Η παιδική ηλικία και η εντατική μητρότητα στον κινηματογράφο της επισφάλειας: Η ταινία 'The Florida Project'

Abstract

This article reads Sean Baker’s The Florida Project (2017) through Berlant’s conceptualization of cruel optimism to critically engage with the construction of childhood and parenting. We content that this film reflects on the cinema of precarity and helps articulate a position from which to problematize the representations of childhood as a normative process and to discuss the impact of neoliberalism on family structures and functioning. Using textual film analysis and cultural critique, Baker’s film offers a potent vision of the ways children use to negotiate dead ends of their family lives in a state of supervision and control, through emotional temporalities and phantasy. The film challenges victimization and pathologization narratives and potentially transforms neoliberal configurations of the self and the society.  Potentially, relevant children’s film genres provide a critical vocabulary for Pedagogy to question simplistic viewpoints of transitions from innocence to experience, from childhood to adulthood. Ultimately, The Florida Project signals a complex turning point in childhood and parenting films, advocating children’s agencies and highlighting dead ends of state interventions working with marginalized families.