“The mother is a child, too”: neoliberal segmentarity, reproductive futurism, and relationality in Enlightened

ABSTRACT

This article examines Mike White and Laura Dern’s HBO series Enlightened (2011–13) in relation to questions of segmentarity, motherhood, feminism, reproductive futurism, and neoliberal capitalism. Rather than looking at the series’ central whistleblower narrative, this article instead examines a secondary plot charting the protagonist’s affective investment in the plight of a Mexican immigrant and her two American children. Drawing on a Deleuzo-Guattarian framework, the article argues that Enlightened foregrounds the important connections between segmentarity and our contemporary neoliberal era, particularly in the context of current political debates surrounding immigration in the United States. The article also examines the ways in which Enlightened teases out the nationalist and neoliberal biases inherent in Lee Edelman’s formulation of reproductive futurism, and briefly draws on Safe (Todd Haynes, 1995), forging key comparisons between the film and Enlightened in relation to their shared interest in New Age spirituality, capitalism, maternity, and ecology. Through the lens of Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking on segmentarity and becoming, the article argues that Enlightened posits alternative modes of community, mothering, and futurity.

KEYWORDS:

• US television
• neoliberalism
• feminism
• motherhood
• immigration
• futurity

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Laura McMahon and Isabelle McNeill for their helpful feedback on previous versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Filmography

Ally McBeal (FOX, 1997–2002)

The Big C (Showtime, 2010–13)

Big Little Lies (HBO, 2017–19)

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (The WB/UPN, 1997–2003)

Enlightened (HBO, 2011–13)

Girls (HBO, 2012–17)

I Love Lucy (CBS, 1951–57)

Insecure (HBO, 2015–21)

Network (Sidney Lumet, 1976)

Norma Rae (Martin Ritt, 1979)

Nurse Jackie (Showtime, 2009–15)

Recount (Jay Roach, HBO, 2008)

Safe (Todd Haynes, 1995)

Sex and the City (HBO, 1998–2004)

United States of Tara (Showtime, 2009–11)

Veep (HBO, 2012–19)

Weeds (Showtime, 2005–12)

Notes

1. See Press (2023) for more on the rise of actress-producers in Hollywood.

2. A reference to Ball’s Lucy Ricardo, the ‘zany’ (Ngai 2012) protagonist of I Love Lucy.

3. See NPR (2011) for more on how Dern’s history of activism informed the development of Enlightened.

4. See Colebrook and Buchanan (2000) and Rizzo (2012) for more on the intersections of feminist theory, film, and Deleuze (with Guattari).

5. A reference to the concept of the ‘good enough mother’, coined by the British pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, whose research investigated the ways in which the infant may in fact benefit from the frustration induced by the mother’s inability to be attentive to its every need (Winnicott 1971 [2005], 13–14).

6. There is, however, one non-white woman at the baby shower.

7. For more on screen performance as authorship, see Hunter (2016), who argues that Sarah Michelle Gellar’s performance in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) can be viewed as authorial.

8. For a more in-depth examination of the use of melodrama in the series, see Gorton (2019).

9. See Ngai (2005).

10. Another moment perhaps tinged with irony in its humorous depiction of Amy’s over-reliance on self-help literature.

11. Although this imagined mother-child relation relies on metaphors of kinship to consider notions of community beyond the family, it perhaps also serves to underscore the family ‘as the standard for all other relational possibilities’ (see Lewis 2022, 10).

12. Perhaps a limitation to reading the scene through Deleuze and Guattari’s model of becoming might be that becomings are to be understood as real rather than imaginary, and abstracted from any logic of metaphor or filiation. Yet the series seems to suggest that, for Amy, here and later in the episode, these becomings are somehow ‘real’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Karim Townsend

Karim Townsend is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge. His research explores connections between contemporary film and screen media, neoliberalism, ecocriticism, and critical theory.