Maman, Misogyny & Modern Art

Towering at over thirty feet, Maman remains a monument to contradiction: an object of awe that is at once nurturing and menacing, fragile in appearance yet materially indestructible. Cast in bronze and boasting a large sac of eggs, its skeletal limbs extend like gothic arches, forming an ambiguous sanctuary beneath their reach. Bourgeois’s choice of the spider as a maternal symbol was deeply personal: her mother, a tapestry restorer, was patient, meticulous, and protective - qualities the artist saw reflected in the spider’s silent labour and tenacity. But the spider is no benign archetype. Across cultures, it is both a creator and a predator. In Maman, these binaries are held in tension, where care, control and motherhood exist as both strength and sacrifice.

When the sculpture was first installed in the Turbine Hall in 2000, its massive presence redefined the space, injecting a domestic metaphor into a cathedral of industry. It challenged the masculine codes of monumental sculpture with an unsettling maternal iconography rarely afforded such scale. Today, in 2025, Maman returns to a cultural moment preoccupied with the economics of care: a time of increasingly toxic online male personalities and intensified polarity over reproductive autonomy. What once felt like a poetic personal tribute now reverberates as political metaphor. The spider's sheltering form becomes symbolic of the invisible structures that both support and constrain women’s lives.

Moreover, Maman’s endurance as an image of maternal power invites comparison with other feminist reimaginings of motherhood, from Mary Kelly’s conceptual explorations of domestic life to Tracey Emin’s frank confessions of maternal loss and longing. Bourgeois offers neither sentimentality nor judgment, but an ambivalent monument: one that honours care without romanticising it. The sculpture’s monumental scale forces viewers to look up - literally - to a mother figure whose strength is formidable but not always comforting.

Since Maman first unfurled its legs across the Turbine Hall in 2000, the landscape of women’s rights in Britain has shifted in notable yet uneven ways. In the early 2000s, the drive for gender parity gathered momentum: campaigns for equal pay transparency began to reshape corporate policy, and legislation such as the Equality Act 2010 established frameworks for combating workplace discrimination. Political representation, too, has improved: by the end of 2024, women accounted for 40% of MPs, a significant increase from levels below 10% prior to 1997. Yet progress remains complicated. The gender pay gap endures, particularly for women of colour; the “motherhood penalty” continues to see women penalised professionally and financially for having children; and the UK faces an alarming persistence of gender-based violence, with systemic failures in policing and support services.

More troubling still is the parallel rise in male-perpetrated violence and digital misogyny. The internet has become a fertile ground for radicalised male resentment, and social media platforms have amplified the reach of so-called “manosphere” influencers who trade in misogyny disguised as empowerment. From incel forums to mainstream influencers peddling anti-feminist rhetoric, these spaces have fostered an aggressive culture that targets women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and young girls. In this increasingly hostile environment, art’s ability to visualise, process, and resist these threats becomes ever more urgent.

In this context, Bourgeois’s insistence on contradiction, fluidity, and ambiguity resonates powerfully with a generation of artists responding to contemporary feminist struggles. Her work rarely declared itself “feminist” in a direct political sense, and yet it constantly centred the embodied experience of women. Created largely in the 1990s and early 2000s, her Cells series are deeply personal, dioramic structures filled with symbolic and often unsettling objects: rusting doors, sheer curtains, skeletal beds, and organic forms echoing breasts, wounds, and phantoms of childhood memory. Their emotional architecture reaches back to her earlier works like The Destruction of the Father (1974) - a grotesque, theatrical tableau in which a paternal figure is consumed. These installations are emotional blueprints, mapping trauma, care, protection, and the oppressive weight of domestic roles. Bourgeois resisted being labelled a “female artist” or “feminist artist,” preferring instead to explore what she called “pre-gender” emotions: fear, jealousy, abandonment, desire. Nevertheless, her elevation of maternal imagery, her critique of patriarchal archetypes, and her disruption of traditional sculptural form made her a central figure in feminist art history.

In 2025, Maman returns as a charged symbol in a society still negotiating the fault lines of gender, power, and care. Bourgeois’s lifelong preoccupation with fear, resilience, and maternal strength resonates strongly in an era marked by both heightened feminist mobilisation and escalating digital misogyny. In this context, the maternal is no longer a sentimental ideal but a contested, politicised space where issues of labour, identity, and bodily autonomy intersect.

Art, for Bourgeois, was combative, cathartic, and insistently personal. Her legacy endures not through imitation but through the continuation of that ethos: a refusal to smooth over pain, and a commitment to make visible what society too often demands be hidden. Maman, looming once more in the Turbine Hall, offers a reminder that the webs women inhabit are still being spun.