Performing Maternities is a collection of essays, creative work, images and scripts which emerged out of an online international symposium held at Brighton University in November 2020. Collectively, the contributors challenge, celebrate and share the normative, the queer, the transgressive, the joy and the pain of performing maternity. The book asks key questions about the construction of maternal identities and mythologies in the contemporary world, the ways these impact on individuals in different social, economic and sexual identities, and the ways in which – as mothers, writers, artists, parents and grandparents -we can challenge and address those identities.