De niñas, monjas y “malas”. Figuras de la maternidad en el cine argentino del siglo XXI

Abstract

If, over the course of the 20th century, Argentine cinema deployed and upheld an hegemonic narrative of maternity based on an idealized conception which organizes worldviews, works on institutional discourses, and finds its way into everyday life, well into the new millennia, a series of works of fiction and documentaries has effected a change in the ways of portraying mothers, in which the specific aspects of the historical moment become evident. In line with the ideas and the events which make up the current time, since the feminist revolts and the feminist tide which erupted in Argentina in 2015, reorganizing the public scene through the visibilization of political demands about women’s rights to decide over their own bodies, films like Hogar (Maura Delpero, 2019); Niña mama (Andrea Testa, 2019); Alanis (Anahí Berneri, 2017); Mi amiga del parque (Ana Katz, 2015); Mala madre (Amparo Aguilar, 2019); Desmadre, fragmentos de una relación (Sabrina Farji, 2018); Mamá, mamá, mamá (Sol Berruezo Pichon-Rivière, 2020); Las motitos (Inés Barrionuevo y Gabriela Vidal, 2020), among others, create a displacement and challenge the traditional narrative enshrining motherhood as a woman’s only possible fate. At what time and how does the revolt channel itself into creative expression and its various ways of crafting stories, inventing figures, and producing meaning? Through the analysis of some of the aforementioned examples, this works attempts to explain the bidirectional forces stressing the representations beyond the boundaries of the screen to imagine new “places of maternity” (Domínguez 2007) which disrupt the cultural imperative by reinscribing the circulation of desire, other forms of affection, and the festive enjoyment of bodies.