An Unforgetting Cradling

A Performative Witnessing of a Mother's Return to a Children's Orphanage

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2409301
AutoresJ G Deegan (0000-0002-8036-3607, Mary Immaculate College, autor de correspondencia)
Año2025
Volumen25
Número1
Páginas77-86
Fecha de publicación2025-02-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaCulture Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1532-7086 • E-ISSN: 1552-356X
EditorialSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/15327086241286419
OpenAlexW4403735407
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas22

Once I walked as an accidental autoethnographer through the entrance door of a repurposed children's orphanage. There on the doorstep, I witnessed a former resident in the final moments of a secular pilgrimage of unforgetting and cradling. Unforgetting is understood, in this article, as a metaphor for the thousands of women and children robbed of their truth, agency, and sometimes their future in state and religious-run orphanages. Cradling is understood as a metaphor for a desiring, sensual, performative, and singular/universal reparation. Influenced by phenomenological writings on the buildings we inhabit and those that inhabit us, and embodied, rhythmic, sensory, and experimental qualitative inquiry writing, I challenge the erasure of violence-toleration in official discourses of church and state-run institutions through a performative aesthetic of witnessing, evoking, and inscribing the lost sensations of a denied, difficult, and violent past into the grand narratives of mothers, children, and childhood

Aesthetics · Art · Developmental psychology · Performative utterance · Child Welfare and Adoption · Family Support in Illness · Psychology · Youth Education and Societal Dynamics