STEVE JOHNSON speaks to DJ and singer/songwriter Mark Radcliffe
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Motherlode
HENRY BELL admires a bold exploration of the material reality and political representations of mothering in Britain
HEROINE: Veteran campaigner Sarah Hipperson, who spent much of the 1980s at the Greenham Common women's peace camp. The site had a continuous women's peace protest from 1981 until the Cruise missiles were removed in 1991. Sarah Hipperson remained an active campaigner and spent most of August 1997 in prison for cutting the fence at Aldermaston
JAMES WALSH takes advantage of an evening of comedy snippets to pick out which clowns will make it in Edinburgh
MAYER WAKEFIELD is swept up by the tale of the south London venue where music forged alliances across race, class and identity
MAYER WAKEFIELD applauds Rosamund Pike’s punchy and tragic portrayal of a multi-tasking mother and high court judge
FIONA O CONNOR recommends an unflinching depiction of child sexual abuse and its aftershocks, set in a working-class Liverpool family
New releases from Paul Weller, Wet Leg, and Dino Saluzzi
Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood
Helen Charman, Allen Lane, £30
IN the 1980s The Sisterhood of Black Single Mothers used the word “motherful” rather than “fatherless” to describe their families. Why describe something by a character it neither has nor lacks?
In her epic political history of motherhood, Mother State, Helen Charman goes further and asks if we can’t understand the world to be “babyful” and use the demands of care to build a universal solidarity rejecting the atomisation that is thrust upon us by both the nuclear family and the neoliberal state.
Charman’s book makes a claim for mothering as a political action, and motherhood as a political state that challenges the narratives of competition and othering that permeate our politics and our world. To mother and to be mothered are, for Charman, potentially universal disrupters of the status quo that can reveal oppressions and combat alienation.
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