the two awardees. The Museum of Motherhood is celebrating these motherhood warriors for their “Practical and Political Inspiration.”

For more on Ann Fessler and Amber Kinser’s contribution to our field, check out their bios below:

Ann Fessler is a photographer, filmmaker, and author. She a professor in the Photography department at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her films, photographs, artists’ books, and audio and video installations have been shown in galleries, museums, and film festivals around the world. Her own experience with adoption has inspired her to explore this topic artistically and has been the theme of her work for the last 25 years. In 2003, Ann was awarded a Radcliffe Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University to compile research and conduct interviews with women who lost children to adoption in the 1950s and 1960s. This research culminated in the publication of The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade (Penguin Press), which was chosen as one of the top 5 non-fiction books of 2006 by the National Book Critics Circle and received the Ballard Book Prize. The Times called it a “remarkably well-researched and accomplished book.” Her recent film, A Girl Like Her (Women Make Movies), has been screened internationally at festivals, colleges, and conferences, and has been subtitled in 5 languages.

Amber Kinser is a writer, speaker, mother, and professor. She is a professor of Communication and Performance at East Tennessee State University, where her scholarship covers family, food, gender, and communication. She was instrumental in forging the Women’s Studies undergraduate major at the university. Dr. Kinser is the author of Performing Motherhood: Artistic, Activist, and Everyday Enactments and Motherhood and Feminism. She is currently underway in a university-sponsored research project, for which she received a $10,000 grant, to study motherhood and the family meal.

*Please note, a previous post had erroneously listed this address as being at 86th and Broadway. The Upper West Side Barnes and Noble location is at 2289 Broadway, the corner of 82nd and Broadway.

Written by: Jenny Nigro, MoM Online Intern

Categories
Featured

Mother’s Day Reading at the Upper West Side Barnes and Noble with Susan Konig and Katharine Holabird

Konig author photoWhat would a Museum of Motherhood-sponsored Mother’s Day reading be without humor, inspiration, art, or creativity? Luckily, we will never have to find out, because our Barnes and Noble event on Sunday, May 10 will feature readings from Katharine Holabird of the famed Angelina Ballerina children’s series and Susan Konig, the author of several books and essays that draw from her experience as a mother. Katharine will open our special Mother’s Day event with a reading at the Upper West Side Barnes and Noble (82nd St. and Broadway) from 1-2PM, followed by a reading from Susan Konig out of her new book Teenagers and Toddlers Are Trying to Kill Me from 2-3PM. Book lovers can support the Museum of Motherhood from May 6-15 by shopping the Museum of Motherhood book fair online at http://www.barnesandnoble.com/bookfairs/. Enter the code of 11455805 at checkout to see a portion of the sale benefit the museum.

For more information about Susan Konig, check out her bio here:

Susan Konig has been a staff writer for The Washington Post, an editor at Seventeen magazine and a columnist for The New York Post.  Her articles and essays have appeared in national publications including Ladies’ Home Journal, Travel & Leisure, First for Women and Parade. She co-hosted the popular Speak Now…with Dave and Susan Konig on Sirius Satellite radio with her Emmy Award-winning comedian husband.  Her first book, Why Animals Sleep So Close to the Road (and Other Lies I Tell My Children), was called “brilliant, witty, and downright Bombeckian” by USA Today. Her follow-up I Wear the Maternity Pants in This Family was a Parade Pick in Parade magazine. Her third book, Teenagers and Toddlers Are Trying to Kill Me!, is based on a true story. http://www.susankonig.net

Arranged by: Jenny Nigro, MoM Online Intern

Categories
Featured

Meet Laura Fuentes on May 9 at the Upper West Side Barnes and Noble!

laura fuentes imageContinuing from our post last week about the programming that we have going on during the week leading up to Mother’s Day, we’re pleased to showcase the event that will be held on Saturday, May 9. As with the Mother Egg Review event we mentioned in our last post, the Museum of Motherhood will emcee a series of mother-centric appearances and readings at the Upper West Side Barnes and Noble (at 82nd and Broadway) from May 6-10. These events coincide with a fundraiser to benefit the museum, hosted by B & N. You may have seen this posted on other parts of our site, but just in case you missed it, here’s the skinny on the fundraiser: for the week of May 6-15, anyone who purchases books through barnesandnoble.com and uses the code 11455805 will see a portion of their sale go to the Museum of Motherhood. On Saturday, May 9, we will welcome Laura Fuentes, renown children’s wellness expert, to the Upper West Side Barnes and Noble from 1-3PM.

Laura is an author, speaker, recipe developer, entrepreneur, and expert in the field of family nutrition. She is the creator and founder of MOMables, an online resource that offers fun and creative ideas for planning kids’ school lunches. She is the host of MOMables Radio, a podcast available on iTunes, a columnist for the Huffington Post, a purveyor of useful how-tos on her YouTube channel, and the author of two must-have recipe books for parents everywhere: The Best Homemade Kids’ Lunches on the Planet and The Best Homemade Snacks on the Planet. Additionally, Laura speaks nationally on a wide range of topics, including family food, children’s health, school lunch policy, and business. She holds a degree in Global Economics and a Master’s of Business Administration. A common thread among these ventures, Laura is “committed to helping parents make real food happen in their households by sharing easy recipes and quick tips.” Laura is a native of Spain and the mother of three.

Contributed by: Jenny Nigro, MoM Online Intern

 

Categories
Featured

The Mom Egg Review and Marjorie Tesser

Marjorie Tesser photoThere is a lot in store for the Museum of Motherhood over the next couple of months! We’re excited to share the events and projects we have planned leading up to Mother’s Day with you in our upcoming blog entries (including last week’s post about the 2015 conference titled “New Maternalisms” to be held on May 2). We hope that you will share these happenings with your communities and join us for these mother-centric plans.

This week, we’re profiling the Mom Egg Review, which will be celebrated at the Upper West Side Barnes and Noble location at Broadway and W 82nd St on Wednesday, May 7 from 7-9PM. The night will feature readings from select contributors to the collection. And who better to explain the purpose and vision of the Mom Egg Review than its editor, Marjorie Tesser?

For those of you who don’t know her, Marjorie Tesser is a poet and editor of the Mom Egg Review, an independent annual print collection of stories (both fiction and non-), poetry, and art that embraces motherwork. An attorney by training, she can also count editor and entrepreneur as her callings. In addition to editing the Mom Egg Review, Marjorie was also the editor of a compilation of poems called Bowery Women and co-editor of Estamos Aqui: Poems by Migrant Farmworkers. She is the author of two books of poems, The Important Thing Is and The Magic Feather.

Of the Mom Egg Review, Marjorie writes:

Mom Egg Review publishes poetry, fiction, and non-fiction by writers who are mothers or who write about motherhood.

There’s a school of thought in modern literature that the personal narrative is dead, that its narrow point of view speaks little to the complexities of today’s world; that those stories all have been told. But not these stories, of women’s lives—of family and motherhood, of culture, work, love, politics, from diverse women’s viewpoints and experience. For thousands of years, the focus of history and art has come from the perspective of males. But women’s stories and insights are important, vital, for our world.

The Museum of Motherhood (along with its non-profit Motherhood Foundation) believes in the importance of these stories, and supports, promotes, nurtures, and celebrates women and their work in an amazing variety of ways—creative, academic, maternal, and entrepreneurial are just some examples, and consistently fosters connections and collaboration.

Our current issue of Mom Egg Review contains a special poetry folio themed “Compassionate Action”. The poems address urgent circumstances, and explore options for overcoming stasis and aligning hands and feet with minds and hearts.

The Museum of Motherhood is the epitome of such action, telling and showing the truths about mothers’ roles and work and value. The media and the established powers, with their tendency to exalt or disparage motherhood, are not exposing these truths. It’s up to us to insure that our stories get told, and heard. We need to support the institutions that that work to ensure that our voices, our experience, views, needs, and realities, are acknowledged.

Contributed by: Jenny Nigro, MoM Online Intern

Categories
Featured

Join Us For Our 2015 Conference, “New Maternalisms”

Joy Rose, Laura Tropp, Barbara Katz Rothman
Joy Rose, Laura Tropp, Barbara Katz Rothman

As we move into April and welcome spring, we also get closer to our annual conference. As you may have seen on other locations on the website, this year, our 2015 conference is titled “New Maternalisms: Tales of Motherwork (Dislodging the Unthinkable)”. The conference will be held over three days, April 30, May 1-2, Thursday-Saturday. Thursday’s program will be held at the CUNY Graduate Center, located at 5th Ave and 34th St. in Manhattan. Friday and Saturday’s program will then be held at Manhattan College, located on Manhattan College Parkway in the Riverdale section of the Bronx.

This year’s theme, the concept of “New Maternalisms” is intended to expose the “fissures and cracks between the ideological representation of motherhood and the lived experience of being a mother” (Klein 2012). Through a series of lectures, panels, keynotes, art, and bridging opportunities, the program seeks to bring increased visibility to motherhood and the labor of “motherwork.” We’re so excited to share this year’s program content and how it brings this to life. The conference will feature a wide range of topics on motherhood, including: “Expanding Theory on Motherhood and Caregiving”, “Visual and Popular Depictions of Mothers”, “Extending/Erasing Motherhood”, a panel on “Intimate Labor: Doulas and Motherwork”, “Motherhood, Identity, and Attachment”, “The Personal Journey and Maternal Storytelling”, a panel on “Interconnected Maternalisms: Examples of Everyday Languages”, “Institutional and Systemic Barriers of Motherhood: Femivores, Foster Care, and Things”, “Motherwork, Culture, and Patriarchal Societies”, “Work-Life Balance, Motherhood and Meaning”, a panel on “Making the Invisible Visible: Valuing Motherwork in Society’s Economy and Institutions”, “Motherwork Bodies, Birthing, and Breastfeeding”, “Mothering, Disability, and Motherless Daughters”, a film screening of MIMI and DONA, “Self-Help Theory and Motherhood”, and a panel titled “To the Moon and Back: Why Mothers March, Motherless Children”.

This year’s keynote address will be delivered by Barbara Katz Rothman in room 9205 of the CUNY, GC at 4:45p. a motherwork warrior who is near and dear to our heart here at the Museum of Motherhood. Dr. Katz Rothman is a Professor of Sociology, Public Health, Disability Studies, Women’s Studies, and the Food Studies concentration at the CUNY Graduate Center (and advisor to our own Martha Joy Rose, no less!). She has done extensive work in the areas of midwifery and reproductive technologies. Her scholarship covers new genetics, medical sociology, bioethics, issues in disability, adoption, race, and food studies. The author of works such as In Labor, The Tentative Pregnancy, Recreating Motherhood, The Book of Life, Weaving a Family: Untangling Race and Adoption, Laboring On, and the upcoming book, Bun in the Oven: Crafting an Artisanal Midwifery Movement, she has also published numerous articles and curated several academic journals in her fields. In recognition of her contributions to the movement, Dr. Katz Rothman was named to our very own Motherhood Hall of Fame in 2014. Her keynote address will be “Women as Fathers,” how our new technologies and practices are recreating motherhood in the image of an old-fashioned patriarchal fatherhood.

Written by: Jenny Nigro, M.o.M. Online Intern