Speculative Care in Mary Jo Bang’s <i>Elegy</i>: Reclaiming Motherhood through Feminist Poetry

Abstract This essay explores the ways in which Mary Jo Bang’s Elegy (2005) and, by extension, similar contemporary elegies by women engage with forms of feminist speculative care that go beyond physical aliveness and are thus disruptive of paternalistic and recovery-focused practices of grieving. Using the insights of material feminisms (Katherine Behar and Sara Ahmed), affect theory (Alex Houen), and the ethics of care (María Puig de la Bellacasa), the essay delves into the collection’s reclaiming of motherhood through its conspicuous rekindling of the corporeal and the material.