![]() ![]() Krauss’s response to this slideshow, as remembered by Nelson, was that Gallop’s ‘maternity had rotted her mind… contaminating serious academic space with her pudgy body and unresolved, self-involved thinking.’ A.L. To make a point about the objectified status of the mother in Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (1980), Gallop discussed photographs of herself naked in the bathtub with her baby son. Nelson recalls a seminar she once attended featuring feminist theorist Jane Gallop and art historian Rosalind Krauss. And a friend reacts to a personalized mug in her cupboard featuring a pregnant Nelson with her stepson and her partner, artist Harry Dodge (who identifies as neither male nor female), dressed up to see the Nutcracker: ‘ I’ve never seen anything so heteronormative in all my life.’ These are not only snapshots of Nelson’s life: they are negatives of a cultural binary that places mothering on the side of normativity, cordoning it off from the rigors of intellectualism, even in supposedly radical feminist and queer circles. ![]() Returning to work after the birth of her son, a colleague reassures her that, eventually, she will get back to writing. At a speaking engagement for her previous book, The Art of Cruelty (2011), a well-known playwright asks Nelson how, ‘in her condition’, she was able to deal with the book’s dark content. ![]()
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