When Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beholder

Death in Venice turns fifty in 2021. The moment of the pandemic may be one reason to look back at this film about cholera in Italy. The release of the documentary The Most Beautiful Boy in the World (2021), about Bjorn Andrésen who starred as Tadzio, is another. But what is most enduring is Visconti’s engagement with the family, and above all with the mother. This calls for reflection in the present moment when maternal eroticism and its relation to maternal subjectivity are newly illuminated in feminist writing. Through extended analysis of Silvana Mangano’s presence in the film, her wardrobe, and her gestures, this article argues that Visconti opens a space for feelings of heartbreak, love for the mother, and grief at her desire. In its vision of madness in the family, beyond its images of cholera in Venice, this is a pandemic film unafraid to look into the vortex.

Labour Pain, ‘Natal Politics’ and Reproductive Justice for Black Birth Givers

The reception of Elaine Scarry’s landmark text, The Body in Pain, focuses in part on exploring how pain might be understood as beneficial or therapeutic. Childbirth is often cited as the paradigmatic instance of this kind of beneficial pain. This essay examines conceptualizations of labour pain in biomedical, natural childbirth and reproductive justice movements that explore the limits of Scarry’s description of pain as ‘unshareable’. Political struggles over pain in childbirth centre on the legibility of pain in labour. Feminist and natural childbirth activists have developed an understanding of pain at birth as central to maternal subjectivity, where pain is a biopolitical force and its management a means of self-transformation. Alongside calls for reproductive justice, the essay considers how the visibility and expressivity of labour pain could contribute to what Imogen Tyler and Lisa Baraitser term a new ‘natal politics’ that addresses concerns for the disproportionate injury and death experienced by Black birth givers.

Revisiting Demeter and Persephone Paper A - Revisiting Demeter: towards reconceptualising maternal subjectivity and erotics

These conjoint papers discuss critically Nancy Chodorow’s understanding of mother–daughter separation as an important milestone in psychic development, as well as subsequent psychoanalytic work on female and maternal subjectivity through revisiting the myth of Demeter and Persephone. In Paper A, we are looking at the figure of Demeter. Our reading of Demeter in the myth questions the usual interpretations of this maternal figure particularly those from a psychoanalytic perspective, drawing the conclusion that Demeter, according to the myth, is the silent container for her child, the mother with no voice or subjectivity, or desire, she is the one who is to be left behind. Through a clinical vignette, we illustrate how in one clinical context, a mother and daughter relationship was perceived and “interpreted”, leading to the mother being seen as the problem, and cause of her daughter’s difficulties. The BBC film, The Mother, received many negative comments and even condemnation for its portrayal of a mother and grandmother as still sexually active, and wishing to be the subject of another’s desire. We suggest that the film illustrated some of our most uncomfortable and complex questions about the mother and the maternal. We conclude by looking at the film and the questions and fears it raises about female sexuality, desire, and ageing when applied to the “older” woman–mother.

Algorithmic vulnerabilities and the datalogical: Early motherhood and tracking-as-care regimes

This article draws on work from a 6-month project with 12 young mothers in which we mapped and tracked ourselves and our infants. The project employed a range of methods including digital ethnographies, walk-along methods, hacking and playful experimentations. We explored, broke and tested a range of wearables and phone-based tracking apps, meeting regularly to discuss and compare our experiences and interrogate the sociotechnical systems of postnatal healthcare alongside the particular politics of certain apps and their connective affordances. In this article, I use the project as a springboard to explore what I call algorithmic vulnerabilities: the ways that the contemporary datalogical anthropocene is exposing and positioning subjects in ways that not only rarely match their own lived senses of identity but are also increasingly difficult to interrupt or disrupt. While this is not necessarily a new phenomenon (see Clough et al., 2015; Hayles, 2017), I argue that the particular algorithmic vulnerabilities within this context, which are forged in part through the ideological enmeshing of the long-running atomization of maternal and infant bodies within the healthcare systems (Crowe, 1987; Shaw, 2012; Wajcman, 1991) and the new and emergent tracking apps (Greenfield, 2016; Lupton, 2016; O’Riordan, 2017) create momentary stabilizations of sociotechnical systems in which maternal subjectivity and female embodiment become algorithmically vulnerable in affective and profound ways. These stabilizations become increasingly and problematically normative, partly because they feed and perpetuate a wider ‘taken-for granted’ sensibility of gendered neoliberalism (Gill, 2017: 609) which, as I argue, is coming to encapsulate the contemporary datalogical anthropocene. Secondly, the sociotechnical politics of the apps and the healthcare systems are revealed as co-dependent, raising a number of questions about long-term algorithmic vulnerabilities and normativities which predate the contemporary datalogical ‘turn’ and impact both practices and methods.