All About Mothers: Pronatalist Discourses in Contemporary Spanish Cinema

Abstract

Spain—the most fertile society in Europe in the early 1970s—now has the lowest birth rate in the world and this fact is the origin of new debates around women's role in production and reproduction, a debate that transcends the strictly personal to acquire new social and political dimension. In such a charged pronatalist social context, contemporary Spanish cinema seems to support this call to maternity—often in no innocent terms. Through the analysis of five movies, this essay studies the ramifications—in contemporary Spanish cinema—of the discourse of maternity and its social implications. First, by examining the self-sacrificing "angel" mother paradigm and its underside, namely the evil, self-satisfying mother, the essay explores how both Benito Zambrano's Solas and Azucena Rodríguez's Puede ser divertido envision motherhood as the way for women's fulfillment and as the solution to women's problems; second, through the analysis of Javier Fesser's El milagro de P.Tinto and Pilar Távora's Yerma, it addresses the confusion between sexual and maternal desires, a confusion that shapes the maternal paradigm of asexuality; and thirdly, by focusing on Almodóvar's Todo sobre mi madre, it reflects upon the dynamics of absorption of the concept of womanhood into the category of maternity.