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Join us for a Meet VCU Authors talk with Olivia Landry, Chair of the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies, and author of Cinema of Crushing Motherhood: A New Feminist Cinema.

Twenty-first-century contemporary films like Emily Atef’s Das Fremde in mir and Savannah Leaf’s Earth Mama portray motherhood as a source of regret, exhaustion, rage, shame, guilt, and disgust. Olivia Landry analyzes this new feminist cinema and the ways it embraces and explores the crushing burden of mothering children.

Landry surveys films released in North America, Europe, and Australia over a period beginning in 2007. As she shows, revelation and the expression of negative feelings upend the traditional image of the perfect, self-sacrificial, and happy mother. Landry tracks how radical positions like maternal regret and family abolition have replaced age-old tropes while also going beyond portrayals of maternal ambivalence. Her feminist method casts off psychoanalysis and renounces pathological approaches to motherhood to show how a generation of filmmakers have insisted on the subjective position and experience of the mother rather than that of the child.

Bold and cutting-edge, Cinema of Crushing Motherhood looks at taboo-breaking films and illuminates the emotions and affects that make them so powerful.

About the Speakers

Olivia Landry, Ph.D is an Associate Professor of German and Chair of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. Among other titles, she is the author of A Decolonizing Ear: Documentary Film Disrupts the Archive. Her research broadly spans film and media as well as theater and performance studies in the German and European context. Here is a full list of her publications.