by Kathryn Phillips
Often when I talk to people about my current art project which focuses on exploring visual representations of the fetishization of motherhood they get tripped up on the word fetish. They think I’m talking about MILFs or people who find pregnant bellies to be extremely sexually alluring. These are part of the sexualization of motherhood, which is merely a facet of the fetishization of motherhood. I’m talking about a much broader subject which encompasses the patriarchal construct of placing utmost importance on the woman’s role as a mother often to the detriment of the individual.
The idea for my art project came to me one day as I was looking at a magazine called Inland Empire. The Inland Empire is an area in Southern California and it’s where Gwen Stefani is originally from. She happened to be the cover model and as I looked over the featured headlines I became annoyed. Gwen Stefani is a powerhouse and someone I’ve looked up to since middle school. To me she was always someone who was so strong, a trendsetter, and crazy talented. If I read an article about her I want to know what she’s doing in music and fashion, what kind of business successes she has, and what other fabulous women she’s rubbing elbows with as they crush it in a male dominated industry. And yet on this cover it would appear that the only thing she was doing with her life was being a mom. Every headline was about her family. The magazine was stripping away almost everything that made Gwen who she was and saying that the only thing about her that is worth reading about is her life as a mom. This really upset me. But then inspiration struck and I had the idea to do a series of art pieces where I digitally place celebrity moms’ faces on classical depictions of the Madonna. The idea being that these magazines are trying to tell women that their role in society has not evolved since Roman times, that our highest purpose is still to procreate and care for children.
It isn’t surprising that something that is viewed as being entirely confined to the cis gendered female experience (somewhat falsely, the only experiences in regards to procreation that are inherently cis female are pregnancy and nursing) would be so heavily obsessed over and idealized in a patriarchal society. As such, what we see in almost every era, including today, is that a woman is not considered to be fully actualized until she has achieved her role as a mother. Because this is not a human truth (men can be fully actualized without being fathers) it creates wistful ideals of motherhood that no woman can live up to.
The fetish looks different in every patriarchal culture but the narrowness of the ideal remains the same. Everything from the the way you give birth, to societal status, to parenting philosophies, are chiseled away and picked apart and put on a pedestal to be admired and achieved.
Meanwhile, in the real world, there are women who are being ignored, marginalized, and shamed because they aren’t part of that ideal. Women who want to be mothers but can’t, women who have no desire to be mothers, women who are mothers but are pursuing their career harder than they are to be the perfect caregiver, and mothers who are struggling in poverty or post partum depression or physical illness or any number of other problems that don’t fit into the quintessential picture of motherhood. These are all women who are made to feel like outsiders and yet often these are the women who need the most support.
This creates other problems that are deeply nuanced and extend to children and teenagers. Because we live in a society that feels that women can’t be completely happy unless they are wives and mothers it creates an imbalanced emphasis on developing attributes that will help them achieve that status as opposed to achieving academic and financial success. Because a woman must be physically attractive to find a mate she is required to spend a great deal of time focusing on creating a thin (but still curvy) body, flawless skin, perfect hair, and amassing clothes and shoes that will help her present her body in an alluring way. She’s also encouraged to develop a personality that will be attractive. She must be sweet, kind, outgoing, submissive, and nurturing. None of these pursuits will help her develop a marketable skill set. This is
highly toxic because when women attempt to achieve such a narrow ideal they are forced to ignore their own individual strengths and weaknesses, often at the expense of their emotional, physical, and mental well being.
My goal is to show how false these ideals are. I want people to look at my art and say that while it’s beautiful, it’s not quite right. Because motherhood is beautiful but it is wrong to believe that women must be mothers in a specific way in order to be successful at it, and it is further incorrect to believe that motherhood is some mystical higher purpose that women must attain in order to live a fulfilling life.
