An Unforgetting Cradling: A Performative Witnessing of a Mother's Return to a Children's Orphanage
Dados Bibliográficos
AUTOR(ES) | |
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AFILIAÇÃO(ÕES) | Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, Ireland |
ANO | 2025 |
TIPO | Artigo |
PERIÓDICO | Cultural Studies - Critical Methodologies |
ISSN | 1532-7086 |
E-ISSN | 1552-356X |
DOI | 10.1177/15327086241286419 |
ADICIONADO EM | 2025-08-18 |
Resumo
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.