Badass Mom Art: Motherhood Untold in My Kind of Crazy

Graphic memoir and feminist mothering theory are at the heart of my research-creation paper “Badass Mom Art: Motherhood Untold in My Kind of Crazy”, which brings feminist mothering theory into conversation with traumatic mothering stories. The research-creation comprises a series of sequential graphic stories from my 2023 memoir My Kind of Crazy and a drawing series, Mothering Myths: (Re)imaginings and (Re)visions. These narratives re-imagine trauma’s impact on my maternal generations and illustrate the feminist shift from the 20th century patriarchal institution of motherhood that creates mothers as powerless and oppressed to 21st century matricentric mothering that empowers mothers through agency, autonomy, authenticity, and authority. Through comic’s conventions of frames, gutters, and the ability to manipulate time, the stories—my grandmother’s, my mother’s, and mine—detail specific traumatic experiences that impact our abilities to mother; they also reveal my perspective on events according to my perceptions and beliefs as an adult creating our stories. These are real stories of mothers unfolding in images and words. The article foregrounds Western patriarchal mothering myths of the ideal mother and the generations of feminist activists and scholars, including Adrienne Rich and Andrea O’Reilly, who have worked to change how society perceives mothers. Feminist poet Adrienne Rich’s seminal text Of Woman Born (1986) differentiates between the idea of motherhood and the concept of mothering; she encourages mothers to be mother outlaws by mothering outside patriarchy’s institution of motherhood’s rules and prescriptions. O’Reilly first questioned why maternity was not understood as a subject position nor theorized as other subject positions regarding the meeting of gendered oppression and resistance in her 2016 text Feminism: Theory, Activism, and Practice. Rich’s and O’Reilly’s proposed mother-centered practice permeates and is key to my art and critical work.