In this article, the author revisits an interview with Ava Montalvo—a mother of two living in Albuquerque, New Mexico— which initially confounded her interpretive resources. This reflexive, performative article examines the role of excess as an analytical lens through which to understand maternal subjectivity and elaborates the methodological implications of this lens for interviewing methods and qualitative fieldwork. The author employs performative writing to exemplify that which exceeds accepted boundaries and normative scholarly representation.
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