‘I’m not your mother’: British social realism, neoliberalism and the maternal subject in Sally Wainwright’s Happy Valley (BBC1 2014-2016)

This article examines Sally Wainwright's Happy Valley (BBC1, 2014–2016) in the context of recent feminist attempts to theorise the idea of a maternal subject. Happy Valley, a police series set in an economically disadvantaged community in West Yorkshire, has been seen as expanding the genre of British social realism, in its focus on strong Northern women, by giving it ‘a female voice’ (Gorton, 2016: 73). I argue that its challenge is more substantial. Both the tradition of British social realism on which the series draws, and the neoliberal narratives of the family which formed the discursive context of its production, I argue, are founded on a social imaginary in which the mother is seen as responsible for the production of the selves of others, but cannot herself be a subject. The series itself, however, places at its centre an active, articulate, mobile and angry maternal subject. In so doing, it radically contests both a tradition of British social realism rooted in male nostalgia and more recent neoliberal narratives of maternal guilt and lifestyle choice. It does this through a more fundamental contestation: of the wider cultural narratives about selfhood and the maternal that underpin both. Its reflective maternal subject, whose narrative journey involves acceptance of an irrecoverable loss, anger and guilt as a crucial aspect of subjectivity, and who embodies an ethics of relationality, is a figure impossible in conventional accounts of subject and nation. She can be understood, however, in terms of recent feminist theories of the maternal

Framing feminism art and the women's...

xx,347 hlm.:il. ; 24 cm

Old Mistresses : Woman, Art and Ideology

Looking at the work of women artists and the history of art, the authors trace the development of the feminine stereotype and its role in structuring the ideology of the discipline of art history. The separation of art and craft, its effect on the way that work by women is seen and valued, and the response of women artists are also analyzed. Circa 150 bibl. ref

Editorial: Mapping Maternal Subjectivities, Identities and Ethics

Editorial with embedded short articles including:- "Maternal Studies: The Why and Wherefore"(Hollway) highlighted as "unconscious intersubjective dynamics" "Why Study the Maternal Now?"(Jensen) highlighted as "parenting" "Thoughts around the Maternal: A Sociological Viewpoint" (T Miller) highlighted as "social locations and structural contexts within which women mother