Subordination, Kin Keeping, and Transgenerational Trauma: A (Post)Feminist Critique Of Blame Your Mama Trope In Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)
(2024) MKVM13 20241Media and Communication Studies
Department of Communication and Media
- Abstract
- After having soared to success for inclusivity, editing, and storytelling at the Oscars 2023, the thesis aims at renditioning a postfeminist critique of the popular culture text, Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) by arguing for the existence and sustenance of, what I call, the Blame Your Mama trope in the film. This thesis examines the Blame Your Mama trope in the film as an underlying mechanism that perpetuates the scapegoating of mothers within and beyond popular culture. The trope is based on societal mother blame backed by elements of subordination, kin-keeping, and transgenerational trauma. By analyzing this trope, there is a hope to reveal the scapegoating of women as mothers and find ways to avoid it.
The construction and... (More) - After having soared to success for inclusivity, editing, and storytelling at the Oscars 2023, the thesis aims at renditioning a postfeminist critique of the popular culture text, Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) by arguing for the existence and sustenance of, what I call, the Blame Your Mama trope in the film. This thesis examines the Blame Your Mama trope in the film as an underlying mechanism that perpetuates the scapegoating of mothers within and beyond popular culture. The trope is based on societal mother blame backed by elements of subordination, kin-keeping, and transgenerational trauma. By analyzing this trope, there is a hope to reveal the scapegoating of women as mothers and find ways to avoid it.
The construction and meaning-making process has been adopted to bring about the existence and sustenance of the trope. Narrative Analysis complimented by Todorov’s narrative structure (Gillespie, 2006) and Semi-Structured Qualitative Audience Interviews have been triangulated not only to bring about how the producers encode the elements of the Blame Your Mama trope within the film’s narrative but also how the audiences then decode those elements by tying in their lived experiences.
The thesis has been designed abductively, based on certain theoretical frameworks, to enhance the validity of the trope. The study provides an extensive enunciation of the institution of motherhood, questions of power and identity, ideals of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mothers, the use of the ideals in the emulation of the trope, popular culture texts, and finally, the postfeminist suture.
The triangulation analysis contributes to the post-feminist understanding of the film and how inclusivity and progressiveness sometimes act as a cover for the symbolic scapegoating of women as mothers. The analysis also showcased that the meaning-making of the trope by the audiences was heavily influenced by their lived experiences, both as mothers and daughters. Finally, the analysis successfully showcased how the Blame Your Mama trope holistically exists in Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) and positions the protagonist, the mother, as a scapegoat in a postfeminist backdrop. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
http://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/9151539
- author
- Arora, Ekshita LU
- supervisor
- organization
- course
- MKVM13 20241
- year
- 2024
- type
- H2 - Master's Degree (Two Years)
- subject
- keywords
- Motherhood, Popular Culture, Postfeminism, Audience Studies, Narrative Analysis
- language
- English
- id
- 9151539
- date added to LUP
- 2024-06-12 08:24:32
- date last changed
- 2024-06-12 08:24:32
@misc{9151539,
abstract = {{After having soared to success for inclusivity, editing, and storytelling at the Oscars 2023, the thesis aims at renditioning a postfeminist critique of the popular culture text, Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) by arguing for the existence and sustenance of, what I call, the Blame Your Mama trope in the film. This thesis examines the Blame Your Mama trope in the film as an underlying mechanism that perpetuates the scapegoating of mothers within and beyond popular culture. The trope is based on societal mother blame backed by elements of subordination, kin-keeping, and transgenerational trauma. By analyzing this trope, there is a hope to reveal the scapegoating of women as mothers and find ways to avoid it.
The construction and meaning-making process has been adopted to bring about the existence and sustenance of the trope. Narrative Analysis complimented by Todorov’s narrative structure (Gillespie, 2006) and Semi-Structured Qualitative Audience Interviews have been triangulated not only to bring about how the producers encode the elements of the Blame Your Mama trope within the film’s narrative but also how the audiences then decode those elements by tying in their lived experiences.
The thesis has been designed abductively, based on certain theoretical frameworks, to enhance the validity of the trope. The study provides an extensive enunciation of the institution of motherhood, questions of power and identity, ideals of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mothers, the use of the ideals in the emulation of the trope, popular culture texts, and finally, the postfeminist suture.
The triangulation analysis contributes to the post-feminist understanding of the film and how inclusivity and progressiveness sometimes act as a cover for the symbolic scapegoating of women as mothers. The analysis also showcased that the meaning-making of the trope by the audiences was heavily influenced by their lived experiences, both as mothers and daughters. Finally, the analysis successfully showcased how the Blame Your Mama trope holistically exists in Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) and positions the protagonist, the mother, as a scapegoat in a postfeminist backdrop.}},
author = {{Arora, Ekshita}},
language = {{eng}},
note = {{Student Paper}},
title = {{Subordination, Kin Keeping, and Transgenerational Trauma: A (Post)Feminist Critique Of Blame Your Mama Trope In Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)}},
year = {{2024}},
}