This interdisciplinary and international volume offers an innovative and critical exploration of the impact of motherhood on the engagement of women in media and creative industries across the globe. Diverse contributions critically engage with the intersections and overlap between the social categories of worker and mother, and the work of media production and maternal caregiving.
Conflicting ideas about, and expectations of, mothers are untangled in the context of the working world of radio, film, television and creative media industries. The book teases out commonalities between experiences that are evident across a number of countries, from Hollywood to Bollywood, as well as examining the differences between class, religion, maternal status and cultural frameworks that surround working mothers in various nation states. It also offers some possibilities for ways forward that can improve the lives of women workers who are also mothers.
A timely and valuable contribution to international debates on equality, mothers and motherhood in audiovisual industries, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of media, communication, cultural studies and gender, programmes engaged with work inequalities and motherhood studies, and activists, funders, policymakers and practitioners.
1. Motherhood and Media Work: an introduction Part 1: Who Cares in Screen Production? 2. Inequality, Invisibility and Inflexibility: Mothers and Carers Navigating Careers in the Australian Screen Industry 3. Managing Wollstonecraft’s Dilemma: Matriarchs in the Nigerian Broadcast News Media and the Politics of Child Care 4. Representing and Experiencing Motherhood - On and Off Screen in Swedish Film 5. The Mother of a Famous Child: The Media Representation of Shirley Temple’s “Mother” in Hollywood, 1934-1940 Part 2: Intersectionality and Media Mothers 6. Negotiating motherhood in the Colombian Audio-Visual Industry: a matter of capital 7. The Future of Muslim Women Behind-the-Scenes of the Malaysian TV Industry 8. British television production and women without children: exclusionary practice in the turn to care Part 3: Stigma, subjectivity and celebrity 9. The operation of maternal stigma in the UK creative and cultural industries 10. Mothers’ subjective experiences of negotiating caring responsibilities with work in the Scottish film and television industries 11. Bollywood Mothers: work life imbalance Part 4: Solutions for better futures 12. The Gendered Practice of The TV Opt-Out 13. Negotiating Motherhood: the search for solutions
Susan Liddy lectures in the Department of Media and Communication Studies in MIC, University of Limerick. Her recent work includes: Women in the Irish Film Industry: Stories and Storytellers (ed.) (2020) and Women in the International Film Industry: Policy Practice and Power (ed.) (2020). She is Chair of Women in Film and Television Ireland, a board member of Women in Film and Television International, the Writers Guild of Ireland and Raising Films Ireland. She is founder and co-director of Catalyst International Film Festival, Limerick. Anne O’ Brien is Associate Professor with the Department of Media Studies at Maynooth University. She has published on the representation of women in radio and television, on women workers in creative industries and examined why women leave careers in screen production. Her most recent book explores Women, Inequality and Media Work (2019).
