1st Edition
Pandemic Motherhood Exploring the COVID-19 Pandemic through Engaged and Applied Arts
Pandemic Motherhood explores how various artistic practices and processes have been instrumental in processing, sharing, and learning about the intersectional epidemics unique to mothers living in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States.
Exploring how the COVID-19 pandemic and childcare converge to create challenging circumstances for women and mothers, the book interrogates ways in which individuals navigated these challenges through dance, performing arts, and theatre. Central to this topic is a growing body of literature about how applied performance affects change, activates transformation and healing, and engages communities in shared lived experience. The collection highlights artistic processes and experiences of developing, creating, devising, or contributing to artwork that centralizes topics of social inequity with pregnancy, motherhood, and womanhood. Pandemic Motherhood also features innovative artistic practices from contributing authors that illustrate complex, diverse experiences of contemporary and coexisting states of art making and mothering.
This edited collection is ideal for students, scholars, and researchers of applied and socially engaged arts, as well as students of sociology and gender studies.
Introduction 1
Ali Duffy, Sarah Johnson, and Tamar Neumann
SECTION I
Pandemic Matrescence: Pregnancy, Miscarriage,
Infertility, Birth, and Post- Partum Experiences 19
1 Performance + Pedagogy + Pregnancy:
A COVID- 19 Pandemic Experience 21
Meagan Dissinger
2 “Elective” Motherhood: Infertility and the COVID- 19
Pandemic 42
Rachel E. Bauer
3 Subversive Grief 52
Rebekah Chappell
4 Trauma, Healing, and the Transformative Language
Arts: Facilitating Expressive Writing Workshops for the
Postpartum Transition 74
Aryn Bartley
5 My Blessingway Project: A Story of Birthing a Mother
and (Her Child) Hope 87
Vanessa Munroe
6 The Cow, the Cyborg, and the Letdown: An
Interdisciplinary Exploration of Telling Breast/
Chestfeeding Stories in the U.S. 99
Emily Kitchens
7 A Choreographic Motherhood: The (Re)Birth of Self
in Creative Process and Practice 114
Tammy Carrasco and Jill Guyton Nee
SECTION II
In the Weeds: A Mother’s Work Is Never Done.
Mothering Children, Teenagers, and Adults through a
Pandemic and Beyond 137
8 My Mom Worked during the Entire Pandemic, and
All I Got Was This Stupid Quarantine 139
Dawn Davis Loring
9 Space for Our Children 154
Kristen Desjarlais- deKlerk
10 Artistry and Authority 165
Sarah Farnsley
11 Dance as Legacy: Passing on an Artistic Practice to
My Daughters 176
Susan Koper
12 Transatlantic Motherhood: A US and UK Comparison
of Mothering in Dance 189
Chloe Hillyar
13 Digital Media’s Bearing on Maternal Well- Being:
An Ethnographic Case Study 205
Courtney D. Lawton, Michael S. Sinclair, and
Shaunda Richardson
14 Intimacy Direction: The Key to Modeling Care for
Mother- Artists 221
Lynn Deboeck
SECTION III
Performances of Motherhood: Art Making, Ideation,
Processes, Outcomes, and Participation through the
Lens of Mothering during the COVID- 19 Pandemic 233
15 Pandemic Mama: Devised Performance for
Community Impact 235
Ali Duffy, Rachel Hirshorn- Johnston, Sarah Johnson,
and Tamar Neumann
16 Pivots and Pianos: Choreographing through the
COVID- 19 Pandemic with a Fifth Grader 255
Yvonne Marie Montoya
17 Performing a “Real” Family: Finalizing an Adoption
amid a Pandemic 275
Tamar Neumann
18 Venus in Quarantine 285
Meghan Frederick
19 BIRTH! A Dance Documentary Exploring Autonomy,
Trauma, and Triumph 307
Sara Malan- McDonald
20 Famalao’an/ Babae: Socially Engaged Art, Feminist
Pedagogy, and Shifting Women’s Storytelling with
CHamoru and Filipino Students through Zine- Making
in Guahan 319
Helen Yeung and Kyra Perez
21 “Our Children”: Sarah Sudhoff’s Multidisciplinary
Artivism in Motherhood 337
Ali Duffy
22 Mama’s Move: Centering Mothers in the Design of a
Dance Storytelling Space 343
Valerie Ifill
23 Life as a Mother Artist: Loving and Grieving through
Dance 357
Madeline Jazz Harvey
24 Conclusion 369
Ali Duffy, Sarah Johnson, and Tamar Neumann
Index 373
Biography
Ali Duffy, PhD, is Professor and Graduate Director of Dance at Texas Tech University (USA), Artistic Director of Flatlands Dance Theatre, and co-founder of the International Parenting and Dance Network. She is mama to sweet Noah.
Sarah Johnson is Assistant Professor of Dramaturgy and Head of the MFA Dramaturgy program at Indiana University Bloomington, USA.
Tamar Neumann is Instructor in English at Tarrant County College, USA. Her research focuses on the performances of open adoption, and how those performances highlight the social construction of families. Her creative work highlights the stories of those who live in open adoptions.
