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Vital Signs: Paper Session 1a
Tuesday 9 September, 3.45-5.15pm, Cordingley Theatre
1a: Symposium: Researching visual, auditory, tactile and other sensory realms
‘Motherhood, identity work, and visual methods: Photography as a method of exploring maternal subjectivity’ –Dr Helen Lomax (University of Hertfordshire), Dr Janet Fink, Professor Gillian Rose, Dr Mary Jane Kehily and Lucy Hadfield (Open University)
This symposium brings together three research projects which have in common an interest in exploring experiences and representations of motherhood through the medium of photography.
Helen Lomax and Janet Fink analyse tape-recorded discussion between a group of women collectively viewing images of new mothers in order to explore cultural representations of birth and mothering. Their paper examines discussants' responses to these photographs and, through the identification of similarities and differences in readings, considers the effects of experience upon the interpretative process and the significance of collective viewing for the management of that process. Through a focus on the particular dynamic of collective viewing, the paper illustrates how meanings of motherhood are reflexively produced, managed and negotiated discursively.
Gillian Rose’s work explores mothers’ own family photographs in order to address questions of maternal subjectivity. As she argues, many women with very young children spend a large amount of time taking photographs of them, and then organising, storing, displaying and circulating those photos. However, much of the literature on family photographs draws on a broadly semiotic analytical tradition, and examines the snaps as images which reproduce certain familial ideologies. Insightful as this approach is, it has little to say about the importance of such photographs to women with young children. Instead, Rose approaches photos as objects which are embedded in social practices, which produce specific subjectivities. She explores what women do with their family snaps, arguing that photographs are important objects with which certain, ambivalent aspects of maternal subjectivity can be articulated.
The paper by Mary Jane Kehily and Lucy Hadfield discusses the use of visual methods as a way of documenting the transition to first time motherhood. Based on the findings of an ESRC project, The Making of Modern Motherhood, the paper focuses on the ways in which women have prepared for the birth of their first child through practices of consumption and the reconfiguration of domestic space. This aspect of their research uses digital photography and audio recording to narrate women's experiences, providing a unique commentary on their changing identities and relationships within the home.
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