Scholarlink

<p>This article examines how women-directed documentary films visualize care as a political and relational practice within crisis-affected Mediterranean contexts. Drawing on feminist ethics of care, social reproduction theory, and critical visual politics, the study analyzes how caregiving is framed across narratives of war, displacement, aging, and intergenerational continuity. Based on qualitative visual–narrative analysis of three documentary films — <i>For Sama</i> (2019), <i>El Batalett: Femmes de la Médina</i> (2017), and <i>The European Grandma Project</i> (2022) — the research explores how maternal labour, communal endurance, and transnational memory are constructed cinematically as forms of social survival. The findings reveal that women-directed documentaries reposition care from private obligation to public, politically charged labour, exposing both resilience and depletion under conditions of militarization, welfare retrenchment, and structural neglect. At the same time, the study demonstrates that visual visibility does not automatically disrupt dominant power structures; rather, representations of caregiving remain embedded within global regimes of recognition and humanitarian discourse. The article argues that documentary cinema can challenge securitized and victimizing narratives by foregrounding relational infrastructures of care, yet meaningful transformation requires institutional and policy engagement beyond symbolic representation.</p>

错误：搜索内容不能为空，请输入英文关键词
错误：关键词超出字数限制，请精简
高级检索

Visualizing Care in Crisis: Women-directed Documentaries and Feminist Narratives of Care in Transnational Mediterranean Contexts

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年4月21日

查看全文
  • Yasmeen Alyeldeen Mohammad Elmahdy Hanafy,
  • Donia Tarek Abdelwahab Mohamed

摘要

This article examines how women-directed documentary films visualize care as a political and relational practice within crisis-affected Mediterranean contexts. Drawing on feminist ethics of care, social reproduction theory, and critical visual politics, the study analyzes how caregiving is framed across narratives of war, displacement, aging, and intergenerational continuity. Based on qualitative visual–narrative analysis of three documentary films — For Sama (2019), El Batalett: Femmes de la Médina (2017), and The European Grandma Project (2022) — the research explores how maternal labour, communal endurance, and transnational memory are constructed cinematically as forms of social survival. The findings reveal that women-directed documentaries reposition care from private obligation to public, politically charged labour, exposing both resilience and depletion under conditions of militarization, welfare retrenchment, and structural neglect. At the same time, the study demonstrates that visual visibility does not automatically disrupt dominant power structures; rather, representations of caregiving remain embedded within global regimes of recognition and humanitarian discourse. The article argues that documentary cinema can challenge securitized and victimizing narratives by foregrounding relational infrastructures of care, yet meaningful transformation requires institutional and policy engagement beyond symbolic representation.