Crying over the mother: reading (and feeling) Ken Wardrop's contradictory construction of maternal femininity

This article presents a combined affective and critical reading of Ken Wardrop's 2004 film Undressing My Mother. The author points to contradictions in the way temporally distinct scripts of Irish femininity are accessed and formally represented within Wardrop's film, and traces her own divided emotional and critical investments in the film's representation of Ethel as a socially conditioned subject caught between modern and postmodern constructions of Irish motherhood.