Displaying Motherhood: Representations, Visual Methods and the Materiality of Maternal Practice

Abstract

In her 2007 paper ‘Displaying Families’ Janet Finch argues for the need to develop Morgan’s notion of family practices to include an awareness of the ways in which families must engage in display in order to negotiate the distanciation of the family over time and space, and the recognition of the validity of these practices. For the family to have ‘social reality’, to be recognised as a family (20 07: 74), she argues, it may be necessary to perform specific practices and to have these acknowledged. Although the gaining of recognition may be felt most acutely by families who are in some ways marginalised, the demand to display family practices is common to all families, although the intensity of such practices may vary over time. Although Finch employs the term ‘display’ she does not intend to focus simply on embodied or visual practices, but includes family narratives and naming practices in her definition of the tools of display. However, her account does not engage explicitly with the wider landscape of cultural and visual representations of the family. For Finch the concept of ‘display’ is used to encourage us to think about the audience, reception and recognition of family practices, consistent with the sociological framing of stories outlined by Plummer (1995), which not only includes the conditions for a story to be articulated, but also the existence of an audience and their willingness to hear and recognise a story.