After Christmas Judith showed us a first draft of her essay. Here’s an excerpt:
Our cultural experience of images of childhood make us (particularly women) wary. How do we avoid the appearance, as well as the actuality, of sentimentality? Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document famously presented her experience of motherhood through the lens of psychoanalysis, but it is not Townley and Bradby’s intention to scrutinise the mother-child relationship. Rather, they consider the dynamics of the family as a whole. In spite of the changes that have taken place in our conception of what constitutes ‘a family’, it is still the basis of our social order. This means our economic structures still ensure that family reinforces the patriarchal order. It is the attempts to circumvent this, to negotiate a way of being (and becoming) in the world, that permeates Artists-As-Parents-As-Artists.
