Maternal Secrets: Shame, Silence, and the Materiality of Mothering

This seminar brings together three explorations of what often remains hidden in maternal experiences. Across different registers - sound, sexuality, and technology - the presentations attend to the secrecies, taboos and silences that shape how motherhood is lived and felt. We ask: What happens when these quiet spaces are opened up? How might vulnerability, desire, and material practices become sites of connection rather than isolation?

Drawing broadly on critical posthuman and feminist new materialism, the speakers each explore facets of motherhood that often remain invisible, inviting thinking on how relational theorising can foreground a maternal agency.

The first presentation turns to maternal sexual subjectivity, probing the tensions between desire and dominant ideals of selfless motherhood.

The second examines the breast pump as a material and affective object, revealing how its rhythms and demands reconfigure bodies, intimacies, and care.

The third listens to voice messages from new mothers, tracing how vulnerability moves through sound and becomes contagious in generative ways.

Together, these conversations invite us to think about the ethics and politics of what is kept secret—and what emerges when those secrets begin to be unleashed and reclaimed as central components of maternal subjectivity.

Soft Infrastructures of Maternal Sexuality: Embodiment, Intimacy, and Becoming in the Perinatal Period (Giverny Lewis)

This presentation concentrates on an often hidden and under-researched area of women’s lives: their experience of sexuality, their bodies and intimacy in the perinatal period. Dominant intensive motherhood and postfeminist discourses continue to reinforce a ‘maternal/sexual split’, in which the embodiments of both mother and sexual agent are seemingly incompatible. In addition, pathologising and paternalistic biomedical models of care provide limited definitions of what constitutes ‘healthy’ maternal sexuality and what subjectivities are available to new mothers.

Engaging with feminist new materialist approaches to subjectivity, embodiment and affect, this research expands on understandings of maternal sexuality. Drawing on longitudinal qualitative data with first-time mothers, the presentation explores how the transition to motherhood shapes women’s sexual self-concepts, desires, and performances. It examines the assemblages of human and non-human agents that co-produce and regulate women’s sexual subjectivities, and how women negotiate these within rapidly shifting corporeal and relational terrains. By foregrounding lived experience and tracing the ‘soft infrastructures’ of bodies, routines, and objects that sustain and trouble maternal life, this work reveals the tensions, contradictions, alignments, and pleasures of embodied perinatality.

Giverny returned to study her Sociology PhD at the University of Newcastle at the end of 2023 after several years working as a sex therapist and relationships counsellor in Sydney and Newcastle. Prior to private practice, she worked for a number of State and National organisations related to sexual health and gender, LGBTQI+ health, and sex education with young people. She has been published in Women’s Health, GQ & Cosmo, and has provided expert commentary for Triple J’s ‘The Hook Up’ Program. She has a particular interest in new materialist and posthuman feminism, embodiment, affect and creative research methodologies.

The politics of pumping: Work, care, and the contradictions of maternal labour (Briony Lipton)

This paper explores the breast pump as a cultural artefact and political object through which to interrogate the contradictions of mothering and paid work. Touted as a tool of liberation allowing mothers to return to the workforce while continuing to “give” breastmilk, the breast pump exemplifies the uneasy compromise between care and capital, intimacy and productivity. It enables separation, but at what cost? Tracing the historical emergence of the breast pump from medical device to workplace necessity, I argue that this object encapsulates the broader ambivalences of motherhood; the tension between attachment and individuation, biology and machinery, autonomy and dependency. Rather than dismantling maternal constraints, the breast pump reconfigures them. Transforming lactation into extractable labour, the maternal body becomes a site of mechanical regulation, and care a logistical problem to be solved. Through this object lesson, I argue that matrescence; that complex, often disorienting process of becoming a mother is not only a physiological or emotional shift, but a political awakening—a moment where the logics of neoliberal work and the messy, cyclical rhythms of maternal life collide. Rather than dismissing or valorising the breast pump, this paper invites us to pause at its ambivalence. What does its hum tell us about the temporal and affective dimensions of early motherhood? And what might it mean to reimagine maternal emancipation not through technological adaptation, but through a structural transformation of how we value care.

Dr Briony Lipton is a researcher in the School of Business at UNSW Canberra. Her work examines gender equality bridging multiple sectors, including higher education, the legal profession, the retail sector, and the trucking industry, and often exposes the entanglements of care and labour in contemporary work-life. Briony is the author of Academic Women in Neoliberal Times, and co-author of We Only Talk Feminist Here. Her next monograph Uncounted Hours: Care Ambition and the Temporal Politics of Mothering and Work (forthcoming, Bloomsbury) explores the daily choreography of mothering and professional life, the costs of care, and the affective weight of institutional time.

Vulnerability as contagion: Sounding out hidden emotions of motherhood (Eva Neely)

This presentation explores how vulnerability in early motherhood can open up spaces for connection and shared understanding. Drawing on voice messages from a longitudinal study with mothers in Aotearoa New Zealand during their first weeks after birth, I listen for the small, intimate details—the pauses, breaths, and unfiltered words—that reveal emotions often hidden in dominant stories of motherhood. These sonic traces carry both isolation and care, making audible the textures of maternal experience that are usually kept secret or silent.

Birth often awakens a sense of permeability and dependency, and this openness can feel unsettling. Yet, when shared, vulnerability can become contagious in a generative way—creating possibilities for empathy, solidarity, and collective care. By attuning to these recordings, I ask: What emotions remain less visible in motherhood? How do they move between bodies and voices, refusing neat boundaries between self and other?

Listening, in this sense, is not passive but an ethical practice. It invites us to think about how sound holds and transmits feelings, and how making space for these hidden or silenced emotions can transform our understanding of maternal worlds. This presentation contributes to our discussion on how secrecy and silence shape maternal experience; and how opening them up might create new forms of connection.

Dr Eva Neely is a senior lecturer at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington. Her research explores the intersections of parenthood, place, embodiment, and health. She is particularly interested in creative qualitative methodologies to explore how bodies, things and places actively co-create knowledges, to find alternative ways of knowing and accessing knowledge.