 Felly, we're going to carry on with our presentations this afternoon and we're really delighted that Praggy a Agawal is part of this event and brings her perspective as a professor of social inequalities. She's a behavioral and data scientist and the founder of a research think tank investigating gender inequalities. And anyone who has read Praggy's writing and I'm sort of clutching my copy of it here and I think this has been One of the really wonderful things about this event, as well as the sharing of literature and a building bibliography. But also we sometimes carry books around with us as sort of talismanic as well. So I think there's something about that, about where these ideas and where an event has come from. And the ideas contained in this book definitely have been very generative in helping us shape today. So I'm clutching a copy and it's actually this belongs to my colleague, Alice Reed, who is the digital marketing manager at the Paul Mellon Centre. So I also want to just shout out to someone who's not here but who is going to be listening to the recordings and helping us process them and put them online. So this is Alice's copy and but it's also very much I think the title of the event pays homage to your work as well. And again, if you've read the book you'll know that this, the prose in it is searching and sometimes it's searing in its honesty. And I think Progure as well, your work raises for us these complex questions about intersectionality, about gender and about race and how again the politics of gender being a mother, the experiences of access to medical care as a woman as well are very different in different places. And so we're really looking forward to having your perspective about these complex experiences and journeys which are never fixed and actually are constantly unfolding. So please join me in welcoming Progure Agawal to give our presentation. Thank you so much everybody. I use my glasses to read but when I look up I can't see anything so it's not because I'm like ignoring you or anything but so I can't do both things at the same time. But thank you so much. It's been such an honour to be here. Thank you for organising this. This space has been really special. I was just saying how full I feel but also there's a lot of like challenging things and uncomfortable things as well and so you need to process them all over again, again and again, go through the same thing. For a long time I didn't talk about mothering or motherhood because as a professional I felt like this is not something that aligns with my professional life as an academic in STEM domain where I was the first woman lecturer in an engineering department and a single parent for a long time. I had my first child when I was 19 and it was unplanned. For a long time I thought I didn't want a child because I'd only seen a specific notion or model of mothering and motherhood and I didn't think I wanted to be one of those and then I had one and it was a very traumatic pregnancy. I almost died. I was in a kind of an abusive context relationship so that also affected my sense of being an identity so I am very interested in the notion of otherness and othering and the belonging and how we become mothers or not mothers when we are still searching for ourselves and then I also and then I wrote this whole book after not talking about it for a very long time. I don't know, yeah things you do sometimes and then I wrote about also abortion and things I wrote about it in this book and I'm sorry there will be topics here which might be uncomfortable and I hope we can hold the space for everybody but also sometimes we just have to sit with the discomfort as well I think. It's really important. I wrote about abortion, about the fact that it was a right decision but then I went through secondary infertility, number of failed IVF cycles and that that kind of notion of almost being a mother but not a mother and also being a mother already and then that alternative timeline already always existing in your brain I think I thought about that quite a lot and still think about it so I'm really interested in that notion of ambivalence and ambiguity when I know it was a right decision but I still cannot not imagine those alternative realities that could have existed on every year so and then I became a mother again but I didn't birth my children and so I also thought a lot about how do you become a mother without that notion of birthing where so much is assigned to the process of giving birth to become a mother that process and for a long time I worried I wouldn't be able to love them as much as I do now and so I also investigated a lot about the scientific aspects of that maternal brain and what happens in your brain and so I thought about this presentation a lot more than I should have I wondered how I can compress all my thoughts when mothering motherhood emotional labor motherhood penalty art creativity choices fertility in these few minutes so I basically thought about it and didn't do anything I made millions of notes and I started an abandoned presentations a procrastinated but in the end here we are I will bring in some of my research in here read some excerpts from my book motherhood and reflect on art and artists who have responded to the themes that I'm most interested in I will talk about some of the issues that are closest to my heart about the marginalisation and other word in motherhood how we compress some of these conversations in a very polarized bind review we might believe that a discussion of fertility of mothering and motherhood only affects mothers or those considering becoming mothers but as philosopher mario brian argues argues in the politics of reproduction much of our social theories have been focused largely in gender divides and on the male half of the world and a critical theory of reproduction that echoes with everyone who identifies as a woman is solely missing she says that women's reproductive consciousness is culturally transmitted it's a tribute to the indelibility of male stream thought that we should have to make this point the historical isolation of women from each other the whole language of female internality and privacy the exclusion of women from the creation of a political community all of these have obscured the cultural cohesiveness of femininity and the universality of maternal consciousness um so I wanted to start with those early days of mothering the second stint and how making art or any form of creativity was for me an act of resistance I remember people telling me that you can um and you have to understand that it's um it's a really big act of courage bravery and sort of insanity to put up any of my art in a room full of artists here so so just have to just just keep that in mind I remember people telling me that you can forget doing anything once the children are born and adamantly refuse to accept and that anything will change at all so I order a lot of art materials and in any of those pauses and lulls I spread out on a one table in the small room with all my paints pens and sketchbooks and I draw I paint the poppy fields and the rolling hills covered with heather and I paint rickshaw scooters trucks criss-crossing the roads around me I paint images of what I think is home and of my homeland in drawing these images from my recent and past travels painting landscapes that exist in my imagination and in the urban chaos around me I stubbornly hold on to assemblans of my old self I try desperately to carry on with my business my research my consultancy working late and little perhaps this release of oxytocin while curling and unfurling through those scribbles is what my mother's brain needs motherhood is idolized the struggle between the self before motherhood and the unpolished often unrecognized sometimes unimaginable version after becoming one is not something we often see in literature or media Rachel Kass writes in her memoir a life's work that after her daughter's birth her appetite for the world was insatiable omnivorous an expression of longing for some lost pre-maternal self and for the freedom that self had perhaps enjoyed perhaps condoned when one tries to talk about this death of the individual self as one gives birth to a new human being or not or the annihilation of what once was in order to raise a child when is demonized guilt anxiety conflicts between our own desires and society's demands from women and our own internalized conflicts and ambivalences are rarely documented the poet Adrian rich wrote privately in a diary and then went on to publish these words in her much acclaimed of woman born motherhood as experience and institution my children caused me the most exquisite suffering or off which I have any experience it is the suffering of ambivalence the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw edge nerves and blissful gratification sometimes I seem to myself in my feeling towards those tiny guiltless little beings a monster of selfishness and intolerance I want to talk about ambivalence today and while we talk about women artists who are mothers and the impact of this on their creativity I'm really interested in the space between being a mother and not a mother the almost mother the not so much a mother mothering but not a mother all the various nuances and gradients the fuzzy boundaries I want to talk about ambivalence because I see much of Hepworth's work as much about ambivalence in mothering where the mother and child are joined together but I see this tension this push and pull a desire to stand apart but never too far away the theme of maternal ambivalence is also explored by Doris Lessing in much of her work in particular her most famous novel the golden notebook not simply hatred or love maternal ambivalence is about a mother recognizing the breadth of emotions she may feel towards a child and role as mother from adoration to vexation from tenderness to despair I'm a writer and mother and I wrote this book motherhood while intensely mothering during a pandemic I'm a mother all the time and I'm a writer all the time but it is the coexistence of these two things these two states of me that I often find is orienting I sometimes wonder if my mothering supports my creativity and vice versa I know that I've written more than ever since I had the twins six years ago I've written hungrily and ravelinsley while trying to bring forth all the words and sentences that seem to be busting with a sense of urgency I make many notes in my phone tiny fragments of beguiling thoughts persuading me to come back to my desk you have to wait I'll tell them with a smile you will be okay because we will meet again very soon I say to myself and to them and I go back to cooking feeding running around with my children while those fragments sparkle and jostle within myself all the time desperate to not be drowned out in my children's giggles and whales I have to hold on to these thoughts tightly and tenderly lest they disappear in the wind these thoughts are all I have sometimes that remind me that I'm a writer sometimes I want to escape my writing because these fragmentary thoughts are slithering away and I can't grasp at them not make sense of the enigma that my book has become and sometimes I want to escape my mothering because these thoughts are nudging me and all I want to do is to get them down on paper before their sharp edges poke holes in my belief that I can mother and write at the same time both equally well I think the discourse around motherhood and ambivalence is so much about body choice and desires the freedom for our bodies the freedom to own our choices and freedom with our desires not just sexual but also the desire to be our true selves to carve out a shape of motherhood that we want but often we don't have a choice the intersectional aspects of autonomy in terms of the complex and interrelated effects of race class ethnicity on the decision that a woman makes about her body and also the choices that are not offered to her are also not well understood or considered there is still very little published information about the reproductive needs of women of colour any discussion that does occur is also dichotomous based in categories defined as white and non-white devoid of the diversity of different intersecting layers and so individual choices and constraints are never discussed the micro aspects of choice and autonomy ignored and dismissed the experience of motherhood differs across race and class and if we take social economic and historical differences into account we could be more aware of the oppression diversity and inequality amongst women women of colour do not experience motherhood in the same way as white women motherhood for women of colour is wrought with anxiety about racial bias and prejudice towards themselves but also towards their children the anguish the pain the loss the joy how can we smooth out the bands treat all mothering as one faceless homogeneous mask being a mother of colour is a different ball game altogether being a mother to a black son is a different pain altogether right now this is analogous colours titus kafar time magazine protest issue June 15 2020 i posted this on my instagram two years ago now i read the heartbreaking story of Ralph Yael and was reminded of this the image references George Floyd calling out for his mother during his arrest as he was pinned to the ground and held down by the police officer for eight minutes and 46 seconds and this is an excerpt from the piece that kafar wrote alongside in her expression i see the black mothers were unseen and rendered helpless in this fury against their babies as a listlessly wade through another cycle of violence against black people i paint a black mother eyes closed furrowed brow holding the contour of a loss is this what it means for us our black and lost analogous colours in america motherhood while being othered is a wholly different ball game maybe better maybe worse but how does one compare apples with oranges just different but how do often do we talk about the difference same is easy to process the homogeneous amalgamation of experiences into one colourless blob is easier to manage and the bands variations gradations the contours in the maps of mothering are obliterated and smoothed out to the point of eraser for instance i've been doing a lot of research in australian archives and libraries recently colonial governance introduced in the state and territories created rigid systems of segregation that were presented as protection for aboriginal people in western australia the aboriginal aborigines act 1905 removed the legal guardianship of the aboriginal parents it made all their children legal wards of the state so the government did not require parental permission to relocate the mixed race children to institutions in 1915 in new south veils the aborigines protection amending act 1915 gave the aborde the protection board authority to remove aboriginal children without even having to establish in court that they were neglected the state restricted an aboriginal women's choice of marriage and sexual partner and perhaps most notoriously created the anti natalist policies that remove their rights as mothers to raise their children these policies led to the scandal of the stolen generation as you know patriarchal colonial power deemed aborigines as inferior but further regularly relegated aboriginal women to the bottom of the evolutionary ladder below even below aboriginal men it is important to recognise that despite relatively recent reforms many of the controls put in place over a century ago still exist under different framework for example aboriginal and torris straight island and children are still being forcibly removed from their families at a rate of 400 times greater than that of the stolen generation as of june 2018 there were 17644 first nation children in out of home care as a result this is a sketch of turendure who I found about in my research and her daughter she was a guide an interpreter and she was born in the early 1800s her daughter Belendella was born around 1831 this is a story of a mother woman who guided the first airway general thomas mitchell while carrying her daughter on her back she's not mentioned in any official documents nor credited formally for her contribution or the way she was mothering while performing this labor for the colonists I found mentions of her and thomas mitchell's diary in the library archives in Sydney and we don't know what happened to her about after 1836 when she was not accepted back by her people but the expedition didn't need her and she was injured and could not walk her daughter was taken away to live with mitchell who is pleased to help Belendella escape the wretched state of slavery that he believed aboriginal women faced that he persisted in this view even though turendure had just acted relatively independently guiding him around her country and beyond belied his greater wish to take back an aboriginal child with the intention of ascertaining what might be the effect of education upon one of that race. Belendella was brought to Sydney to live with mitchell's family but she was not regarded as a true member of the family when mitchell returned to England with his wife and children in 1837 Belendella was left behind mitchell later described taking her in as an experiment in developing the mental energies of the Australian Aborigines. He proudly reported that she read at a similar level to white children of the same age after he took her in. Rebecca Balmore is an Anishinaabe artist and a member of the first nation in Canada. In a work matriarch Balmore represents the mother of a first nation's teenager who froze to death after being abandoned on the outskirts of Saskatoon. These are the mothers who experienced the starlight tours a practice where native people who are seen to be rowdy were picked up and dropped off in sub freezing temperature by the police left to walk back on their own often just in their t-shirts. Balmore gestures towards the pain of state violence enacted against the Canada's indigenous mothers in particular their motherhood seen as inadequate judged and punished as if they were raising criminals. On January 28 2002 police officer drove Daryl Knight five kilometers outside of Saskatoon and abandoned him in minus 22 degrees Celsius weather with a t-shirt and jean jacket on his back. Ever since Knight's starlight tour his entire family has been living in a reserve outside the city. Although his mother Rosa says Saskatoon is her home she won't return she can't go back motherhood in this community is displacement and being erased push to the margins quite literally motherhood mothering hope optimism in the face of inequalities and injustice choosing to be a mother while being another can be seen as a radical revolutionary act in itself. But while I say this I've also been thinking about Jennifer Nash's word there has been intensified scholarly and popular interest in representing black motherhood as both a site constituted by grief unexpected laws and as a political position made visible only because of its proximity to death. It's certainly the case that a cultural inattention to motherhood has been replaced by an intense investment in representing at least some aspects of the nature and meaning of motherhood and in representing certain mothers particularly black mothers as symbols of trauma and injury of pain that can be mobilized for legitimate political ends and social change. Black women come into focus as political subjects through maternity and through maternal practices that are intimate with loss grief and death. Indeed it's crucial to continue to interrogate why black women's subjectivity is political visible only when it stands for the loss of another. Approximity to dead or dying black usually male bodies. I think it's pronounced Eileen Eileen Bottma an artist from Cape Town knits with nylon stockings stitches with human hair and performs interventional actions with household furniture. In her work the body specifically female and maternal bodies is everywhere signaled but seldom present this and this creates this reflective tension within her work that speaks to how narratives of gendered roles and identities are written into representation. So this work entangled particles is she's swaddled in a heavy blanket and the artist is dealing with the sub summation of her self identity in raising a child and questioning the narratives around a mother figure. What the artist calls her deliberately bad knitting is central here. Bottma also creates a narrative for her work itself encouraging possibilities for the interpretation of creative labour as well. What emerges is this foregrounding of women's ambivalence, the space between the binaries and the interest in oppositions. But what also interests me is the gaze with which motherhood has been represented in artwork, religious icons with sentimental mentality within patriarchal ideals of female roles and how this artwork subverts it but how often do we subvert it. In my book I also talk about the way maternal bodies are represented as seen and also racialized. In the late 20th century the American painter and you I'm sure you've heard or seen her work Alice Neill painted a series of sexualized pregnant nudes and though she did not clearly attribute this as a feminist statement she saw this as a retort to the prevalent male gaze that did not depict pregnancy even though it was a basic life's fact. Annie Leibowitz's image of Demi Moore from the cover of Vanity Fair in 1991 became unintentionally became a symbol of women's empowerment while also mobilizing a highly divisive debate around sexuality and pregnant bodies. That issue of the magazine was so shrink wrapped on news stands much like a porn magazine and a number of news agents changed refused to sell it deeming it unsuitable yet the maternal but erotic image made it the best selling single issue in the magazine's history and made headlines around the globe. This prompted many celebrities to unabashedly photograph the bump rather than hide it and as white motherhood took center stage it also heralded an era of increasing self-regulation and self objectification for pregnant bodies and instagram has added to this glorification of white motherhood over the years and I write about instagram here but we had a conversation about instagram just now and how that affects the whole performance of maternity and motherhood on that as well. The cultural historian Karen Heane says that the visible pregnant body demonstrates that a woman is sexually active and I know Hetty talked about it a little bit yesterday as well and that is hugely problematic when women men wrote about pregnancy portraits they used euphemism the French word for pregnancy and my French is terrible so I'm not going to say it on shant it translates as an enclosure or the enclosing wall of a fortified place so it immediately humanizing the person who's pregnant to be seen only as a vessel as an enclosure for the growing baby and I talk a lot about in my book but also generally about how we idealize motherhood but not mothering in our society. In recent times it has become more common to see pregnant bodies on our screens in our social media squares and timelines. Nevertheless when Beyonce announced a pregnancy with a series of photographs in 2017 symbolically drawing from a range of cultural and historical sources what subliminal references to Botticelli's birth of Venus and reminiscent of renaissance portraits of the Madonna with a blue veil it created a sensation perhaps particularly because it brought into focus how women's bodies have historically been marginalized and violated while also continually objectified. The reappropriation of the image of the Virgin Mary was particularly telling and controversial. The predominant depiction of Mary is that of white superiority of positioning whiteness as pure and divine and as a black woman Beyonce not only posited a sexualized heavily pregnant body but also challenged those cultural norms with what cultural critic and theorist Bell Hooks calls the oppositional gage gaze to see name and question and ultimately transform oppressive racialized images. Research shows that black and brown women experience racialized pregnancy stigma. They reported encountering assumptions that they had low incomes were single and had multiple children hyperfertilities as something that is assigned to black and women brown women as well and had multiple children regardless of socioeconomic status marital status or parity. So this hyperfertilization because it was assumed that black and brown women could give birth very easily in their large families and their lots of children. This is also why the conversation around infertility is so stigmatized but also so much silence around it in black and brown communities. Women encountered racialized pregnancy stigma in every day life healthcare social services and housing related contests making difficult to complete tasks without scrutiny. For many racialized pregnancy stigma was a source of stress and it may contribute to poorer maternal and infant outcomes by way of reduced access to quality healthcare impediments to services resources and social support and poorer psychological health. Black women in the UK are four times more likely to die in pregnancy in childbirth and white women. Asian and mixed-race women are twice as likely. I think mothering is always already characterised by loss, whether that is the collateral loss of former identity in the mother or the unavoidable fear of loss when expecting a child, the physical and emotional loss whether that is through abortion or the inability to conceive and mothered through personal and political circumstances. I've talked about only a very tiny aspect of otherhood and motherhood here from a very cis gender heterosexual perspective which is also a privileged view really. Otherhood and motherhood, the margins of motherhood outside the hegemonic ethnocentric construction comes at the intersection of disability, queerness, gender non-conforming identities, class and so on. It comes in form of mothering but not have birth a child, almost being a mother but not quite, the interrupted motherhood and all the way we are often not one or the other, a mother or a non-mother but somewhere in between. I think it is the issue not only of choice but also the access to choice. These rigid classifications and assignations of who and what a woman is based on appearances and who can give birth, who should be called a mother are all traps that do not consider multiple experiences especially of those who are on the fringes. And this is something I wrote in the book. Is there a colour for motherhood? Is it all pink and blue or is there room for grey? Is there a colour of womanhood? Is it all red, ripe or green so fertile or shades of pink and grey around the edges and brown? Is there a colour of home of belonging? Is it all a shifting parkinge dark when it should be light? I see in colours, in hues, in shades but sometimes there just aren't enough colours, enough names, enough words. Have you been looking at the black and white for so long? Thank you. Thank you so much for that brilliant talk and I think it really is important and we spoke about this in the introduction but to really try and start to describe in betweenness and I was really struck probably by your idea about gradients, about the fuzziness of boundaries, of non-fixity as well, of positions, of being mothers, of not being mothers, of these things not being separate categories in their own safe pigeonholes which can be clearly defined or described so I think again just in thinking about the broader themes and topics and ideas that are coming out of the whole event I think that was thank you for kind of helping articulate that some of that messiness, the chaos of trying to describe that as well so that's just quite a personal response to your talk there but I wanted to ask you as well about maybe some of that boundary crossing that you do in your own work because you're a data scientist by training and working quite a social sciences background and a sort of work within data in empirical ways of number crunching and I'm sure you work with spreadsheets quite a lot but also the kind of the boundary crossing that you do as a writer and as a creative as we've seen there and how you the intersection that or the intersections of that work between the personal, the political and the professional so how do you go about kind of working with that do you find it a productive tension is it something that you are thinking over just I'd be interested to just think about that in a sort of in from your career as well thank you so much that's a really interesting question I think one of the reasons is that I think I'm quite resistant to boxes and labels I think from a very young age I was I was already always trying to dismantle those kind of expectations that people place on me or norms so one of the reasons is that my first degree was actually architecture so I'm really always interested in the intersection between art and science I've always been and I do feel like we keep those disciplinary boundaries very rigid sometimes specially in academia I've noticed that but my work was always interdisciplinary so my phd was like psychology and cognitive science and computer science and and geography and everything kind of intersecting between those and I looked at the notion of different concepts again I'm really interested in challenging concepts that society places so for instance recently I've written a book about hysterical and how the notion of hysterical is imposed on women as well I really find it stimulating working in this way about this cross-disciplinary way because I think that is the only way we should and can really make it a very fertile kind of production either we just do it ourselves or we work in collaboration with other people because sometimes when we sit within those boundaries we can create echo chambers and we don't have like this cross pollination of ideas but I think my brain just works like that that I and so I'm a behavioural and data scientist and I look at behavioural behaviours and psychology and cognitive science and also how behavioural data and data kind of effects a society and how data is represented I love writing about things it's not always pleasant or pleasurable it's a very painful process often as most creatives would know and certainly failure is a big part of it and rejection is a big part of it but I don't know if that answers your question I can ramp it on like my brain does yes interesting and in your book as well you talk about the the landscape of data and how that has privileged and most of the studies have been centred on white women in Europe and North America and I wonder whether is that landscape changing partly as the community of research is changing or is it's are there still you know huge leaps and you know just a tremendous amount of work to don just to start to kind of make different inroads into the evidence that the data is is providing from which then the kind of narrative journey is that your mapping can come you know can produce or can can start to imagine yeah data certainly has privilege and it's a reflection of who is collecting the data um who has resources who what did they consider valid and to be collected so when we look at archives we often find the things that have not been protected or preserved are the ones that the colonialists or colonizers didn't think were valuable enough and so all that knowledge embedded knowledge has been lost and similarly with data um it's a it's a model of the world and it's only very selective so people only select data that they think are representative of the world that they are interested in so yes women's experiences have long been dismissed um and um and I was really when I was writing this book in 2019-20 um when I was kind of putting it together I found that actually the fertility authority in the UK because I'd gone through the whole infertility experience myself and I'd written about how I'd not seen anybody who looked like me on those rooms waiting rooms where I was sitting or anything like that but when I looked at the data they hadn't desegregated the data according to ethnicity so there was no record of how many black and brown women were had been on this journey so I couldn't really find any data of how even the data representation of that and then I was trying to really look at I wanted this book to be the space where um different stories can be of voices who are on the margins can be heard so I was interested in trans experiences and gender non-conforming non-binary and I find that there's hardly any data about them um about these communities who are already marginalized and their voices or their representation is very they're very silenced so um I spoke to as I say in the book I spoke to quite a few but I didn't ultimately include those stories just relying on case research studies or things that are read on the pap newspapers and contemporary stories because I didn't want to speak on anybody's behalf but yes the lack of data is a huge worry because then we don't hear the experiences of these communities and we have other people who are privileged speaking on their behalf you know and what about the response to the book again because often I think a lot of people have spoken about this the process and quite a number of people have said you know I did this work during the pandemic as well that was a space of you know a kind of production where you know you were forced in a way to to do some some projects and leave other ones behind and so in this sort of the isolated circumstances of writing in the pandemic and then releasing these ideas into the world could you describe some of the the response or the reactions that some of those of the that might have surprised you or you weren't expecting um so it's been interesting um I um when I first thought about writing this book as I said I didn't talk about my experiences mothering or motherhood or anything because I think there's a lot of internalized shame and guilt I didn't even talk about infertility to my mum she didn't know I was going through all that I didn't talk with anybody about any experience I've went the early you just think your stories are mundane and you kind of soldier on and you go on and but also there's an internalized shame and I talk a lot about shame now um but at that point I hadn't and so when I thought about writing this book it was because I felt like I hadn't seen this kind of representation much in and at that point so when the book went out of submission in early 2020 actually a lot of publishers said um this or everything's been written about motherhood so I don't think we'll want another way I've already got somebody who's writing one motherhood but that is a completely different person and a white woman whose middle class was writing one motherhood so it couldn't be the same as my story so there was still a box ticking going on about who gets to tell these stories and whose stories are considered valid and and and all those kind of things um since the book came out it's been amazing I've had so many messages of hope and optimism of just being seen and especially women who like women of color especially but also other women who felt like oh it's really some emotional messages left for me voice mails and things which I feel overwhelmed but I don't know what to do with that because it's really and it's really makes me emotional to think that people have felt seen and heard by this book and um how it is resonated with them so it's been really a privilege and an honor