Bio: Dr. Isadora Petrauskas is a mother, multidisciplinary artist, researcher, and Associate Professor at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University’s School of Cultural Technology in China. Her research centers on embodiment, cultural studies, language, and technology, exploring how these elements shape and inform human experiences. Co-founder of TVNI and Plastico Preto, Petrauskas collaborates globally with artists to examine complex intersections of identity, cultural displacement, and societal transformation. She currently is the director of the MSc Cultural and Creative Industries – Interactive Media pathway, advancing critical engagement with contemporary culture through art and research that challenge conventional narratives and inspire reflective inquiry.
Abstract
This article explores pregnancy as an embodied contradiction, where the maternal body is experienced simultaneously as self and other. A personal account of pregnancy in China is used as a situated example to consider how cultural frameworks, medical institutions, and historical narratives shape maternal experience, often amplifying feelings of estrangement and ambivalence. The discussion examines the tension between dominant discourses that idealize motherhood and the lived realities of bodily expropriation, discomfort, and resistance. Personal narrative is placed in dialogue with historical perspectives and cultural discourses to critique the silences surrounding maternal ambivalence and to expose the inadequacy of available language to convey pregnancy as lived experience. The article argues that attention to these contradictions opens new ways of understanding motherhood as both a cultural construction and an embodied reality.
The Self as Other: Embodied Contradictions in Caring for an Unfamiliar Body
- JourMS - 