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Session 1: Monstrous Mothers and Their Families
Chair: Stephen Morris

Monstrous Mothers and the Media
Nicola Goc
Journalism and Media Studies, University of Tasmania, Tasmania

Mothers have been receiving bad press since that mythological ‘monstrous mother’, Medea, killed her children. The “Cruel Mother” motif has been a recurrent representation in plays, ballads, poems and novels for centuries and continues to survive in the ‘monstrous mother’ motif of contemporary media infanticide and child abuse discourses. The demonising of mothers has reached an apex in media discourses of recent years positioning mothers - Kathleen Folbigg, Lindy Chamberlain, Sally Clarke, Angela Cannings, Andrea Yates and Rosa Richards - as “Monstrous Mothers”. Why has contemporary press discourse returned with such vigour to the ‘monstrous mother’ motif of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century in the narrativizing of infanticide and child abuse? Contemporary media discourse places the deviant mother within news texts as wicked and cruel, the antithesis of motherhood. Through the individualising of deviance within the ‘monstrous mother’ paradigm the media audience, and society, is absolved of responsibility through the actions of the individual. But what effect does the media’s continual inscription of ‘motherhood’ as the dominant representation of adult women – from politicians to CEOs to sportswomen - have on the way motherhood is viewed by society today? While the sole sphere established as the appropriate place for women is one in which social discourses are depoliticised, where matters related to women’s lives are conventionally off-limits as topics of public discussion and areas of political intervention (Fraser 1989), the ‘monstrous mother’ motif allows infanticidal and abusive women to be categorised as an aberration, to be consigned to the episodic judicial news paradigm. Using contemporary media texts this paper will examine the role the media plays in creating the social space in which motherhood continues to be constrained within a patriarchal ideology where women as mothers continue to be categorised, idealised and demonised and where deviant mothers are understood as ‘monstrous’.

Becoming-Other: The Monstrous Child in Contemporary American Horror Film
Colette Balmain
Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College, High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom

No abstract is presently available

The Monster Under the Bed: Adult Anxieties of Childhood
Lois Drawmer
Department of Arts and Media, Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College, High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom

This paper will explore the issues surrounding the powerful notion of the hidden monster, who lurks under the bed, in the cupboard, or just around the corner, and its links with children, the unstable construct of childhood itself, and adult anxieties surrounding these. I will discuss complex cultural assumptions about childhood and relate these to the potentially disruptive figure of the monster in suburbia and family life, in media representations including Poltergeist (T. Hooper, USA, 1982), Stephen King’s It (T. Lee Wallace, USA, 1990), and Last (R. Harmon & R. Vota, USA, 2002). I will argue that childhood is symptomatically read through adult perceptions, either as trauma, or through western prescribed constructs of the ‘proper’ child in middle-class suburban family life. In particular I will focus on the ways in which that adults mobilize a nostalgic or idealized construct of the child, and childhood as a category, in order to play out expressions of both fear and desire in the figure of the monster who either threatens to corrupt the ‘innocent’ child or, more terrifyingly, to become part of the child itself.

I will draw upon Chris Jenk's notion of binaries of good / evil children which are graphically structured in the horror and thriller genre. However, I will also argue that these ostensibly simplistic dichotomies are rooted in a contemporary cultural concern with the shifting boundaries of childhood.

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