Jenn Thảo Nguyễn

One aspect of this week’s course material that really intrigued me was the overt marginalization of motherhood in scholarship and research. Kawash opens up this conversation by illustrating how motherhood has been chronically sequestered from feminist and women’s studies. Nelson supports this critique through personal anecdotes, one of the most striking being the story of Rosalind Krauss’ harsh criticism of Gallop’s work, which aimed to focus on her relationship with her son, as self-indulgent and uncritical. One potential response to this marginalization of motherhood in academia, as suggested by Tolentino, is to take inspiration from the Milan women, who have embraced motherhood as a lens through which to better examine and learn from literary heroines. In this context, motherhood then becomes the tool through which one achieves critical distance, rather than being blamed for its absence. Alice Diop’s film also captures another enlightening reclamation of the othering of mothers, framing it through the concept of “sorcery”. What would typically be deemed an episode of the histrionic mother’s loss of faculties is reclaimed by Laurence Coly through the use of ‘sorcery’ as her power and her alibi. When the subject of such sorcery is mentioned, Diop uses the rhythmic sound design and the disorienting framing of Rama’s experience with her own pregnancy in the courtroom as evidence of the sorcery’s existence. It is in the liminal space of otherness that ‘motherhood’ resides in the film — the space of accountability for her unaccountability. The field of motherhood studies seems to be a hall of mirrors through which one enters and turns away from distortions and intentional twisting of its own reflection. Hormones are used against the mother — her softness, her renunciation of coherence, and all such qualities are reified and chemically engineered for her to be successful at child-rearing. After reading these different texts, Saint Omer seemed to me an interrogation of motherhood studies itself; the discipline is on the stand. Motherhood studies may be isolated because it is nebulous and nebulous because it is intrinsically personal. Everyone in the courtroom has a deeply intimate relationship to the idea of motherhood, and therefore, it makes their examination of Laurence inextricably biased. This bias, this sorcery, is used by Laurence’s attorney in her defense to strike a chord with the jury, claiming this impossible impartiality as chimeric cells (monster cells) and such cells the key to unlocking their connection to motherhood and to Laurence. And perhaps it is the chimeric cells in us that makes it even more pertinent that we study motherhood, as it is a critical closeness that we need to truly understand ourselves.