The Nightdress I Wore to Give Birth In

Abstract

A pale blue cotton nightdress from Mothercare; I don’t remember buying it, but I must have done. Strange that I should have thought it necessary to buy a maternity nightdress to give birth in when nudity or a large t-shirt would have sufficed. My mother tells me that when she gave birth to me, she was left to labour alone with only an occasional check up from a young male doctor wearing a hand knitted Aran jumper. During the course of her labour, she pulled at this young doctor’s jumper until it began to unravel.What ties these two stories is the role of materiality as the stuff of the performativity of childbirth. Together they tell of maternal relations consolidated through materiality, of intersubjective experience and memory materialized. Both the physical experience of birthing and the emotional memory of the performance of giving birth have an ambivalent and ambiguous relationship to death, horror, haunting and the uncanny.This essay looks at four artworks that position the nightdress as a performative object resonant with maternal relations, intersubjective experience and the uncanny. Cornelia Parker’s Blue Shift; Louise Bourgeois’ Cell VII; Megan Wynne’s Untitled (postpartum nightgown); and my own The Nightdress I Wore to Give Birth In.This essay draws on recent writing around feminism and new materialisms. Maurizia Boscagli positions clothing as the material signifier of femininity, the choosing of clothes as a potentially radical act of non-conformity. Jessica Benjamin positions maternal intersubjectivities as the active engagement of identification and recognition, in and through relationships to other subjects. Alexandra Kokoli explores through an analysis of feminist artwork, the uncanny as the ambivalent space through which feminism engages with psychoanalysis. Barbara Creed challenges the notion of the female body as terrifying disrupting the understanding of woman as victim within the genre of horror.