As celebrities sporting "baby bumps," politicians, Olympic athletes, and talk show guests, mothers are ubiquitous throughout U.S. media and popular culture. Like lightning rods, these high-profile mothers attract accolades and judgments associated with ideals of female sexuality, gender roles, and constructions of contemporary families. Motherhood Misconceived explores this widespread cultural fascination with motherhood through analyses of mothers in contemporary U.S. film, including both mainstream and independent cinematic representations. The contributors draw on a variety of critical approaches to consider the spectacle of pregnancy; mother-daughter relationships; mothers as predators, narcissists, and absent victims; and the ways in which cultural anxieties are displaced and projected onto marginalized mothers in films such as Fargo; Transamerica; Gas, Food, Lodging; Ordinary People; and Scream. Ideal for women's studies or film studies classes, Motherhood Misconceived will help students contextualize current debates about motherhood as they play out in popular and independent film.

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Heather Addison, Mary Kate Goodwin-Kelly, and Elaine Roth I. The Celluloid Stork: Picturing Pregnancy 1. Pregnant Body and/as Smoking Gun: Reviewing the Evidence of Fargo Mary Kate Goodwin-Kelly 2. Mother's Day: Taking the Mother Out of Motherhood in The Thrill of It All Tamar Jeffers McDonald 3. Not Exactly According to the Rules: Pregnancy and Motherhood in Sugar & Spice Madonne M. Miner II. Constructions of Motherhood: Mothers, Daughters, and Sex 4. Modernizing Mother: The Maternal Figure in Early Hollywood Heather Addison 5. "Whose Baby Are You?": Mother/Daughter Discourse in the Star Images of Mary Pickford and Joan Crawford Gaylyn Studlar 6. "You Just Hate Men!": Maternal Sexuality and the Nuclear Family in Gas, Food, Lodging Elaine Roth III. Horriffic Mothers and the Mothers of Horror 7. Hollywood's "Moms" and Postwar America Mike Chopra-Gant 8. Alfred Hitchcock and the Phobic Maternal Body Mun-Hou Lo 9. Paranoia, Cold Surveillance, and the Maternal Gaze: Reconsidering the "Absent Mother" in Ordinary People Mark Harper 10. Scream, Popular Culture, and Feminism's Third Wave: "I'm Not My Mother" Kathleen Rowe Karlyn IV. Maternal Anxieties of Class, Race, and Gender 11. Great Ladies and Guttersnipes: Class and the Representation of Southern Mothers in Hollywood Films Aimee Berger 12. "Don't Say Mammy": Camille Billops's Meditations on Black Motherhood Janet K. Cutler 13. From Dad to Mom: Transgendered Motherhood in Transamerica Mary M. Dalton List of Contributors Index