Marking motherhood : Tattooing and willfulness as a response to and a way to survive child removal

Morriss, Lisa and Beckwith, Siobhan (2025) Marking motherhood : Tattooing and willfulness as a response to and a way to survive child removal. The Sociological Review. ISSN 0038-0261

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Abstract

Our project, Marking Motherhood , explores the significance of tattooing for mothers following state intervention and child removal. Taking a material methods approach to ‘object interviews’, we found that the women curate their own tattoo collections, creating an archive inscribed on their skin. We analysed the interviews using Sara Ahmed’s theoretical work on ‘willing’; specifically, we apply her concepts of willfulness, a willfulness archive and a will sphere. Later, Ahmed’s work on hope and the will as project are brought into dialogue with Tia DeNora’s notion of carrying a dream. By bringing together Ahmed’s and DeNora’s theoretical and conceptual work with extracts from our empirical interviews, we develop the theory through the data. We argue that through their tattooing practices, the women are carrying their children on their bodies, enabling a maternal connection to persist, despite the enforced separation. Tattooing allows the mothers to simultaneously survive the trauma of separation, bear living with unspeakable pain in the everyday, and to will a different kind of future into being, creating possibilities and hope. The article makes an original sociological contribution as it is the first to show the significance of tattooing practices for mothers following state intervention and child removal. Many high-income countries with institutionalised systems of child protection remove children from their mothers in the ways discussed in this article. Hence this distinctive form of loss and the associated maternal strategies to grieve, survive and sustain a connection with their child are a global concern.