'This article contextualises Jennifer Kent's 2014 film The Babadook (2014) within postmaternal Australia. Theorised by Julie Stephens, the postmaternal refers to a paradigm characterised by the disqualification of maternal forms of care as indices of citizenship. Stephens argues that the postmaternal has underpinned significant personal suffering in the lives of women in the thirty years since its ascendancy to ideological predominance. Kent represents the distress of her maternal protagonist, Amelia, according to the conventions of horror and the Gothic, as she mothers in a situation of extraordinary personal trauma. This paper focuses, however, upon the political dimension of Kent's representation of the maternal, and applies D. W. Winnicott's object relations theory to Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection to articulate the interplay of psychic and structural factors underpinning Kent's representation of the mother. A central contention is, accordingly, that Kent depicts a maternality subject not solely to personal trauma, but also to a societal abjection of the maternal and related forms of care upholding postmaternal capitalism. This is an abjection that Amelia depressively internalises, turning from mother to monster. Also considered is the signifying potential of haunting and monstrosity, where maternal concerns are repressed and abjected from the public sphere. Demonstrated are the political underpinnings of the maternal Gothic, and the possibility of redemption through the embrace of human interdependence.' (Publication abstract)
