CLASS DESCRIPTION
“Through our experiences of motherhood, we as mothers have come to an embodied understanding of our own oppression. We have felt it, even if we could not always name it. Furthermore, we have dreamed and written and shared about the possibility that mothering could be otherwise” Jennifer Lane, Everyday World-Making: Toward an Understanding of Affect and Mothering
In this lecture, Anna Johnson explores the ways in which motherhood, understood as broadly as possible, can bring us to an “embodied understanding of our own oppression”, revealing the ways in which mothers are othered, and endangered, by patriarchal, heteronormative, capitalist structures, and how this intersects with wider gender-based oppression.
We will draw upon theorists such as Rozsika Parker, Jacqueline Rose and Wendy Hollway, and how they build on the work of foundational maternal studies writers such as Adrienne Rich and Andrea O’Reilly, and how 21st century motherhood life writing responds to mothering under these conditions.
Via the work of writers such as Hannah Silva, Catherine Cho and Maggie Nelson, we will look at authors’ struggles to find language for motherhood experience, given the scarcity of precedence for writing honestly, first-hand about motherhood. We will see how, as “a social institution that functions ideologically and politically […] motherhood idealizes mothers” (Coulter, The Encyclopedia of Motherhood, 2010, p. 571) and how this idealised form of motherhood is not only unattainable because its expectations would be too much to ask of anyone and because it assumes a biologically based, heteronormative form of mothering, but also because the intense labour of motherhood is not recognised or supported, in practical terms, by capitalist, patriarchal structures of power.
As Lane succinctly puts it, “the demands made on mothers by the institution of motherhood are impossible to achieve, which accounts for why failure has come to be seen as an inevitable part of mothering. Moreover, to succeed within such an institution means to be deemed successful by inherently misogynistic, racist, and classist measures” (Everyday World-Making: Toward an Understanding of Affect and Mothering, 2018, p. 77).
In voicing the complexities of real, ambivalent motherhood, and the effects of the impossible demands made on mothers, the life writing texts explored here can be seen to break the silence around the ways in which mothers are oppressed by patriarchal, heteronormative, capitalist structures, and even to offer “the possibility that mothering could be otherwise” (Lane, Everyday World-Making: Toward an Understanding of Affect and Mothering, 2018, p. 78).
Engaging with these texts is deeply important in that it allows us to begin to separate motherhood from its social expectations and pressures, to consider the possibilities of mothering ‘otherwise’, and to begin to mobilise against the oppressive structures that damage the mental, physical, economic and creative health of those who mother.
ABOUT OUR LECTURER
Dr Anna Johnson (they/them) is a writer, poet and lecturer, and earlier this year completed their PhD in creative writing at Kingston University. Anna lectures in creative writing and runs writing workshops. They hold a first-class BA (hons) in History and Theory of Art, University of Kent and an MA in Fine Art, Central Saint Martins. Anna lives and works in East London.
Anna’s prose/poetry life writing practice, and research, centre around motherhood, haunting and failure, drawing on, amongst other things, disability theory, queer and feminist theory.
They have published widely, both academic and creative works, and their first full-length prose-poetry work (as Anna Brook), Motherhood: a ghost story, is out with Broken Sleep Books. They are also currently guest editor of Studies in the Maternal journal.
INSTAGRAM: @annaotheranna
WEBSITE: https://www.annabrook.co.uk/
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AUTUMN/WINTER TERM 2025
Monday 15th September
Luisa-Maria MacCormack (she/her)
Female Sexuality and the Male Gaze
Monday 22nd September
Dr. Kate Pickering (she/her)
Feminist Religious Worldbuilding in Contemporary Art
Monday 29th September
Julia Kotziamani (she/her)
Misogynist Bureaucracies: Administrative Erasure and the Feminist Body
Monday 6th October
Noelle Perdue (she/her)
The Evolution of Post-AI Pornography
Monday 13th October
Erin James (she/they)
The Real Housewives of Racist TV Tropes: a Black Feminist Reading of Reality TV
Monday 20th October
Jo Harrison & Holly Isard
RECORDING ONLY - Breastfeeding as work: the contradictions of breastfeeding under capitalism
Monday 27th October
Luisa-Maria MacCormack (she/her)
The Vagina Dentata: Myths of The Monstrous Feminine
Monday 3rd November
Catherine McCormack (she/her)
Eve and the Serpent: Snake Symbolism and Repressed Histories of the Feminine
Monday 10th November
Dr. Lena Mattheis (they/she)
From Thou to They: Gender Nonconformity Pronouns in Literary History
Monday 17th November
Giulia Palladini (she/her)
The Feminist Before the Archive
Monday 24th November
Gudrun Filipska (she/her)
Eco-Feminist Art and Science Fiction
Monday 1st December
Anna Titov (she/her)
Clarice Lispector: Existentialism and Dark Feminisms
Monday 8th December
Jennifer Jasmine White (she/her)
Fashioning Labour: Feminist Art and The Industrial Body
Monday 15th December
Anna Johnson (they/them)
Writing Motherhood: An Embodied Understanding of our Own Oppression
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