The Maternal Gaze: The Labour of Mothering in Tully

Tully (Jason Reitman, 2018) focuses on an exhausted mother of three, her husband, and the “night nanny” she employs to help with her newborn baby. The film exposes several of the failures of heterosexuality, specifically traditional and stereotypical gender roles in the nuclear family—indeed the husband is frequently present in the narrative because of conversations about his lack of presence when he opts out of family life to play video games or take business trips—while the mother handles what is presented as a monotony of child-rearing and chores. The failure of their heteronormative life is further illuminated when juxtaposed with the suburban mother’s queer relationship with the nanny in the present and her wild, lesbian past in NYC. I employ a range of queer theory to analyse the labour of femininity—the protagonist mother with no time to spend on herself is very unlike the glamorous star persona of Charlize Theron who plays her—the labour of childcare, both unpaid mothering and paid nannying, and the illness that occurs in the film because of the toll of such labour.