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This volume brings together research and artistic practices that challenge dominant narratives around motherhood.

Performing Maternities is a collection of essays, creative work, images, and scripts that emerged out of an online international symposium held at Brighton University in November 2020. Together, the contributors challenge, celebrate, and share the normative, the queer, the transgressive, the joy, and the pain of performing maternity. The book asks key questions about the construction of maternal identities and mythologies in the contemporary world; the ways these affect individuals in different social, economic, and sexual identities; and how—as mothers, writers, artists, parents, and grandparents—we can address and challenge those identities.
 

This edited collection engages with both identity and specific time-limited notions in performance: textual, embodied, visual, and communal.

Each chapter of Socially Engaged Creative Practice focuses on an individual or group’s mode of working and methodological practice of performance across a range of modes, disciplines, and media, from community opera to online queer performance; from anti-racist classroom pedagogy to 1980s cabaret in nightclubs; from community art projects in schools to community writing projects in transport interchanges. The performers, writers, and creators represented here engage and grapple with contemporary performance as a situated practice and as a problem.

The personal perspective of each performer—as directors, librettists, producers, and writers—is explicitly located in a community, and the book offers a series of case studies detailing socially engaged work that aligns with concepts of performance and community.