Chapter 8: (M)otherlands of Unruly Therapeutic
(looking for who made this mess)
In honour of Unruly Therapeutic’s first year of life, a panel have been invited to work with and share their response to chapter 8 of Foluke Taylor’s Unruly Therapeutic – Black Feminist Writings and Practices in Living Room. They will each respond to the chapter and its themes and offer a response from the ‘gestures’ left in their bodies and the ‘much more than words’ that this particular chapter evokes. The panel have been invited to respond in their own idiosyncratic way. Foluke has also been invited to make her own response to the chapter, to annotate, extend, be in dialogue with what she wrote then and to speak of what comes now.
(M)otherlands (looking for who made this mess).
What would it mean for us to take the words “mother” and “therapy” and drop them in the ocean? Whisper or sing them into the sea, walk them across a river or—where that is impractical—hum them into a bowl of water? Could we ask water—this early felt experience of mother—about the wounds that we have attributed to her? We watch ripples, listen for resonance, study reflected light. We experiment; read water; hum divination; practice (m)otherwise.
What would it mean to be curious beyond the contribution of a particular mother to my personal grief and psychic trouble and bring into view the context of before and beyond?
Foluke Taylor – Unruly Therapeutic
As a participant, you are also invited to respond to the chapter in writing, via video recording, via image making, via poetry (modality of your choice). Contributions will be shared on this page if you send your response to: trschair@gmail.com
You can purchase the book here: BOOK.
The reading/study list: (a gathering of the writers/thinkers/creators that the panel walk with)
- Maternal Incoherence by Joy James
- Birthing Racial Difference by Gail Lewis
- Mothering not motherhood by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
- Experiments in Radical Hospitality Research Seminar: M. NourbeSe Philip
- Captive Maternal Love: Octavia Butler and Sci-Fi Family Values – Joy James
The Playlist: “books leave certain sounds”, writes Dionne Brand. The panel have been invited to share the music that comes to them in response to this chapter.
About the author: Foluke Taylor therapist*writer, working with an asterisk to signal black feminist modes of creation, space-making, and care. She is interested in facilitating emergence – in the what-is-not-yet-but-is-coming-to-be and the therapeutics that usher it in to being. Foluke is the author of How the Hiding Seek (2018) an experiment with the intermediary agency of creative writing to counter hierarchy, categorical difference, and separation. She is a troubler of borders including, but not limited to, those erected between mind/body, human/ ‘nature’, now/then, and fiction/non-fiction. After spending several years doing some adult growing up in The Gambia, Foluke returned, with her partner and children, to the city of London where she is now based. Unruly Therapeutic: Black Feminist Writings and Practices in Living Room, was published by W.W. Norton in 2023.
About the panel:
To be confirmed:
Dr Gail Lewis : Nydia A. Swaby : Eddie Bruce Jones : Alexis Pauline Gumbs : Robert Downes :
Gail Lewis is Visiting Professor at Yale University and Reader Emerita in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College.
Gail has written, but is trying to become a writer; Gail likes to speak, but is still seeking her tonalities; Gail sometimes feels lonely, inept and scared; but Gail is brought into being in and by the company, care and joy of black/women of colour feminisms and queer knowings and livings.
Some of Gail’s ‘tryings’:
‘Where might we go if we dare’: moving beyond the ‘thick, suffocating fog of whiteness’ in feminism Gail Lewis & Clare Hemmings
Gail’s publications include ‘Race, Gender and Social Welfare: encounters in a postcolonial society’ (2000), Polity Press; ‘Citizenship: personal lives and social policy’ (2004), ed. Polity Press; ‘Birthing Racial Difference: conversations with my mother and others’ (2009) Studies in the Maternal; ‘Unsafe Travel: experiencing intersectionality and feminist displacements’ (2013) Signs: journal of women in culture and society; ‘Where Might I Find You’: Popular Music and the Internal Space of the Father’, (2012) Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society; ‘Questions of Presence’, (2017) Feminist Review, Issue 117; Once More With My Sistren: Black Feminism and the Challenge of Object Use. (2020) Feminist Review. Gail believes that open and honest conversations across differences, including intergenerational conversations, are the pressing issues of this moment of hate-filled crisis.
Venue: on line
Date: to be confirmed.
Check times in your time zone : time zone
- Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines Edited: Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams • ↩︎
- Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return • ↩︎
The Relational School 