Joanna Kellond
About this Event
In her book of 2011, Confronting Postmaternal Thinking, Julie Stephens suggests that contemporary societies in the global north are decidedly ‘postmaternal.’ By this she means that they are characterised by a “widespread cultural unease, if not hostility, towards certain expressions of the maternal and maternalist political perspectives in general” (2011, ix). This talk will unpack various understandings of the term ‘postmaternal,’ both positive and negative, and consider the contribution that psychoanalytic accounts of subjective development can make to theorising the postmaternal as a utopian horizon, where practices of mothering circulate beyond, and contrary to, the nuclear family.
Joanna Kellond is Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Brighton, where she leads the BA (Hons) Politics, Sexuality and Gender. She is also a Founding Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Association. Her scholarly work is located at the intersection between psychoanalytic theory and practice and socialist-feminism. Her monograph, Donald Winnicott and the Politics of Care, was published in the Palgrave Macmillan series, Studies in the Psychosocial, in 2022.
Event Venue
Online