The Routledge Handbook of Motherhood on Screen

by Susan Liddy (Editor), Deirdre Flynn (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781032485720
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	04/25/2025
Series:	Routledge Media and Cultural Studies Handbooks
Pages:	506
Product dimensions:	6.88(w) x 9.69(h) x (d)

About the Author

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).

Table of Contents

Introduction: Susan Liddy, Deirdre Flynn

Section 1: Mothers, daughters and intergenerational relationships

1.     Diary of a chambermaid: Molly Smith Metzler’s 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 can’t 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.     “I’m Not Your Mother. I’m a Drag Queen on a Cross-Country Tour”: Representations of Motherhood and Drag Families in Netflix’s ‘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 ‘Ocean’s 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 Žbanić’s 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 cinema’s battle against collective amnesia             

23.  Blessed be the Fruit: Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale fertility and intensive motherhood                   

24.  “An Image Will Suffice”: Motherhood and Eviction During Spain’s Long Economic Crisis in Amelia Ulman’s 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 Child’s 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 Women’s 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)