Flying with the Bone Mothers: The Curious Case of the Girl with a Bird in her Mouth

This chapter has been created through a collaborative writing exercise in which we experimented with a method of call-and-response exploring ideas to do with motherhood, raising girls, and biopolitical symbiosis. We engage with fabulation as a strategy to decentre the idea of human exceptionalism. Reimagining the Finch Girl story, we challenge ways of thinking that come from an anthropocentric world view, and instead open out to the possibility of multiple parallel modes of existence of which the finch is an example of. We do this to not only recognise our ignorance of different ways of inhabiting and perceiving the world, but also to acknowledge that human-centric knowledge enfolds dangerous and problematic ‘givens’ which are ingrained in the narratives that have shaped us: the patriarchal, the progress-oriented, the linear, the heteronormative, the hierarchical, the racial, the white, the colonial.

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