The Films of Xavier Dolan: Queering Motherhood and the Nation

Abstract

Xavier Dolan (b.1989) has experienced a meteoric rise to fame in Québec’s film and media industry, most notably for his matrocentric cinematic style hallmarked by themes of disordered family relations and queer coming-of-age narratives which frame his portrayal of modern Québec. As notes Bill Marshall (2016), however, although Dolan’s success has been ‘one of the most striking developments in Québec cinema over the past decade’, it remains ‘accompanied by much journalistic chatter and cliché, and some, but so far relatively limited academic attention’ (189). This thesis intervenes to embed the Dolandrama within a broader sociohistorical, multi-mediatic inquiry which addresses Québec’s shifting relationship with maternity and counternormative family ties in relation to modern statehood; more specifically, I ask how Dolan’s works reconsider the future of Québécois (national) identity which, whilst continuing to rely on maternity as a nation-building tool, can now be fused with queer studies to depart from normative spaces, times, and philosophies which persist in mandating the province’s idealised image of the ‘good’ mother. I engage the Dolandrama in an extended dialogue with queer, feminist and gender theories; approaches to psychoanalysis and affect theory; filmic phenomenologies and assessments of Québec’s social geographies; and haptic approaches to memory and temporality, addressing precisely how Dolan’s lucid presentation of mother-and-childhoods of difference is positioned as central to a necessary inclusion of queer relations to self and (m)otherhood in the province’s evolving national identity. To this end, the four chapters in this thesis are organised thematically following the life stages key to understanding Dolan’s pluralised approach to maternity in Québec: through spaces of (pre-)conception and birth (chapter one); adolescence and mother-child separation anxiety (chapter two); preparing for grieving and death (chapter three); and moving on towards the (in)attainability of independence (chapter four). This theoretical approach not only advances the universality of Dolan’s cinematic appeal, but seeks to urgently bolster the (academic) validity of the filmmaker’s cinematic engagement beyond aesthetic concerns of queer mothers and childrens’ belonging and (dis)attachment to Québec-as-nation, today and in the future.