Taste My Sorrow

Abstract

For many years there has been intense feminist discussion surrounding western discomfort with pregnant and maternal embodiment. Thinking through the complexities of the pregnant subject as a site for interrogating the ethics and aesthetics of disaster, monstrosity and horror, theorists have celebrated how the unstable spatiality and temporality of pregnant embodiment exceeds regulatory and social norms. Arguing against this tendency for abjection, others have deliberately approach the specificity of maternal subjectivity from a position that engages with the generative, surprising and unexpected in order to counteract a discourse they believe is mired in loss, murder and melancholy. However, despite both these positions' proclaimed interest in embodied specificity, very little consideration is given to articulating the phenomenological differences between the pregnant body and the maternal body. More often than not, the pregnant body and the maternal body are seen as interchangeable terms, revealing a narrative that conflates one ontological being with another.Starting from the premise that there is a distinct difference between pregnant and maternal bodies, this article investigates the affective quandary faced when pregnant and maternal norms are ruptured due to pregnancy loss. Performing the catastrophic unspeakableness of my own experience of stillbirth, this paper takes as its subject Taste My Sorrow - my ongoing series of video, performance and sugar-based works that materially folds and refolds grief, anger, shame, tragedy and horror into sensorially complex forms. Performing a visual and textual elegy for a longed-for dead child, this I sample from my experience stillbirth to ethically and aesthetically explore the catastrophic assemblage of becoming maternal loss.