Esther Windsor
 
Motherhood, Power and Love,
curated and chaired by Esther Windsor on resonance fm, with 'Enemies of Good Art'. 8th February 2011

Quicktime Version and downloadable mp3 >


From yummy mummy, slummy mummy, supernanny to pram face. Aspiration, anxiety and instruction mix to produce potent symbols in popular culture and at the heart of political discourse and emotional life. This talk examines contemporary motherhood and questions:

Romance, marriage, mortgage, motherhood, why not 'having it all' might not be a bad thing?
What is the value of motherhood? What's love got to do with it? What is emotional capital?
This live discussion will be chaired by Esther Windsor, using research in feminisms, subjectivity and psychoanalysis to explore maternal identity. It will think about disrupting popular and conflicting models of motherhood and consider maternal identity as fluid as well as culturally specific. It will look at how signifying practices, like 'Enemies of Good Art', might open up spaces for rethinking motherhood and self determination.

Esther Windsor is a curator, artist and mother, completing a practice based PhD in Fine Art at Kingston University.

Anouchka Grose is a Lacanian Psychoanalyst, member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, a mother and author of 'No more silly love songs, a realists guide to romance'

Mo Thorp is Course Director of Fine Art at Chelsea, convener of The subjectivities and Feminisms research group, Chelsea School of Art, an artist, mother and grandmother.

Dr Lisa Baraitser is a feminist writer, a psychotherapist and senior lecturer in Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck. She is author of Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption
Enemies of Good Art on the 100th anniversary of Women's Day

Enemies of Good Art was initiated by Martina Mullaney and Ana Shorter and seeks to investigate the possibilities of combining art practice and family commitments. Inparticular it seeks to encourage participation by parents and their children in a series of public discussions and art based events. In his 1938 novel Enemies of Promise Cyril Connolly asserted that ‘there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall’. Since April 2009 Enemies of Good Art has debated the issues arising from this infamous quote.