Rewriting maternal femininity in Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document

The subject of chapter 5 is the installation Post-Partum Document (1973–79). The chapter traces how Mary Kelly’s engagement with the visual appearance of language became a tool to deconstruct idealised myths of maternal femininity. By taking material desires – so often pathologised – as her aesthetic subject, Kelly challenged white ideals of maternal femininity as an identity women naturally assume. Crucial to this challenge was the psychoanalytic argument that through pregnancy and the first months of infant care, women re-experience their psychic lives before their negative entry into the Oedipus Complex. Kelly shows that mining the feminine pre-Oedipal for its affective and aesthetic plenitude opens up the feminist possibility that women can do more than serve as the ground for patriarchal losses; they can actually compose their own forms of fetishisation, a ‘language’ capable of writing women’s desires into cultural visibility. Kelly draws upon the visual language of the hieroglyph to represent this fetishisation. And with elegant hieroglyphic forms, Post-Partum Document touches upon the legacies of British colonial history and its manifestations as metropolitan racism in the London of the 1970s. As Kelly demonstrates, this structural racism was consolidated through the naturalisation of maternal femininity that Post-Partum Document puts into question.