This paper engages with theories of the monstrous maternal in feminist philosophy to explore how examples of visual art practice by Susan Hiller, Marc Quinn, Alison Lapper, Tracey Emin, and Cindy Sherman disrupt maternal ideals in visual culture through differently imagined body schema. By examining instances of the pregnant body represented in relation to maternal subjectivity, disability, abortion, and “prosthetic” pregnancy, it asks whether the “monstrous” can offer different kinds of figurations of the maternal that acknowledge the agency and potential (...) power of the pregnant subject. (shrink)

Over the past decade, representations of pregnant embodiment, foetal imagery and the maternal body have become the subject of intense feminist investigation across fields as diverse as philosophy, science and cultural studies. This body of work represents a sustained intervention in the politics of reproduction and the politics of representation that builds on earlier feminist discourses on motherhood. Within this article, I want to address the limits of, and ruptures in, the representation of the maternal body in relation to particular (...) examples of visual art practice. The article focuses on four pregnant figurations that seem to constitute certain limit points in the representation of maternal embodiment: the `phantom' pregnant body; the elderly prima gravida; the pregnant woman with disabilities; and young women undergoing abortion. My argument is that, in these particular visual texts, `being pregnant' is represented as an unnatural rather than a natural state and as a cultural rupturing of feminine and maternal norms. This seems to offer a useful starting point from which to interrogate the relations between prevailing discourses around the maternal subject and the unstable subject of pregnancy. (shrink)

This article explores late works by contemporary artist Louise Bourgeois that illuminate current concerns about ageing maternal bodies and the ambivalent responses of fear and loathing that they provoke. In 2003, Louise Bourgeois made an installation for the Freud Museum in Vienna entitled The Reticent Child, on the subject of her own earlier pregnancy and birth of her son, one of several works featuring maternity and fertility which Bourgeois has created in old age. In Nature Study 2007, made at the (...) age of 96 years, she depicts carnal couples and pregnant and birthing figures embodied in brilliant pinks and scarlet reds. Bourgeois represents women as the powerful agents of the maternal function, marking a return to motherhood as a central topic of her earlier work. Edward Said posited sources of cultural meaning as ‘the whole notion of beginning, the moment of birth and origin … reproductive generation, maturity’, and ‘the last great problematic … the last and late period of life, the decay of the body’ (Said, 2006: 4–6). What does it mean for Bourgeois to return to the theme of birth in her nineties and how does it resonate with contemporary anxieties about the ageing maternal body? If the space of the gallery is a safe arena for a woman artist to present sexuality and maternity in old age, how are older women who break codes of fertility represented elsewhere? In a culture which is hostile to the conjunction of ageing women with motherhood, I shall argue that Bourgeois’ late maternal works can help to undo the taboo on older mothers. (shrink)