The Missing Mother

This collection explores the concept of the Missing Mother from two inter-related standpoints: the mother as absent in society and the mother as absent in a woman’ s selfhood. The first perspective considers why and how the mother/mothering is disregarded, discounted, or dismissed in art, literature, culture, policy, and law while the second perspective explores why and how a woman has marginalized, lost, forgotten, forfeited, or abandoned her individual maternal identity. Whether it is society that erases the maternal or a woman who forsakes it, the aim of this collection is to consider the why, how, what, who, and where of the mechanics of missing mother in both society and self. This collection considers reasons for this disavowal and disappearance of the maternal and shows how mothers can and do resist to recover and reclaim the maternal in society and self. Overall, this collection seeks to uncover and reveal the mother so marginalized and maligned in and by patriarchal culture and to show how women may find the missing mother in society and self and achieve empowerment in doing so.

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 coeditor/editor of thirty plus books on many motherhood topics Martina Mullaney is currently Post-Doctoral Researcher on the Feminist Art Making Histories Project at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dú n Laoghaire, Ireland. She holds an AHRC-funded Ph.D. in art from the University of Reading 2022.

TABLE OF CONTENTS 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 Wó jciak and Dagmara Metel 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