Ep. 13 - Panel 2B - Part 3 - Black Butterfly: Maternal mutation narratives - Ciaran Gorman (MU)

NPPSH Conference

#MeToo and #IBelieveHer vocalised personal traumas within the frame of a global conversation about sexual violence, and a movement to carve out space for the most disenfranchised under capitalist patriarchy. However, not every story of trauma, marginalisation and repression is suitable for a hashtag; there are some stories that society still denies mainstream attention and acceptability because of an unwillingness to engage with the difficult and complex issues they bring to the fore. The surge in writing about the complicated maternal experience in the last decade has not been paralleled by mainstream visual representation precisely because of this fact. The previously unheard voice of the mother continues to go largely unseen. This paper will outline recent developments in French art-house cinema to give this ‘seen’ dynamic to alternative stories of maternal trauma, ambivalence and rebellious transformation. Our Children (2012), 17 Girls (2011) and A Happy Event (2011) explore undersides of the maternity narrative that range from difficult pregnancies, to the weaponisation of pregnancy as a tool to dismantle capitalist patriarchy, to that most taboo of maternal traumas: infanticide. This paper will draw on the work of Rye and Chodorow, and their interrogations of motherhood narratives and stereotypes, to locate these three films within larger myths about mothering as a site of positive transformation and analyse individually their subversion of this trope. Finally, this paper will conclude with an analysis of the place of such visual representations of darker maternity narratives within the larger mainstream conversations about female liberation from patriarchy. Ciara Gorman is currently a candidate for the MA in French at Maynooth University, where she completed her undergraduate degree in French and Law. She intends to pursue a PhD in French in the near future so that she may pursue a third-level teaching career. Her areas of research include the detective novel and women’s writing. The topic of her MA thesis is Louis XIV iconology in the current French presidency.