Becoming 'Mother': An Autoethnographic Study through Paint and Prose

Abstract

The forces at work influencing how I identify with motherhood is the focus of my paintings throughout my child's first year of life. In this autoethnographic visual essay, I analyze my visual depictions of the struggles with which I wrestled. I consider ways in which my personal struggles conform or reject popular notions of motherhood and breastfeeding. I critically look at historical and current visual culture influences that may be at work in my own contradicting images of motherhood, negotiating feminist ideologies with my own experiences as a mother who breastfeeds. Through the lens of social constructionism and feminist new materialism, my images not only reflect what is being experienced, but they also influence how I make meaning of these experiences and my identity in motherhood.