Excremental Subjectivity: Presence, Absence, and Feces in Mary Kelly's Post-Partum Document

Abstract

A series of six “documents” that include a child’s clothing, scribblings, utterances, and shit-stained diapers, Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1972-1979) has long been considered an exemplary work about motherhood. The documentary and psychoanalytic process by which Kelly explores the changing nature of a mother’s relationship to her child varies between the objective and subjective. This article explores Documentation I: Analysed Faecal Stains and Feeding Charts of the Post-Partum Document—a section in which Kelly documents the weaning process by recording the foods introduced and the nature of the child’s bowel movements. Through close analysis, and in relation to psychoanalytic and childrearing literature, this article argues that these stained diaper liners act as indices of the child’s presence and absence, thus becoming what Jacques Lacan would term, an objet petit a for the mother. Close examination of these liners reveals the slippage between what is present, implied, and absent. Through Documentation I, Kelly provides evidence for the ambiguous and amorphous process of weaning, thus exposing maternal anxieties.