The language of motherhood has been formed by the institutional public discourse and by its construction of how mothers are expected to behave, which social values they should adhere to, and which duties and responsibilities are assigned to them. This has resulted in constructing mothers as primary caretakers who sacrifice their womanhood for the sake of being a perfect mother. With the spread of social networking, mothers have created online communities in which they do not only share mothering tricks and tips, but also construct the mother as a social actor with a distinctive social dialect. The objective of this paper is to analyze the sociolect of Czech mothers who are active on the Czech Facebook group called Protivný sprostý matky (Nasty mean mothers) that was created in January 2022 as a Facebook profile of a successful TV show broadcast on the online platform of the Czech Public TV. Framed by the feminist discourse analysis, the qualitative research of the posts and comments collected on this platform will discuss how Czech mothers and their choice of language related to mothering help to construct the identity of a mother in the Czech digital environment. It will search for how they refer to their maternal identity, how they negotiate their caretaking role and how they express their doubts and anxieties about failing the societal expectations of being a good mother.

The experiences of contemporary women/mothers conform to varying degrees to the pattern of behaviour expected by society. Their personal experiences are diverse and show the many faces of motherhood. In recent years, this problem has begun to be analysed by the social sciences (e.g. Parker 1995, Hays 1996, Messer 2013, Donath 2017, Garncarek 2019, 2020, 2022, Mustosmäki A., Sihto T. 2022, et al.), it is also taken up by contemporary cinema.

The presentation will attempt to show 'cinematic reflections' of contemporary difficult motherhood, which has recently been increasingly noticed and portrayed by Western cinema. The author of the presentation seeks to answer the question - how do selected films violate and deconstruct the patriarchal gender order in relation to motherhood (including essentialisation, naturalisation and idealisation of motherhood)? The speech will present the results of a qualitative analysis of selected film images: We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), Daughter (2021). The theoretical basis of the conducted research was the gender approach in social research and T. Scheff's concept of guilt and shame.

The analysis of the material shows that motherhood is not a woman's natural vocation, nor is it a role that is carried out unreflectively, although such a message is served to women from an early age. The images analysed here revealed numerous differences between what society expects of mothers and the inner (not always realised) needs of women-mothers. They show mothers who regret motherhood and deconstruct the patriarchal gender order in relation to motherhood.

Lucy Fischer’s 1996 work Cinematernity sought to ‘recall the importance of the maternal register within cinematic discourse’ (31), most urgently addressing the need to liberate filmic representations of motherhood from the ‘confines of melodrama’ (6) to which they had traditionally been bound. No truer could this be the case for Québec’s film industry following the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, when media depicting the motherhood so central to understandings of a newly secular, provincial-as-national identity transformed from being merely melodramatic to, instead, experimental; imbued with radical feminism; and/or empowered by documentary approaches. As Québec emerged from its great darkness, so, too did its filmmakers: they adopted new genres to celebrate the polyvalence of maternity, drawing on the lived experiences of ambivalence, sexuality, and abandonment to humanise the women so burdened with the duty to build a national ideal – to no longer be the ‘saintly guardians of the home and family’ (Ule & Rener 1997: 231) who would formerly be labelled as melodramatic had they dared rebel. This paper examines the spaces and times occupied by mothers in three Québec films – De mère en fille (dir. Anne Claire Poirier, 1968), Les bons débarras (dir. Francis Mankiewicz, 1980), and Hommes à louer (dir. Rodrigue Jean, 2008) – to interrogate how the evolution of genre in screening motherhood in Québec fundamentally reimagined how national identity was constructed in the latter half of the 20^th century, whilst reflecting on the role mothers may play in shaping future understandings of the province.