Helen Charman in Conversation
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Helen Charman will be joining us at Juno Books to discuss her new non-fiction book, Mother State, setting out a radical case for motherhood as a political state, and what liberated motherhood could be.
When we talk about motherhood and politics together, we usually talk aboutisolated moments - the policing of breastfeeding, or the cost of childcare. Butthis is not enough: we need to understand motherhood itself as an inherentlypolitical state, one that poses a serious challenge to the status quo.In Mother State, Helen Charman uses this provocative insight to write a newhistory of Britain and Northern Ireland. Beginning with Women's Liberation andending with austerity, the book follows mothers' fights for an alternative future.Alongside the mother figures that loom large in British culture, from MargaretThatcher to Kat Slater, we meet communities of lesbian squatters, anti-nuclearcampaigners, the wives of striking miners and teenage mothers protestinghousing cuts: groups who believed that if you want to nourish your children, youhave to nourish the world around them too.Here we see a world where motherhood is not a restrictive identity but a state ofpossibility. 'Mother' ceases to be an individual responsibility, and becomes anexpansive collective term to organize under, for people of any gender, with orwithout children of their own. It begins with an understanding: that to mother is apolitical act.
Helen Charman is a Fellow and Assistant College Lecturer in English at ClareCollege, University of Cambridge. Her critical writing has been published in theGuardian, The White Review, Another Gaze, and The Stinging Fly amongothers. As a poet, Charman was shortlisted for the White Review Poet's Prize in2017 and for the 2019 Ivan Juritz Prize for Creative Experiment, and haspublished four poetry pamphlets, most recently In the Pleasure Dairy. Charmanvolunteers as a birth companion in Glasgow.
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