Post-Partum Document (PPD) is an archive of objects that represent the pleasures Mary Kelly's maternal figure takes in caring for her child. PPD engages with the psychoanalytic narrative to rewrite the positioning of maternal femininity. The 'Introduction' to PPD consists of four infant vests made of yellow wool. The first chapter of PPD, 'Documentation I: Analyzed Fecal Stains and Feeding Charts,' creates a more complicated relationship to maternal sentiment. PPD reflects and complicates the attention members of the Women's Movement paid to transforming the conditions of women's work and undoing the gendered division of labour. 'Documentation VI' replicates the form and visual appearance of the Rosetta Stone, the famous Egyptian stele inscribed with hieroglyphs, Demotic, and ancient Greek, to memorialise the loss that the child's acquisition of language represents. 'Documentation II' exemplifies Kelly's attention to the work that goes into the child's language acquisition.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, women artists in the United States and Britain began to make texts and images of writing central to their visual compositions. This book explores the feminist stakes of that choice. It analyses how Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero, and Mary Kelly worked with the visual dimensions of language to transform how women are perceived. To illuminate the specific ways in which these artists and writers contribute to the production of a feminist imaginary, Part I charts the correspondences between the artwork of Piper and the writings of Davis. It analyses the artwork she created in the late 1960s and 1970s, when she began using text to create artwork that moves between what Piper identifies as 'the singular reality of the "other."' Davis's writing exposes the fictions animating projections that the black female body is perceived to be a malleable ground upon which fears and fantasies can take visual form. Part II focuses on aggression and traces how its repression plays out across Spero's Codex Artaud and Solanas's SCUM Manifesto. It argues that in Post-Partum Document, texts and pieces of writing become fetish objects that Kelly arranges into visual and linguistic 'poems' that forestall a confrontation with loss. Part III demonstrates that the maternal femininity thought to naturally inhere in woman is also restricted and muffled, quite efficiently repressing the possibility that women could address each other across maternal femininity's contested terrain.