Appel à communications : 𝑀𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟ℎ𝑜𝑜𝑑𝑠 𝑜𝑛 𝑆𝑐𝑟𝑒𝑒𝑛 : 𝐺𝑙𝑜𝑏𝑎𝑙 𝑃𝑒𝑟𝑠𝑝𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑠

Loic Bourdeau et Julie Rodgers (Maynooth University) lancent un appel à communications pour leur colloque Motherhoods on Screen : Global Perspectives qui se tiendra de façon hybride le 23 et le 24 septembre 2022. La date de tombée pour soumettre une proposition est le 1er mai 2022. Consultez tous les détails.

Extrait de l’appel :

In La Société des vulnérables. Leçon féministes d’une crise [Vulnerable Society: Feminist Lessons from a Crisis] Najat Vallaud-Belkacem and Sandra Laugier draw lessons from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and note that “in England, mothers are 47% more likely than fathers to have lost their jobs since February 2020”, in Germany, “mothers who continued to bring their babies to daycare so that they could work were called ‘Rabenmutter’ [neglectful mothers],” and that educational tasks prescribed by the French Ministry of Education “were carried out for the larger part by mothers” (2021:17-18). Last year’s MU Motherhood Project dedicated a conference on “Motherhood and Work,” which likewise highlighted the ongoing disparities in care work today. Building on our panel which focused on representations of motherhood and work in films, we now wish to further explore motherhood on screen from a global perspective. Screen should be understood in the broad sense as film, television, social media platforms, streaming platforms, and other forms of moving image media (TikTok, YouTube, for example).

The success of recent films such as The Lost Daughter (2021) and Madres paralelas [Parallel Mothers] (2021), series like Maid (2021), Plan Coeur [The Hook-Up Plan] (2018-22), Motherland (2016-2021) or Mythomaniac (2019-21), and the active presence of mothers on social media and blogs, all demonstrate the potential of motherhood for creative cultural production on screen. In addition to Rodgers’ extensive scholarship on motherhood, including The Truth about (M)Otherhood: Choosing to be Childfree (2021), and Bourdeau’s work on care and subversive models of motherhood in Horrible Mothers: Representation across North America (2019), a number of contributions such as Italian Motherhood on Screen (2017), Media Work, Mothers and Motherhood: Negotiating the International Audiovisual Industry (2021), and Mothers Comrades, and Outcasts in East German Women’s Films (2016) all point to the need to further interrogate and expand the conversations around motherhood. This conference specifically seeks to investigate what the medium of the screen contributes to the topic, particularly in relation to the lesser discussed maternal narratives (as evident in the list below).