Project description
Exploring ‘abnormal’ motherhood in Spanish movies
In the past, motherhood was depicted as trouble-free and healthy by media. However, in recent years, discussions about controversial topics such as ambivalence towards children, sterility and maternal stress have become more common in various forms of media. The EU-funded MOTHERING project focuses on motherhood as a central topic in gender studies. Despite gaining more attention, many natural maternal experiences are considered ‘unnatural’ in societal discourse: the affected mothers are then portrayed as ill or unfit. MOTHERING will analyse films from the 20th and 21st centuries depicting such ‘abnormal’ or ‘sick’ mother-child relationships in Spain, characterised by sterility, poverty and anxiety, in contrast to ‘normal’ motherhood, which is imagined as fertile, healthy and unproblematic.
Objective
Many depictions of motherhood in 20th-century European media fall under what Susan Maushart described as the mask of motherhood (3). With this expression, she refers to narratives that envision motherhood as healthy and unproblematic. However, since the last decade of the 20th century, this situation has changed, where maternity has become a controversial subject, and discussions over issues such as ambivalence towards the child, sterility, and maternal stress are conspicuous in different media. This is where the planned project, which regards motherhood as a central question in gender studies, picks up. Despite this increased visibility, many maternal experiences do not fall under the category of normal in normative societal discourses, and mothers affected by them are portrayed as ill or unfit. Abnormal motherhood encompasses practices that lie outside ... the limits of a norm previously established by hegemonic thinking; and, vice versa, normality is what remains after establishing the edges of the abnormality (Huertas 26). Taking Spain as the main case of study, I analyze 20th and 21st-century films of mother-child relationships deemed abnormal and sick, characterized by sterility, poverty, and anxiety, in contrast to normal motherhood, imagined as fertile, healthy, and unproblematic.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European FellowshipsCoordinator
1010 Wien
Austria