Sideways growth and horizontal care: Sciamma’s queer children and their mothers

Drawing from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s writing on love and Kathryn Bond Stockton’s theory of queer childhood as an act of growing “sideways” (25), this article presents a close reading of the complex interplay between motherhood and queer childhood in Tomboy (2011) and Petite Maman (2021), two films in which mothers and queer children come together in horizontal dynamics of care and tenderness, and are drawn apart by difference and domination. Alongside a specific study of the complex maternal dynamics at play in both films, this article offers a phenomenological reading of love as linked to our experience of being-in-the-world, as theorized by Merleau-Ponty. He describes love as an “undivided situation” that we enter into, reaching a state of mutual recognition of our full perceptual experience ( Les relations avec autrui chez l’enfant 59). This “undivided situation” provides space for a nuanced consideration of the relationship dynamics of tenderness and cruelty, pain and fierce devotion, that characterize the relationship between the mother and the queer child in Sciamma’s films. Though Tomboy centers on a markedly more fraught relationship between a mother and her genderqueer child, Petite Maman portrays a reparative bond between generations of mothers and daughters, reflecting a possibility of transcending anxieties in favor of a hopeful and horizontalized dynamic of care between mothers and children. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .