Defying normativity in Constance Debré’s Love Me Tender

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines Constance Debré’s Love Me Tender (2020) through the prism of transgression. If overstepping boundaries is intrinsic to transgression, the protagonist oversteps many of the culturally constructed limitations on behaviours expected of women at midlife. Rejecting every conventional aspect of her former life—her heterosexuality, her job, her family, her home, her marriage and her possessions—she appears to be the ultimate transgressive midlife woman. Yet, as this article will argue, the protagonist’s transgression is most clearly identifiable in the cumulative impact of her actions within the specific context of her quest for access to her eight-year-old son. As the narrative traces the protagonist’s relationship with her son as it is affected by a bruising judicial battle for her parental rights, Love Me Tender dialogues with other cultural representations of the maternal experience and contributes to the discourse around queer mothering. In its presentation of an alternative model of motherhood it asks the reader to consider not only the role that the French state plays in establishing and maintaining a universal ideal of the mother–child relationship which underpins the perceived boundaries of what is deemed to be a good mother but also what the consequences should be for the transgression of these boundaries.