The Queer Maternal Body

While there has been a great deal of theorization of both the queer body and the maternal body, very little has been written about the queer maternal body, a body that produces or mothers a child while refusing to participate in the heteronormative construction of motherhood and maternity. This presentation will be focusing on the work of Sheila (Wilson) ReStack, who has curated, created, and constructed queer maternal bodies through her own work, her collaborative work with her partner/spouse Dani (Leventhal) ReStack, her curated exhibitions such as Repeat Pressure Until (2017) and her zine Mother Mother, an edited publication of mother artists and writers. ReStack’s work questions what it means to be queer in relationship to the institution of motherhood, how motherhood can be reconfigured through the lens of queer spaces and relational aesthetics, and finally, how queer maternity can be represented in a way that refuses to acknowledge heterononomative codes of traditional mothering. This presentation will use ReStack’s work as a foil to question how a queer maternalism might be conceptualized and represented.