So Mayer - Mothers of Invention: Film, Media, and Caregiving Labor

Praise for Mothers of Invention

This gathering of outstanding film and media scholars and makers demonstrates how becoming and recognizing mothersquite literally the oldest job in the worldhas changed and challenged their work. Here the fusion of their personal experience, art-making, and scholarship breathes new life into disciplinary methods.

Amelie Hastie, author of Cupboards of Curiosity: Women, Recollection, and Film History

What a timely collection on parenting, caregivingand especially motheringin film and media cultures. Contributors examine not just representations of motherhood and maternity onscreen but working conditions for mothers and caregivers in media industries, mothering as a form of media labor and media consumption, and the radical possibilities of feminized caregiving on set, in the classroom, and at home.

Shelley Stamp, author of Movie-Struck Girls and Lois Weber in Early Hollywood

Never has the media industry been in greater need of attention. In Mothers of Invention, Mayer and Columpar approach this challengewith care. They propose a refocused media scholarship that turns the spotlight from longstanding discourses of innovation to reveal the foundational underpinnings of the industry: labours of caregiving. This wide-ranging collection of essays effortlessly models what it means to care, and the manifold benefits of caring about care, carers, and caregiving in global audiovisual industries.

Deb Verhoeven, Canada 150 Research Chair, University of Alberta

Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series

A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu.

General Editor

Barry Keith Grant

Brock University

Edited by

So Mayer and Corinn Columpar

Wayne State University Press

Detroit

Copyright 2022 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan, 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America.

ISBN (paperback): 978-0-8143-4852-9

ISBN (hardcover): 978-0-8143-4853-6

ISBN (e-book): 978-0-8143-4854-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021943124

On cover: Agns and Rosalie Varda on the set of Clo from 5 to 7 (1961), a film by Agns Varda. Photograph by Liliane de Kermadec. Cin-Tamaris. Cover design by Will Brown.

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For the beloveds who are helping us learn about caregiving: Freddie, Issy, and Mollie on one side of the pond, and Daniel and Harper on the other

So Mayer and Corinn Columpar

Raising Films Research Collective

Susan Berridge

Kristy Guevara-Flanagan and Irene Lusztig

Claire Perkins

Rashna Wadia Richards

Alice Haylett Bryan

Tessa Ashlin Nunn

Missy Molloy

Sara Saljoughi

Corinn Columpar

Elissa Rashkin

Maria Cabrera

Elinor Cleghorn

Jules Arita Koostachin

So Mayer

Kristi McKim

We would like to thank the following people: our acquisitions editor, Marie Sweetman, and series editor, Barry Keith Grant, both of whom supported this project enthusiastically and recognized its historical urgency; all the other people at Wayne State University Press, especially Carrie Downes Teefey, Robin DuBlanc, Emily Nowak, and Kristina Stonehill, who were not only proficient and attentive but a joy to work with; our two anonymous peer reviewers, who agreed to read our manuscript in the midst of a pandemic and their own working practices, and whose endorsement stoked our belief in the project and our excitement in reaching an audience; the Raising Films family, including its many research contributors, crowdfunders, collaborators, and community, and the faculty, staff, and students at the University of Torontos Cinema Studies Institute, all of whom provided institutional and moral support; Cine-Tamaris, whose lead archivist, Sherine El Sayed Taih, dug deep in the archives for our stunning cover image; and finally, our contributors, whose insightful, innovative, and careful work has been a source of ongoing inspiration.

So Mayer and Corinn Columpar

As we complete this introduction to Mothers of Invention: Film, Media, and Caregiving Labor, the world is navigating the COVID-19 pandemic, and both of us live in countriesthe United Kingdom for So and Canada for Corinnthat are in the fourth month of a quarantine conditioned by stay-at-home orders and social-distancing protocols. We begin our work with this expository note as a way of acknowledging both the magnitude and the uncertainty of our current historical moment and, by extension, the radically shifting ground on which we suddenly find ourselves as feminist critics and as editors of a book that is midway through a multiyear production process. Yet as much as things change, they also stay the same when it comes to a key topic in Mothers of Invention: the demands of caregiving, particularly parenting. Indeed, multiple realities that this volume explicitly addresses not only persist right now but are being thrown into starkly fresh relief as parents and other caregivers dedicate themselves to acts of care during a quarantine. As a result, even though most of the essays that comprise Mothers of Invention were written in the era before COVID-19, they add up to an anthology that in both content and spirit speaks volumes to our present momentand likely far beyond.

The unprecedented workload of COVID-19 caring, including the supervision of remote learning, and the toll it is taking led pediatrician Robin C. Williams and child psychologist Jean Clinton to title their recent opinion piece in the Globe and Mail The Parents Are Not Okay. One of the primary reasons for this trend among working women is the fact that they typically take on more caregiving activity in individual family units still dominated by Euro-Western heteronormative models, making for a situation in which mothers, especially, are not okay.

More than three decades after sociologist Arlie Hochschild, with Anne Machung, famously identified working womens second shift, the inequitable division of domestic labor that term names, along with the ideological forces undergirding it, has changed very little: as Moira Donegan writes in the midst of the pandemic, Everyone has a public health obligation to stay home, but only women have a socially enforced responsibility to take on disproportionate domestic work while they are there.