Skin in the Game: Mothering and Bodies

Pregnant bodies change. Fact. But what is the true physical cost of pregnancy and birth? How does a changing body impact sex, desire and emotions? And why does society hold such rigid expectations on pregnant people and parents to look a certain way?

April Hélène-Horton, also known as The Bodzilla, advocates for body acceptance and fat positivity. Lefa Singleton Norton is a writer and producer who recently wrote about her experience parenting with a disability in We’ve Got This: Stories by Disabled Parents. Frankie van Kan is a writer, performance artist, sex worker and parent.

For this M/Other event, they come together to discuss navigating changing bodies, desire, stereotypes around fatness and motherhood, and the realities of parenting with a chronic illness in a wide-ranging conversation hosted by poet, performer and advocate Eleanor Jackson.

Please note Vanessa Muradian is no longer appearing in this event.

Conversations in M/OTHER may include references to topics such as mental health, reproductive rights, and childbirth. If you need assistance with any of these issues, you can learn more and seek advice via the Centre of Perinatal Excellence (COPE), Perintal Anxiety & Depression Australia (PANDA) and Beyond Blue.

The official bookseller for M/OTHER is Neighbourhood Books.

M/OTHER is a weekend of fearless conversation about the ways ‘motherhood’ is experienced, portrayed and labelled by those who mother, have been mothered, wish they were mothers, do not identify as mothers, cannot or do not want to mother, and by society at-large.