The motherhood dispositif in ‘All about my mother’: entextualizations and scalar processes

Abstract

In this article, we understand motherhood as a dispositif that shapes social life and gives support to the nuclear family, but that is subject to mutations and reappropriations. Our purpose is to think about the extent to which the film All about my mother, by denaturalizing maternity performances, as well as those of gender and sexuality, stimulates reflexivity on this subject and leads to possible resignifications. We have selected two moments of the textual trajectory (BLOMMAERT, 2005) the film has been following since 1999 and submitted them to the analysis of the entextualization (SILVERSTEIN; URBAN, 1996; BAUMAN; BRIGGS, 1990) and scalar processes (BLOMMAERT, 2010; CARR; LEMPERT, 2016) mobilized in order to gauge such reflexivity. We have observed that a large part of the queer destabilizations that the film narrative promotes inspire positions in new entextualizations that, in most cases, ratify such destabilizations and manage to expand the concept of motherhood beyond biological and instinctive associations, which prevail in common sense (SCAVONE, 2001; FIDALGO, 2003; PINHEIRO, 2014).