Personalised script

1. Does "a personalised script" mean "a handwritten text"?

2. Does "working motherhood" mean "being a mother who also has a job outside the house"?

3. Does "inadequate nursery care" mean "the child not being cared enough by his mother who has a job"?

4. Does "her fetishisation of the child" mean "the mother fetishises the child"?

5. What does "in the eyes of the law" mean?

6. Does "its own erosion of phallic empowerment" mean "femininity is eroded by phallic powers" or "the erosion of the phallic powers of femininity "?

Text:

On the slate casts in Documentation VI, the inscriptions of her son’s first attempts at writing are accompanied both by a personalised script possessively documenting his early use of language, which is both joyous celebration of his development and a fearful sign of his separation from the mother, and a formal typewritten text that examines the reality of combining working motherhood with inadequate nursery care and the attendant feelings of guilt. The work presents the contradictory space of desire: on the one hand, the mother as female subject gains pleasure from her fetishisation of the child– she has become a phallic subject in the eyes of the law – but on the other hand, there is an explicit discomfort at the patriarchal conditions and conditioning of that pleasure, as voiced in the final part of the work, which poses the question of desire: ‘What will I do now?’, now that the child is becoming more and more socialised through school and contact with peers and other adults. While motherhood gives the woman an identity which is valorised, it also, as in classic fetishism, carries within itself the seeds of its own erosion of phallic empowerment.