Rites of Passage: Maternal Symbolism and Mónica Mayer’s “Performative Pedagogy”
Thursday, February 13, 2020: 10:30 AM
Marquette Room (Hilton Chicago)
The artist Mónica Mayer has utilized pedagogical strategies to creatively disrupt and performatively reconstruct patriarchal expectations of women’s identities in Mexican society since the late 1970s. The formation of her feminist artistic consciousness began while she was a student at the Academy of San Carlos. Here she confronted institutionalized sexism in the form of exclusion from social spaces, vandalism of her works, and critiques from fellow students. In particular, male artist colleagues argued women were biologically inferior as artists due to the fact that “motherhood took up all of [their] creativity.”[1] These experiences motivated Mayer to seek out feminist institutional spaces, as well as form her own educational projects in Mexico throughout her career. This paper explores the relationship between Mayer’s feminist reclamation of the maternal in her artistic practice during the 1980s and the development of what she calls her “performative pedagogy.” Tracing key works alongside the strategic deployment of the maternal in the history of women’s education in Mexico, I highlight the ways in which Mayer transforms patriarchally-defined rites of passage linked to the maternal into tools of feminist instruction. I argue Mayer’s work locates symbolic performative and pedagogical qualities of the maternal, and in doing so creates spaces for collectively unlearning expectations of gender identities in order collaboratively recreate them for the future.