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October 9, 2025Open Access

Speculative Care in Mary Jo Bang’s Elegy: Reclaiming Motherhood through Feminist Poetry

Key Points

The essay illustrates how Mary Jo Bang’s Elegy reclaims motherhood, disrupting traditional grieving practices through feminist perspectives.
Through the lens of feminist speculative care, the analysis emphasizes the importance of corporeal and material experiences in mourning.
The insights drawn from material feminisms and affect theory highlight the text's challenge to paternalistic grieving norms.
By focusing on the ethics of care, the analysis expands the discourse on mourning to include non-traditional interpretations of motherhood.

Abstract

Abstract This essay explores the ways in which Mary Jo Bang’s Elegy (2005) and, by extension, similar contemporary elegies by women engage with forms of feminist speculative care that go beyond physical aliveness and are thus disruptive of paternalistic and recovery-focused practices of grieving. Using the insights of material feminisms (Katherine Behar and Sara Ahmed), affect theory (Alex Houen), and the ethics of care (María Puig de la Bellacasa), the essay delves into the collection’s reclaiming of motherhood through its conspicuous rekindling of the corporeal and the material.

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