Kaplan SexWorkMotherhood 1990
Kaplan SexWorkMotherhood 1990
Kaplan SexWorkMotherhood 1990
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The Journal of Sex Research
Introduction
Many of us know women who, over the past 20 years or so, have
struggled to combine sex, work and motherhood. Even when they are
in heterosexual marriages, women have difficulties linking these three
aspects of their lives. But those who are single or recently divorce
mothers, who are poor or belong to minority groups, or who are gay
parents, find even greater odds stacked against them. It has been clear
that women's difficulties owe much to the lack of facilitating institu-
tions for leading a life combining sex, work and motherhood: we still
do not have adequate, available and inexpensive child care, and flexi
ble and accommodating work schedules.
Accounting for why modernist and postmodernist America stil
refuses to make easy for any women combining sex, work and mother
hood lies beyond my scope here. Let me merely gesture to the
enormous economic and technological changes that have taken place in
E. Ann Kaplan, Ph.D., is a professor of English and director of the Humanities In-
stitute at The State University of New York, Stony Brook. She has written widely on
feminist theory, film, and popular culture. Her most recent books include Rocking
Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism and Consumer Culture; and the
edited volumes, Postmodernism and Its Discontents and Psychoanalysis and Cinema.
Her book on Motherhood and Representation is currently in press. Send requests for
reprints to E. Ann Kaplan, Humanities Institute, SUNY, Stony Brook, Stony Brook,
NY 11794-3394.
409
3Feuer (1989) argues that interpretative communities may make new use of popular
materials; they may defuse a program like Dynasty ideologically, and incorporate it
into new imaginary constructs. But this does not mean that it is no longer important to
explore the investments in positions that texts themselves stake out on an unconscious
level.
neither sex nor work, per se; and certainly not any special tensio
might be between the two for women. Mystic Pizza intere
treats a group of working class women, but the thrust of the f
again not the working situation per se (this does figure more
tantly than usual, however), but how the various women wil
their love or other personal problems, and find happiness.
Working Girl, meanwhile, is important and unusual in focussi
women in the work place. Its main theme is: what is it like to wo
female boss? And: what is a female boss like? Unfortuna
answers both questions negatively, showing that the female
more ambitious, jealous, and manipulative than any male bo
be; and that working for such a boss is a nightmare! The narrat
construct Melanie Griffith as a potentially humane, empathi
boss, but the film ends as she undertakes her new role, leavi
imagine what will happen. Significantly, this film absolutely ex
any reference to motherhood and children, as these roles might
act with, or problematize, female needs for satisfaction in work
Together, the films show, first, how patriarchy still desires t
trol even a no longer "dangerous" female sexuality; and sec
similar desire to keep female sexuality, work and motherhood d
segregated spheres. If the patriarchal imaginary has to a
accommodated woman's new-found sexual freedom in recent
and has accepted woman's needs for work, new anxiety arises fr
changed reality that childbirth and child care no longer signify
that woman need stay in the home, or that she be married and
monogamous. This fear has arguably produced some recent (diff
discourses about the threat of female sexuality to motherhood,
will briefly illustrate by reference to three recent Hollywood f
The Good Mother (1988), Stella (1990), and Fatal Attraction
exemplify in quite different ways contested discourses about
sexuality, motherhood and the family; together they show alte
in these discourses from the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s. The Good
Mother represents discursive struggles in a 1970s, "high modernist"
framework.4 In the film, the discourse of a heterosexual female desire
released outside of marriage is in conflict with a sentimentalizing
motherhood discourse (in which motherhood is viewed as in itself all
that a woman needs). These in turn operate across other discourses,
4The term "high modernist" is meant to suggest late modernism-a modernism that
has almost exhausted itself, and that is to be differentiated from subsequent "post-
modernism." The film is modernist in that it assumes that Anna's "truth" is achiev-
able, theoretically, if only legal institutions were rational. For more on this, see Kaplan
(1990).
wife and child have now returned), Glen Close points out the re
double standard, in which his having an affair is a simple thing
object to be used and thrown away. Yet things are not so sim
her, since she is all alone, and needs him.
The female spectator may continue identifying with the hero
far, only to have the identification sickeningly wrenched away
Close, unable to hold on to Douglas, turns into a monster of horr
proportions before our eyes. We are invited now to identify wi
the besieged husband and abused wife and, finally, with the wr
ly tortured child. Glen Close, the repressed underside of the
family, now becomes intolerable: like the ghastly mutations of
fiction and horror genres, she must be eliminated at all cost
representative of all that threatens the biological nuclear famil
those mutations, she keeps returning in ever more vile forms, w
more monstrous purposes, until, finally, husband and wife man
eradicate her. The wife has to take on the murderous aspects
Close in order to achieve her demise (revealing, perhaps, the
embedded even within the family), but the sanctity of the
family is, just about, retrieved as the battered trio regrou
reconstitute their little community.
The film must be read on at least two levels, that of the depi
gender/sex discourses, and that of underlying psychoanalytic
processes. The possibility for the Glen Close character rests, first, on
the new conceptions about female sexuality that the early Women's
Liberation Movement produced: one of the main issues in the first
phase of the Movement was challenging the limitation of female sex-
uality to that safely confined within patriarchal norms. Female sex-
uality was brought out of the closet and discussed: topics such as
vaginal versus clitoral orgasms, lesbian versus heterosexual sexuality,
female sexual fantasies and their implications were extensively
debated in popular materials as well as in feminist scholarship. On the
level of individual discourse (and the dailiness of historical subjects),
these developments resulted in freeing women from the confines of
oppressive, often sexually unhappy marriages, liberating women to
seek sexual satisfaction in whatever modes (lesbian, heterosexual,
"kinky," "vanilla") they chose. It is significant (for understanding the
reaction to these developments in dominant representations) that the
women's movement early on ignored the mother per se, while devoting
attention to problems of day care, control of childbirth and reformu-
lating child-rearing. The fact that much early feminist work was
geared at freeing women from the necessities of mothering [and chal-
lenged dominant codes by refusing to hypostasize the (patriarchal)
York Times article (1988, July 28) about in vitro fertilization ima
the sperm binding to an egg in the woman's body, but again the bl
up image floated in space, and the title said nothing about the wom
Popular narratives also focus newly on the "unborn," make the f
of central concern, and marginalize the woman. A recent Buck Ja
television episode pitted a daughter against her (negatively c
mother over the question of whether or not the daughter should
her illegitimate conception, despite the fetus' having been damage
a sporting accident.
Focus on the fetus may indicate a renewed desire to write the w
out of the story (except as once more an unquestioned patriarchal
tion), or to marginalize and negate her subjectivity. This new
discourse, apparently contradictory to that of a nostalgic return to a
sentimentalized mother-child relationship, in fact colludes neatly with
it. Instead of an intense mother-child relationship being idealized and
hypostatized, we have obsession with conception and gestation-with
fetal life within the woman. But the discourses are linked in both in-
dicating, at least in dominant forms, a return to obsession with the
biological child. The differences are important, however: the senti-
mental mother discourse speaks from the position of the mother's
absorption in nurturing: however oppressively, it situates the mother
as a subject, as in The Good Mother. The reproductive discourse, on
the contrary, marginalizes the woman again (i.e., it is only interested in
the woman as the being that initiated the fetal discourse-by desiring
to create a fetus); it also redefines subjectivity, in making into a sub-
ject what is not yet human. The woman is marginalized, made into a
non-subject, or, as in a recent book by Elizabeth Kane (1988) about her
surrogacy experiences, happily marginalizes herself. Meanwhile,
culture positions the not-yet-born, paradoxically, as subject, raising
anew issues of what constitutes subjectivity.
Conclusion
References
SUTER, J. (1976). Feminine discourse in Christopher Strong. Camera Obscura, Nos. 3-4,
135-150.