Of Women and Children : Bad Mothers as Rough Heroes

Though framed within the context of contemporary crime fiction, my work here considers the representation of femininity and maternity in the way these notions are inflected, today, in a genre that is still felt as mostly male in terms of both authors & readers. My position is that we are currently witnessing the birth of a new kind of female character, mostly defined a problematized reconfiguration of the relationship woman/lover & mother/child. This new profile seems to propose a more complex and certainly disturbing vision of femininity and most of all maternity and is meant to describe a process in which women can no longer be seen as “docile bodies” (Foucault) in that they react to the description Judith Butler provides of traditional femininity (maternity included) and they refuse performing established gender norms in the extremely repetitive way that is expected from them. And yet, tough rough they may be, these profiles are felt as a realistic inflection of the social role assigned to women and of the oppression implied in it. The notion of motherhood proposed in We need to talk about Kevin (both the novel & the filmic adaptation) and the TV series The Killing, for example, while keeping the interpretation of the female body as “pliable flesh”, a “surface for inscription”, also collects the heritage of Medea’s myth and enters the ambiguous realm of the interactions between the need and right of each human being to decide for his/her body and the so-called moral law, often coinciding with a social law.