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Feminist Art and the Maternal Andrea Liss Table of Contents PRESS Feminist Review M/C Reviews		$24.95 paper ISBN: 978-0-8166-4623-4 $75.00 cloth ISBN: 978-0-8166-4622-7
A highly engaging, taboo-breaking study of feminist contemporary art. Feminist motherhood is a surprisingly unexplored subject. In fact, feminism and motherhood have been often thought of as incompatible. Profound, provocative, and innovative, Feminist Art and the Maternal is the first work to critically examine the dilemmas and promises of representing feminist motherhood in contemporary art and visual culture. Andrea Liss skillfully incorporates theory with passionate personal reflections on the maternal, and in doing so she advances a fresh and necessary perspective on both feminism and art. Offering new research on works by well-known and emerging artists who approach feminist motherhood issues from their own knowledge and experiences, Liss explores a wide range of examples from the challenging to the taboo, including Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document, Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Maintenance Art projects, Renée Cox’s Yo’ Mama portraits, and Ngozi Onwurah’s film The Body Beautiful. Liss considers traditional characteristics that mothers are assumed to possess, such as nurturing, empathy, and sacrifice for their children—qualities that paradoxically have negatively defined women as “sentimental”—and assertively revalues them within both motherhood and feminism. Throughout, she deftly intertwines theoretical analysis with the arresting and enlightening first-person voices of artist-mothers and their children. Putting forth an original ethics of feminism and the maternal—how to be in the place of the other and inside one’s self, how to care for another and one’s self—Liss reconceives the mother-child relationship as a model for relations among races, genders, and ages and radically reinterprets maternal traits as vital forms of social, artistic, and political address. “I am certain this book will become a valuable 'must-read' for students and artists to break down the mythology of the separation between art and motherhood. This is a thoughtful exploration of what feminists have brought to this question over several generations of art production.” —n.paradoxa “Liss herself is a generous and thoughtful character here, sharing the insights of her young feminist students on motherhood and poignantly recounting her life history as a mother in order to initiate an intimate bond with the reader.” —Choice Andrea Liss is professor of contemporary art history and cultural theory at California State University, San Marcos. She is the author of Trespassing through Shadows: Memory, Photography, and the Holocaust (Minnesota, 1998). 192 pages | 56 b&w photos | 7 x 10 | 2009 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments Introduction. Thinking (M)otherwise: New Bodies of Knowledge 1. Breaching the Taboo 2. Intersubjectivities: Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document 3. Maternal CARE: Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Maintenance Art 4. Mamas Out of Place 5. Making the Maternal Visible: Renée Cox’s Family Portraits 6. Loving in Difference: Ngozi Onwurah’s Mother–Daughter Reflections Interlude: Cultural and Maternal Notes on Living through Breast Cancer 7. Maternal Mourning: A Collaboration between Civia Rosenberg and May Stevens In Lieu of a Conclusion: Maternal Passions Notes Bibliography Index

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