Toggle Main Menu Toggle Search

Open Access padlockePrints

'"Une vraie famille Benetton": Maternal metaphors of nation in Il y a longtemps que je t'aime - a response to Susan Hayward'

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Sarah Leahy

Downloads

Full text for this publication is not currently held within this repository. Alternative links are provided below where available.


Abstract

At the end of her provocative chapter ‘National Cinemas and the Body Politic’ published in Ezra and Harris (eds) France in Focus: Film and National Identity (Berg, 2000), Susan Hayward sets a challenge for the reader to ponder. This challenge is to consider the ways in which cinema enables the sexed female body – straitjacketed by national discourses into an uncomfortable and precarious transvestite masquerade – to emerge in multiple and scattered forms, crossing (transgressing) national, sexual and gender boundaries to threaten the unity of the nation-subject (Hayward 2000a: 112). In this chapter, through an examination of the representation of a range of different maternal relationships that lie at the heart of Il y a longtemps que je t’aime (Claudel, 2008), I attempt to take up this challenge by considering how a reframing of cultural constructions of the maternal body in particular might also pose a challenge to the unified nation-subject, especially if this entails a questioning of the ties that link motherhood and nation.


Publication metadata

Author(s): Leahy S

Editor(s): Higbee, W. and Leahy, S

Publication type: Book Chapter

Publication status: Published

Book Title: Studies in French Cinema: UK Perspectives 1985-2010

Year: 2010

Pages: 153-165

Publisher: Intellect

Place Published: Bristol

Library holdings: Search Newcastle University Library for this item

ISBN: 9781841503233


Share