The Master's thesis analizes the representation of women's reproductive rights and motherhood in European and Slovenian films after the #MeToo movement. Initially, it delves into the topic through the history of European film and within the field of auteur cinema points to conceptual conundrums, feminist criticism and social issues of pathologization, stigmatization and taboos surrounding female bodily realities. Following the outline of the theoretical lenses of historical, feminist and phenomenological readings of film, it turns to the question of women's film and its female gaze in relation to narrative tropes and genre, before moving towards a visual and narrative analysis of ten women-directed European films released between 2019 and 2024, that explore the question of how European feature films frame our understanding, expectations, prejudices and anxieties about women's reproductive rights. Through the analysis of archetypes of motherhood, the medicalization of the female body and female reproductive realities, such as pregnancy, birth, abortion and postpartum depression, the thesis explores how contemporary (women's) cinema opens up new discourses, breaking established myths and articulating women's experiences of their bodies anew. In doing so, it notes that the field of maternal and reproductive discourse is becoming more open, complex and diverse, while its narative, visual, and genre modes of representation are distinctly hybrid, subversive, and deviate from established conventions.
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