Abstract
Tully (Jason Reitman, 2018) focuses on an exhausted mother of three, her husband, and the “night nanny” she employs to help with her newborn baby. The film exposes several of the failures of heterosexuality, specifically traditional and stereotypical gender roles in the nuclear family—indeed the husband is frequently present in the narrative because of conversations about his lack of presence when he opts out of family life to play video games or take business trips—while the mother handles what is presented as a monotony of child-rearing and chores. The failure of their heteronormative life is further illuminated when juxtaposed with the suburban mother’s queer relationship with the nanny in the present and her wild, lesbian past in NYC. I employ a range of queer theory to analyse the labour of femininity—the protagonist mother with no time to spend on herself is very unlike the glamorous star persona of Charlize Theron who plays her—the labour of childcare, both unpaid mothering and paid nannying, and the illness that occurs in the film because of the toll of such labour.
For Marin, my greatest love and joy.
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Notes
- 1.
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3: 6–18.
- 2.
bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectator,” in The Feminism and Visual Cultural Reader, ed., Amelia Jones (New York: Routledge, 1992), 94–105.
- 3.
Simone de Beauvour, The Second Sex (London: Vintage 1949/1997).
- 4.
White has been capitalised throughout this chapter in accordance with the Style Guidelines this collection adheres to. For more information about this please see the introduction to this collection, where the editors expand on this stylistic decision.
- 5.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 24.
- 6.
Butler Gender Trouble, 34.
- 7.
Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993), 234.
- 8.
Angela McRobbie, “Top Girls? Young Women and the Post-feminist Sexual Contract,” in Cultural Studies 21, no. 4 (2007): 37.
- 9.
Beverley Skeggs, “The Making of Class and Gender through Visualising Moral Subject Formation,” in Sociology 39 (2005): 965.
- 10.
McRobbie, Top Girls?, 124.
- 11.
McRobbie, Top Girls?
- 12.
Leanne Dawson, “Introduction,” in Queering German Culture, ed. Dawson. Camden House (New York: Boydell and Brewer, 2018), 1–18.
- 13.
Lisa Duggan, “The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism,” in Materializing Democracy: Towards a Revitalized Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).
- 14.
Jo Littler, “The Rise of the ‘Yummy Mummy’: Popular Conservatism and the Neoliberal Maternal in Popular British Culture,” Communications, Culture and Critique, 6 (2013): 227–43.
- 15.
McRobbie, Top Girls?, 142.
- 16.
Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: NYU Press, 2005).
- 17.
Leanne Dawson, “Beyond Boxticking and Buzzwords: A queer, anti-racist, anti-ableist sharing in UK academia,” in The Queer Precariat In and Out of Higher Education, ed., Matt Brim, Yvette Taylor and Chunjeet Mahn (London: Zed Books, 2023).
- 18.
Jackie Stacey, “Desperately Seeking Difference,” Screen 28, no. 1 (1987): 48–61; Terasa De Lauretis, The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1994.
- 19.
Katrin Sieg, “Sexual Desire and Social Transformation in Aimée & Jaguar,” Signs. Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 1 (2002): 312.
- 20.
Leanne Dawson, “The Ghostly Queer Migrant: Queering Time, Place, and Family in Contemporary German Cinema,” in Queering the Migrant in Contemporary European Cinema, edited by James S. Williams, 33–46. New York: Routledge, 2020.
- 21.
Thomas Elseasser, The Mind-Game Film: Distributed Agency, Time Travel, and Productive Pathology (London and New York: Routledge, 2021).
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Dawson, L. (2024). The Maternal Gaze: The Labour of Mothering in Tully. In: Tomsett, E., Weidhase, N., Wilde, P. (eds) Working Women on Screen. Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49576-2_11
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