The Routledge Handbook of Motherhood on Screen offers a comprehensive global analysis of the representation of Mothers and Motherhood in contemporary screen industries and online spaces. Over five distinct sections, this handbook examines how the complexities and realities of contemporary motherhood are translated to the screen.
Offering a full scholarly overview of the field, this handbook provides a ground-breaking and important contribution to our understanding of motherhood on screen. The geographical and genre reach of the handbook presents new ways of theorising and reframing current scholarly debate, and gives a wide-ranging and comprehensive contribution to knowledge of on-screen representations. An international team of established scholars and emerging voices provide analysis of representations from around the world, spanning a breadth of genres. The chapters situate transnational screen representations of motherhood in the 21st Century and assess the implications of contemporary representation of motherhood.
Thoroughly challenging and expanding understandings of motherhood and mothers, this handbook will be an essential multi-faceted publication for researchers and students of film, TV, animation, motherhood, gender studies, feminism, ageing studies, anthropology and sociology.
The Routledge Handbook of Motherhood on Screen offers a comprehensive global analysis of the representation of Mothers and Motherhood in contemporary screen industries and online spaces. Over five distinct sections, this handbook examines how the complexities and realities of contemporary motherhood are translated to the screen.
Introduction: Susan Liddy, Deirdre Flynn
Section 1: Mothers, daughters and intergenerational relationships
1. Diary of a chambermaid: Molly Smith Metzlers raw chronicle of
mother-daughter relationships in Maid (2021)
2. Desiring Daughter and Transgressive Mother: The Refashion of Motherhood in
the film Send Me to the Clouds (2019)
3. A Story of Strategic Turkish Motherhoods Within a Patriarchal Structure:
The Case of 2 Girls (2005)
4. Exploring the Complexity of Italian Motherhood on Screen: From
Contestation to Identity Formation
5. I cant leave her: Maternal Gothic/Horror in Hereditary (2018), Relic
(2020), and You Are Not My Mother (2021)
6. You Smell the same as Mum: Representing the Intersection of
(brother/)Sisterhood and Motherhood in Chinese Movie Sister
Section 2: Challenging traditional motherhood: Queer, ageing and
non-traditional motherhoods
7. Im Not Your Mother. Im a Drag Queen on a Cross-Country Tour:
Representations of Motherhood and Drag Families in Netflixs AJ and the
Queen
8. Transgender Mothers and Ikai in Japanese Films
9. Parental Accommodation and Resistance: Mainstreaming Lesbian Motherhood in
The Kids Are All Right (2010) and The Fosters (2013-2018)
10. A Precious Commodity: Motherhood, Surrogacy, and Abortion on Primetime
Television
11. Representations of Later Motherhood in Irish Film: A Bump Along the Way
(2019) and Joyride (2022)
12. Motherhood is a Mental Illness: Hustlers (dir. Lorene Scafaria, 2019)
as maternal melodrama?
13. The Anatomy of Dependence: Other Faces of Motherhood on Japanese
Post-Millennial Screen.
Section 3: Motherhood and Labour
14. Living the Dream, Having a Baby and Making a Film: Pregnant Actors in
Oceans Twelve,and Prevenge
15. Disrupted Mothering: Porn Performers Experiences of the Idealised Sexual
Maternal Dichotomy
16. Muscle mommies and cardio queens: portrayals of 21st-century motherhood
on social media.
17. Mothers-turned-activists in Japanese documentary film. Tokieda Toshie and
the pioneer democratic motherhood.
18. The Mother and the Whore: Working-Class Motherhood in British Cinema
(1959-2021)
19. White Saviourism Meets Maternal Care: Inequity in Call the Midwife (2012-
)
Section 4: Motherhood and Conflict
20. Weapons of War: Mothering in Jasmila banis Grbavica (2006)
21. Meek does not mean weak: Mothers seeking justice and revenge on Indian
screens and streaming content
22. Silent echoes: Grieving Mothers in Lebanese cinemas battle against
collective amnesia
23. Blessed be the Fruit: Hulus The Handmaids Tale fertility and intensive
motherhood
24. An Image Will Suffice: Motherhood and Eviction During Spains Long
Economic Crisis in Amelia Ulmans El Planeta (2021) and Sordid Scandal
25. The Intersection of Male Perspective and Female Performance in the
Romanian New Wave Representation of Motherhood: Maternal Contradictions in
Childs Pose (2013)
Section
5. Good Mom/Bad Mom Narratives
26. Screening Divine Monsters: The Angry Mother in Indian Popular Cinema
27. Failing at Being a Perfect Mama: Portrayals of Womens Labour and Child
Abandonment in Contemporary Japanese Films
28. Uncanny Motherhood in Contemporary Irish Cinema
29. Conflicted Mothers: Single Motherhood in selected Bollywood movies
30. The imperfect (single) mother in La hija de un ladrón (Funes) and Ama
(de Paz Solva)
31. Implosions, fugues, and maternal raptures: chaste bodies and adolescent
bodies in Hogar (2019)
32. Understanding Mothers: Mothers as the extensions of the children in
Israeli youth programs
33. The sex and relationship therapist will see you now:
Peri-menopause, post-natal depression and single motherhood in Sex Education
(2019-2023)
Susan Liddy lectures in the Department of Media and Communication Studies at MIC, Limerick. Her research interests and publications relate primarily to gender and diversity issues in the Irish screen industries; older women on screen and behind the camera; motherhood and caring; and harmful behaviours in the screen industries workplace. She is President of Women in Film and Television International and Chair of Women in Film and Television Ireland. She is a board member of the Writers Guild of Ireland, Raising Films Ireland and the Irish Film Institute. She is the Director of the Catalyst International Film Festival in Limerick - a festival that prioritises films and filmmakers from underrepresented groups.
Deirdre Flynn is Lecturer in 21st-Century Literature at Mary Immaculate College in Limerick and a member of the Young Academy of Ireland at the Royal Irish Academy. She has published widely on contemporary literature, precarity, migration literature and Irish studies. She is the secretary of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literature (IASIL).
