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Clemence, Jason T.

English

2007

MA

Modern cinema has gone out of its way to provide a certain degree of feminine empowerment. Female characters have transcended the role of "sexualized object to be rescued" to attain subjectivity and agency for themselves; it is no longer strange to see a woman acting violently or independently in a filmic narrative. Such progressive characterizations, however, tend to be problematized when the feminine subject is reimagined as a maternal subject; that is, as pregnant or as a mother. In these instances, there is a trend of violent masculinity directed at the maternal body. In my Lacaniadpsychoanalytic reading, the maternal subject is regarded as an exacerbation of the (non)subjectivity of woman. The fetus functions simultaneously as a symptom of obscene enjoyment and, more importantly, as the objet petit a: the more-than-itself that signifies access to presymbolic jouissance.
This paper will explore violence: potential and realized, as it is directed at the maternal body. Chapter 1 will demonstrate desubjectivization as a willful act of the symbolic order against the pregnant woman through the film Citizen Ruth. Chapter 2 will survey three films in which the presence of pregnancy and motherhood is actively appropriated to normalize the absence of the sexual relationship. Finally, using Palindromes as a point of reference, chapter 3 will acknowledge the possibilities and problems of lending subjectivity and egoism to the objet petit a, the fetus. I hope to demonstrate that the irreconcilable nature of the abortion debate informs all of these theoretical readings of the selected texts; that the cultural anxiety produced by such an emotional, heavily-polarized issue is bound to surface in filmic texts, and to project this anxiety onto the maternal subject.