Carneiro & Ramos 2026

Public Mother: Performance, Care, and Racialized Labor in the Public Sphere

Public Mother is a performance-based research project that investigates how care, motherhood, and emotional labor are publicly enacted, racialized, and unevenly valued in contemporary society. Developed through embodied and auto-ethnographic research methods and presented as a live performance, the project asks a deceptively simple question: what happens when maternal care—often imagined as private, invisible, and feminized—is made public, shared, and witnessed across racial differences?

Funded by the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society (CRRES), Public Mother sits at the intersection of performance studies, race and ethnicity studies, feminist theory, and practice-based research. The project treats performance not only as an artistic outcome but as a research methodology—one that generates knowledge through bodies, proximity, care practices, and audience encounter.

Methodologically, Public Mother was developed through auto-ethnographic and practice-based research, combining personal narrative, embodied inquiry, and collaborative performance-making. The initial research phase culminated in a 20-minute public performance presented on September 18, 2024, at the Lee Norvelle Theatre Center at Indiana University. While this performance marked a key research output, the project is ongoing and continues to evolve through new research questions and transnational dialogue.

Key Research Insights

Care labor is not neutral: it is shaped by race, gender, and power, and is often expected to flow unidirectionally—from racialized bodies toward dominant ones.
Public displays of intimacy and care can interrupt normative scripts around masculinity, motherhood, and racial separation.
Performance creates a space where audiences do not simply observe care but are implicated in its ethics and distribution.
Embodied collaboration across racial differences requires sustained trust, negotiation, and vulnerability—mirroring the labor the project seeks to make visible.
Artistic research can function as a mode of social inquiry, producing insights unavailable through text-based research alone.

Background and Research Context

Across race and feminist scholarship, care is increasingly understood not as a private virtue but as a form of labor that is historically extracted, unevenly distributed, and politically regulated. In the U.S. and across the Americas, this labor has been disproportionately carried by women of color, whose practices of care are often naturalized, expected, or rendered invisible rather than recognized as skilled, relational work. Yet within dominant theatrical and academic traditions alike, performance is rarely treated as a legitimate site of inquiry, and care is frequently relegated to background affect or moral sentiment rather than understood as a structuring force of social life.

Public Mother intervenes on both fronts. The project approaches motherhood not as an identity or role, but as a set of embodied, relational actions—holding, leaning, carrying weight, staying present, and witnessing—shaped by race, power, and historical violence. Drawing from Black feminist thought, decolonial performance practices, and Latin American traditions of embodied storytelling, the work treats performance itself as a research method, using the rehearsal room and the live event as spaces where knowledge is generated through bodily encounter rather than observation alone.

In doing so, Public Mother also challenges conventional modes of spectatorship. Rather than positioning audiences as detached viewers, the performance implicates them in the ethics of care being enacted, asking how witnessing, proximity, and attention redistribute responsibility. Situated in a moment marked by racialized state violence, political fracture, and collective fatigue, the project does not seek resolution. Instead, it treats care as a site of inquiry and friction—where intimacy, power, grief, and accountability collide, and where new ethical questions emerge through shared presence.

Research Methods

This project employs auto-ethnography and practice-based research methods, treating artistic creation as a primary mode of inquiry rather than as illustration of preexisting theory. The research was conducted primarily in a rehearsal room, understood as a laboratory for embodied, relational, and reflective investigation.

Key methodological components included:

Auto-ethnographic inquiry drawing on lived experience, positionality, and embodied history.
Writing and movement-based exercises exploring holding, weight, dependency, protection, and exposure.
Embodied collaboration across racial differences as a research encounter.
A 20-minute performance presented publicly on October 18, 2024, as both research output and dissemination.

Findings and Analysis

One of the project’s central findings is that care becomes politically legible when it is displaced from its expected bodies. In Public Mother, acts of holding, leaning, and mutual support between performers destabilize assumptions about who gives care and who receives it. The research also revealed how public witnessing transforms care into an ethical demand rather than a sentimental gesture. Care becomes legible as labor—unevenly distributed, emotionally costly, and socially regulated.

Importantly, the research process revealed the limits of a single performance event in addressing the structural conditions under examination. While the September 2024 performance made racialized care visible within a U.S. institutional context, it also generated new questions about transnational maternal grief, state violence, and collective mourning.

Implications and Future Directions

The project is now entering a new research phase grounded in dialogue with Black mothers’ feminist movements in Brazil, particularly groups formed by women who have lost their children to state violence and necropolitical systems. This phase expands Public Mother beyond the U.S. context, situating maternal care and grief within global structures of racialized violence. Through listening-based exchange rather than representational appropriation, the project seeks to learn from activist-led knowledge practices that understand motherhood as both political resistance and collective survival.

Meet the Researchers

Dr. Ana Carneiro (Assistant Professor in Playwriting, head of the M.F.A. in Playwriting)

Ana Carneiro’s work focuses on decolonial transcultural expression through performance-making with a feminist diasporic Latine lens. She is a writer, director, and interdisciplinary artist dedicated to creating transformative experiences that build bridges and tear down walls. Besides being a professor at IU Bloomington, she is the founder and artistic director of the Babel Theater Project, where she produces work for lasting social and aesthetic change at the crossroads of languages, cultures, and disciplines. As a scholar, Ana has contributed to Routledge edited volumes focusing on Theatre & Migration, Latine Theater, and Theatre and Racial Justice.

Paulo Ramos (CRRES fellow)

Paulo Ramo’s work is situated within Afrocentric and decolonial thought, strongly drawing from Yorubá philosophy and practice. He is an artist, poet, and lawyer currently pursuing his doctoral degree in the Graduate Program in Social Sciences, concentrating in Gender and Black Studies, at São Paulo’s Catholic University. He is a member of several study groups including the Nucleus for Studies in Urban Research (Nepur), Racism Observatory (Observatório do Racismo), and the Nucleus for Research on Sexuality, Feminism, Gender and Difference, INANNA). He is the creator of Pretaquisador, a stamp of approval for books on race and Black Studies.