‘Poor Piper’

Abstract

“Poor Piper”: Academic Performances and Maternal Interruptions Made Public” features theorized anecdotes from the author’s experience working in academia as a mother. The essay builds and expands on Lisa Baraitser’s notion of interruption as a generative space for maternal subjectivity by exploring two moments in which the academic mother is interrupted by her own maternity suddenly, unexpectedly, and publicly during routine academic performances. In the first anecdote, the author’s sense of self as a professional and competent academic is forcibly interrupted by the needs of her “sick” child. This initially private interruption becomes public when the mother attempts to teach a lecture in her child’s presence, and her maternal subjectivity is thrust upon her child’s act of public interruption. In the second anecdote, the author’s sense of self as a professional and competent academic is forcibly interrupted by a well-meaning colleague publicly calling forth her motherhood during an annual review, forcing the academic into a maternal subjectivity even in the absence of her child, raising the specter of both professional and maternal failure.