Full Description
First collection of essays on cinematic motherhood.
As celebrities sporting "baby bumps," politicians, Olympic athletes, and talk show guests, mothers are ubiquitous throughout U.S. media and popular culture. Like lightning rods, these high-profile mothers attract accolades and judgments associated with ideals of female sexuality, gender roles, and constructions of contemporary families. Motherhood Misconceived explores this widespread cultural fascination with motherhood through analyses of mothers in contemporary U.S. film, including both mainstream and independent cinematic representations. The contributors draw on a variety of critical approaches to consider the spectacle of pregnancy; mother-daughter relationships; mothers as predators, narcissists, and absent victims; and the ways in which cultural anxieties are displaced and projected onto marginalized mothers in films such as Fargo; Transamerica; Gas, Food, Lodging; Ordinary People; and Scream. Ideal for women's studies or film studies classes, Motherhood Misconceived will help students contextualize current debates about motherhood as they play out in popular and independent film.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Heather Addison, Mary Kate Goodwin-Kelly, and Elaine Roth
I. The Celluloid Stork: Picturing Pregnancy
1. Pregnant Body and/as Smoking Gun: Reviewing the Evidence of Fargo
Mary Kate Goodwin-Kelly
2. Mother's Day: Taking the Mother Out of Motherhood in The Thrill of It All
Tamar Jeffers McDonald
3. Not Exactly According to the Rules: Pregnancy and Motherhood in Sugar & Spice
Madonne M. Miner
II. Constructions of Motherhood: Mothers, Daughters, and Sex
4. Modernizing Mother: The Maternal Figure in Early Hollywood
Heather Addison
5. "Whose Baby Are You?": Mother/Daughter Discourse in the Star Images of Mary Pickford and Joan Crawford
Gaylyn Studlar
6. "You Just Hate Men!": Maternal Sexuality and the Nuclear Family in Gas, Food, Lodging
Elaine Roth
III. Horriffic Mothers and the Mothers of Horror
7. Hollywood's "Moms" and Postwar America
Mike Chopra-Gant
8. Alfred Hitchcock and the Phobic Maternal Body
Mun-Hou Lo
9. Paranoia, Cold Surveillance, and the Maternal Gaze: Reconsidering the "Absent Mother" in Ordinary People
Mark Harper
10. Scream, Popular Culture, and Feminism's Third Wave: "I'm Not My Mother"
Kathleen Rowe Karlyn
IV. Maternal Anxieties of Class, Race, and Gender
11. Great Ladies and Guttersnipes: Class and the Representation of Southern Mothers in Hollywood Films
Aimee Berger
12. "Don't Say Mammy": Camille Billops's Meditations on Black Motherhood
Janet K. Cutler
13. From Dad to Mom: Transgendered Motherhood in Transamerica
Mary M. Dalton
List of Contributors
Index
