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This paper investigates how the 2013 film 12 Years a Slave, through the character of Eliza, makes visible struggles associated with Black motherhood that persist today as interlocking systems and institutions of oppression. Although Eliza occupies the narrative periphery, her experience of sudden loss and grief feels current as modern Black mothers confront sudden familial separation, grief, the disparagement of Black women’s health, and societal forgetting of Black children. While liberalisms would have us embrace the idea that chattel slavery no longer affects modern American society, this article insists that those connections be attended to if we are to understand contemporary challenges to modern-day Black motherhood. Finally, this article asserts that Black motherhood be characterized as one that elevates traditions, such as kinship, nurtures collective families, and moves beyond surviving to thriving to ensure that our children not be forgotten. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rituparno Ghosh is one of the most prolific filmmakers from Bengal, whose narrative depiction gained global critical acclaim in a short career span (1992-2003). Ghosh’s work focuses on human interaction and relationships through the women characters and their identity formation in Bengali society. His 2002 film Titli offers a nuanced exploration of the multifaceted experiences of a mother-daughter relationship, subverting the social representation of motherhood in Bengal. This paper investigates the various dimensions of motherhood, womanhood, and identity formation depicted in the film and interprets how Ghosh’s narrative sheds light on the social, emotional, and cultural aspects of this complex role—a role where mothers are not limited to caregivers and caretakers of domestic life without any identity of their own other than that of a mother, a wife, or a daughter. By analyzing the cultural symbols, dialogue, and visual motifs employed in the film, the paper explores how motherhood is constructed and perceived within the film’s cultural milieu. Reading the film through motherhood and feminist scholarship helps understand the representation of the “sexual mother,” juxtaposing it with the image of an ideal “goddess mother” in Bengal, India, and challenging patriarchal norms imposed on women. It explores the themes of sacrifice, self-identity, and personal agency about motherhood. Examining the conflicts and dilemmas faced by Titli’s mother, Urmila, this paper unravels the complex interplay between the expectations imposed by society and individual desires and aspirations of women, both as mothers and within the dynamics of mother-daughter duos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through an analysis of Chinonye Chukwu’s 2022 film Till, this article explores how Mamie Till-Mobley’s motherhood is cinematically represented. Focusing on director Chinonye Chukwu’s matrifocal lens, it analyzes racialized public motherhood and its painful containment of mothers within the institution of motherhood alongside radical and life-affirming possibilities for mothering in the wake of Black maternal necropolitics. This article looks at how racialized public motherhood allows mothers to continue the work of mothering and affirming their children’s humanity and the value of their lives even when all that remains of them is their dead bodies. It explores the multiple, often difficult strategies Mamie Till-Mobley employed in the fight to lovingly shape the meaning of her son’s life and death that have profoundly changed the course of American history. In this way, I connect this historical example of racialized public motherhood in Mamie’s practice to its contemporary, local, and intersectional implications. This article highlights the long line of Black maternal activists that have followed Mamie, as Black children are still dying from police violence and other forms of anti-Blackness, and closes with reflections on the cost to Black mothers and the tensions around Black women’s subjectivity. It aims to show how continued racial violence in the United States necessarily connects the struggle of mothers across temporalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Volver and Live Flesh present the contradictions inherent in celebrating assertive motherhood through the 'costumbrista' tradition that Almodóvar has adapted and adopted throughout his career. Nostalgic yearning for a 'return' to the mother(land) is filtered in these films through a view of women projected through casting, costume, as well as the segregation of cinematic space. This results in a projection of exteriors as the masculine domain and assigning women largely to interiors, as in melodrama. Howe [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monsters constitute an essential aspect of any society, but their imprinted cultural body causes them to fulfill different roles in different cultures. By remaking a monster from a different culture, the mutated entity will fail to reproduce the same meanings since many symbols will be lost in cultural appropriation and faulty translation. This article analyzes such loss of meaning in the portrayal of one relevant monster in Eastern culture (the onryō) in a Western context of horror movie mania, decoding the underlying gender politics ingrained in the Japanese movie Ringu (1998) and its Hollywood remake The Ring (2002). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary movements against state-sanctioned violence have used rhetorical refrains to mark and practice dissent, as evidenced by the proliferation of "hands up, don't shoot"; "#sayhername"; and "#blacklivesmatter." These refrains provide a specific discourse through which critiques of violence, surveillance, and economic injustice are galvanized, connecting activists and demonstrators across geospatial and temporal landscapes. Political refrains are more than just rallying cries; they also function as edicts, as commands that often disrupt the very practices they name. In this article, I argue that Barry Jenkins's use of the "Don't look at me!" refrain in Moonlight, expressed by Little/Black's mother, Paula, functions to name and obfuscate the racialized and gendered surveillance of Black deviance throughout the film. Set in the midst of the War on Drugs, culture of poverty thesis, and a post-Moynihan Report political culture that blamed the failure of the Black community on the Black matriarch, Moonlight offers an alternative reading strategy that instead of re-pathologizing Black motherhood and queer sociality actually renders visible and mutable the controlling images used to surveil and flatten Black subjectivity. Paula's "Don't look at me!" attempts to render her own body out of sight in order to ask viewers to look beyond her, to shift the pathologizing lens away from her to instead think of the various systems of power operating that inform her choices and epidermalize her body as a problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on American film director Todd Haynes. Topics discussed include his three films "Far From Heaven", "Mildred Pierce" and "Carol"; Stanley Cavell's film ethics and philosophical argument; and suburban confinement in Far From Heaven and inevitable conflict of one of character of 'Mildred Pierce' with her daughter. Also mentions about loneliness, motherhood and friendship in films.

This article analyzes Beatriz Flores Silva's En la Puta Vida (2001), one of the most acclaimed Uruguayan films in recent history. While previous critics have viewed this film as a cultural text that only responds to the interests of big global media capital and that reinscribes notions of the heteronormative family, I argue that Flores Silva's film is both a globalized product and a politicized narrative that strategically uses the genre of melodrama to articulate a feminist politics, underscoring the ways in which the economies of transnational motherhood, sex work, and human trafficking mark particular female bodies. Sex work, I suggest, enables the protagonist to engage in the construction of a friendship-based endeavor (communal ownership of a beauty parlor) that itself hints at the work of the self, on the self, and the aesthetic as a mode of alternative sociality. I propose that regardless of obvious reinscriptions, this film presents us with a narrative that asserts sex work as a legitimate form of labor and foregrounds female friendship as a political ideality. En la Puta Vida, I contend, pushes the audience to question and grapple with what constitutes work, the moral, and the "good life." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the 2010 film "Biutiful," directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu and starring Maricel Álvarez, Javier Bardem and Guillermo Estrella. Particular focus is given to the concept of abjection and maternal representation among immigrants. An overview of the story of immigrant childminding is also given.

The article offers information on the themes of motherhood in black motion pictures. It mentions the films like "Get Out" that symbolizes maternity and how it defies the iconography that a horror film usually depicts. Topics include black motherhood on screen, mother-daughter relationship in a film titled "Pariah" and black queer identity in a film titled "Moonlight".

Contemporary crime television in the early twenty-first century demonstrates a fixation with maternal identities relating to professional, working women. Its writers, their protagonists and supporting characters, have become obsessed with maternal ambivalence, specifically, conflicting feelings of love and hate that mothers feel toward their children. Since motherhood is not simply an unquestionable part of female identity, but an institution naturalized through dominant patriarchal structures, the female investigator figure in crime TV is a particularly rich subject in the exploration of maternal ambivalence and how it plays out in crime TV representation of motherhood. Close examination of Broadchurch, Happy Valley, and The Fall, featuring strong maternal (or staunchly non-maternal) figures, demonstrates the professional-domestic conflation in the female investigator figure, using several maternal character tropes (e.g. grieving mother, Mama Bear), to effectively explore, stabilize, and even vilify maternal ambivalence. While certain programs condemn the professional woman as a neglectful mother, others allow for a more nuanced exploration of maternal ambivalence, treating maternal identity as a complex and imposing abstraction. These programs’ exploration of the female investigator suggests what it means to mother in a world where women are expected to juggle and navigate between numerous identities with ease and grace. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Historically, Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) and James Cameron's Aliens (1986) have attracted an exorbitant amount of scholarship focusing on the numerous representations of the maternal body scattered throughout the pair of films. However, the majority of criticism tends to restrict the narrative in each film by structuring it as a binary opposition between Ellen Ripley and the Alien Queen, each seemingly embodying the role of "good" and "bad" mother respectively. In this article, I argue that the relationship between these two maternal figures is not so easily reduced to the strict dichotomy between "good" and monstrous body; in fact, it is one of subjection. The following article incorporates Barbara Creed's scholarship on Scott's Alien to illustrate that the first film in the franchise pays close attention not only to the primordial archaic mother of the pre-Symbolic, but to how the traumatic experience of birth is internalized in the psychic realm. Furthermore, this article explores how this very experience of abjection facilitates a "turning toward" phallic Law in order to assuage the trauma of the originary loss. Using Judith Butler's theory of homosexual melancholy, I argue that the Alien Queen in Cameron's Aliens is not merely a horrifying phallic mother but an Absolute Subject of maternity that Ripley must embody to be recognized within the phallogocentric network of representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a country where the maternal instinct is still considered a conditio sine qua non of being a woman, maternal ambivalence is one of the ultimate taboos. But Italian filmmakers are trying to change that. Four recent Italian films--Lo spazio bianco by Francesca Comencini (2009), Maternity Blues by Fabrizio Cattani (2011), Quando la notte by Cristina Comencini (2011), and Tutto parla di te by Alina Marazzi (2012)--use everything from single motherhood and postpartum depression to infanticide as a lens through which to approach this "unspeakable" topic. This article demonstrates how the archetype of the loving, self-sacrificing mother that lies at the heart of the Italian identity is also the source of its twenty-first-century motherhood crisis and that Italian women's ambivalence about motherhood is paralleled by a national one: a deeply rooted contradiction between private worship and public lack of support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the Jon Lucas and Scott Moore film "Bad Moms." It looks at how the film constructs the characters' non-traditional mother roles as being "bad," the qualities of motherhood, and how it presents the stereotypes and traditional parenting behaviors expressed by "good" mothers as opposed to the parenting methods of "bad" mothers. It notes the influence of male conceptions of mothers' family roles and behaviors in making the mothers "good" or "bad."

A criticism is presented of the American Disney film "Tangled." Particular focus is given to the film's depiction of adoption and motherhood, including in regard to the film's fictional character Rapunzel's realization that she was adopted and the consequential breaking of her adopted mother (and fictional character) Gothel's mirror.

Many female sex workers begin sex work as mothers, or because they are mothers, and others seek childbearing. Motherhood may influence women's livelihoods as sex workers and their subsequent HIV risks. We used qualitative research methods (30 in-depth interviews and three focus group discussions) and employed Connell's theory of Gender and Power to explore the intersections between motherhood, sex work, and HIV-related risk. Participants were adult women who self-reported exchanging sex for money within the past month and worked in entertainment venues in southern Tanzania. Participants had two children on average, and two-thirds had children at home. Women situated their socially stigmatised work within their respectable identities as mothers caring for their children. Being mothers affected sex workers' negotiating power in complex manners, which led to both reported increases in HIV-related risk behaviours (accepting more clients, accepting more money for no condom, anal sex), and decreases in risk behaviours (using condoms, demanding condom use, testing for HIV). Sex workers/mothers were aware of risks at work, but with children to support, their choices were constrained. Future policies and programming should consider sex workers' financial and practical needs as mothers, including those related to their children such as school fees and childcare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A film criticism is presented for the motion picture "Boyhood" directed by Richard Linklater and starring Ethan Hawke. Topics discussed include the filming of the film, which was spread over 12 years, the depiction of Texas in the film, and the various cars used in the film. The film's depictions of motherhood, fatherhood, and sisterhood are also examined.

In this paper the author explores representations of rescue and motherhood in the 2005 film, Born Into Brothels, which won the Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary. Embedded in a colonial history of looking relations, the film embodies white Euro-American fantasies about children in "other" parts of the world. In the film, Indian children are portrayed as innocent, vulnerable, preyed upon for prostitution, and in need of rescue. Indian women, on the other hand--their mothers--are portrayed as impoverished, incompetent, and eager to prostitute their own children. Through its decontextualized portrayal of the sex industry in Calcutta and its cinematic erasure of local efforts to improve the lives of sex workers and their children, Born Into Brothels tells a familiar story that appeals to western notions of rescue. The author asks: Why are the children worth saving, but their mothers are not? And, how are contemporary practices of sex work in Calcutta structured by the postcolonial state and its relationship to other social, political, and economic contexts? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I explore polygamy in Nia Dinata's Indonesian film, Love for Share, and how it can be used as a key signifier to analyze the construction of gendered subjects, identities and relations in the phallocentric discourses of family and nation. In Indonesia, the family structure is inherently patriarchal and hierarchical in nature, one which exhorts wives to stay at home while husbands are seen as breadwinners and whose roles are non-domestic. However, women are doubly marginalized in Indonesia as their subordinate status in the domestic space is reified at the national level through the state ideology of the nation as a "united and inclusive family". Moreover, using the doctrine of Ibuism, or Motherhood, the government encourages women to stay at home and conform to the ideal roles of wife and mother, thereby restricting their rights as citizens. Using Benedict Anderson's theory of the nation as an "imagined political community", I will consider how Love for Share ideologically constructs and imaginatively situates its characters as gendered subjects in the spaces of family and nation through the representations of polygamy, and how the film imagines and expresses female desire, agency and freedom. In this manner, the film both reflects and contributes to the ongoing discursive negotiations and transformations in gender identities and relations occurring within the sociopolitical landscape of contemporary Indonesia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on motherhood and barrenness of Indian women as portrayed in Bengali cinema. It features several films including "Monihara" (The Lost Jewels), "Antarmahal" (Views of the Inner Chamber), and "Devi" (The Goddess) that depict women's obsession to jewels, childless wives, and young women with aged husbands. The author concludes that the society does not change in cosidering childless women dysfunction.

The article examines the representations of motherhood and melodrama in the films "Todo sobre mi madre" and "Volver," both directed by Pedro Almodóvar. The author provides historical information on melodrama and the study of the genre. The author discusses the potential for subversion in Almodóvar's use of melodrama. Almodóvar's dismissal of the working-class father is examined. The article also examines the word and concept of "españolidad" (Spanishness) and how Almodóvar uses it. The portrayal of female friendship in his films is also addressed.

The article presents an analysis on the role and representations of motherhood in the judicial decisions of the criminal justice system. It examines the portrayal of motherhood in the international films "Maria Full of Grace" and "Clean" where drug involvement of women and the disadvantage brought by race and gender are the key aspects. It also looks at the effects of women's care-giving roles in sentencing decisions and on whether or not the issue of motherhood helps women, particularly women of colour, to avoid punishment. According to the author, the movies imply that sentencing decisions in criminal cases considered motherhood as a mitigating factor for their offending behavior where offenders are handled based on their selfless mothering motivations and not on profit or greed.

This article challenges accepted interpretations of Soviet women's history, particularly the notion that the Soviet government engaged in a pro-natalist campaign in the 1930s. It undertakes an examination of the depiction of mothers in Soviet films, arguing that, given the close Party supervision of the film industry, these figures represent the official Soviet view of motherhood. The content of the films reveals that maternity was secondary in importance to labour outside of the home, and that the Soviet Union rejected the kind of pro-natalist campaigns found in the rest of Europe, especially the racially inspired one in Nazi Germany. The article concludes that the 1936 Soviet family legislation, in fact, had no effect on the depiction of mothers on Soviet screens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the cinematic representation of motherhood in Polish post communist cinema focusing on films that tackle childlessness, abortion, and maternal fathers. Most of these films dealt with motherhood as the ultimate purpose of women's existence and their obligation towards their male partner and the society at large. Yet, some films portray men who look after young children, replacing absent mothers, thus regarding them better than mothers. This event bears witness to the downgrading of motherhood in Poland while promoting justification for this process. In Polish cinema, the problems of motherhood are shown in very diverse films, Thus, an array of films also were taken account including melodramas, road movies and thriller, and films which do not fit into any single genre.

The article presents the author's views on the portrayal of mother-monster relationship in the films. "Rosemary's Baby" and "Aliens" are the films which are centrally concerned with motherhood and monsterhood. These films pose the collapse of the utility of the patriarchy's nature-culture binarism, they appear to erect that dualism as locatable. In the movies, the division between nature and culture collapses in the relationship between the mothers and the monsters.