Abject Motherhood in Nightbitch

Mothers, in their presence and in their absence alike, are prominent figures in both our real lives and our popular culture. Despite the mother figure’s important role in the narratives we tell and their influence in our real lives, mothers historically have very rarely been the protagonists of pop culture stories. The 2024 horror-comedy, Nightbitch (2024), is one recent exception to this trend that likewise could be considered a response to it. Nightbitch (2024) follows a new mom, played by Amy Adams, as she struggles to adjust to her role as a stay-at-home parent. Her challenges range from an absent but well-meaning husband, the monotonous routines of domestic life, longing for her art, and—most notably—that she suddenly begins transforming into a dog at night. In facing these challenges, the film’s protagonist, who remains unnamed and is listed in the credits as “Mother,” struggles with choosing to stay at home versus her longing for the working life she left behind. The film attempts to illustrate this patriarchal “either/or” ideology surrounding motherhood, and, in doing so, this article argues that Nightbitch appears, on the surface, to align itself with a new wave of early-twenty-first century films that Barbara Creed identifies as Feminist New Wave Cinema and that she argues “break with tradition, challenge dominant forms, adopt new styles, and speak for the rights of women and social minorities.” 1  However, upon closer analysis, it is clear that Nightbitch ultimately falls short of providing any meaningful critique—feminist or otherwise—by focusing on the tolls of motherhood on the individual rather than on the institutionalized demands and constraints placed on how motherhood is expected to be performed under patriarchy, ignoring the ideological and institutional systems that continue to subjugate mothers and, instead, placing the burden of blame for the protagonist’s struggles on herself.

Motherhood Today, Feminism, and the "Mommy Wars"

The United States has mommy issues, that much is clear. Today, mothers in the US are taking center stage in both online discourse and in political spheres. Alena Kate Pettit, one of the women who was instrumental in “tradwives,” an online movement that promotes domesticity, tells The New Yorker that the movement has become “its own monster.” 2  Pettit talks about how the movement increasingly became political and commercialized and less about documenting a personal choice. In politics, motherhood is center stage. ABC news reports in April 2025 that the current Trump administration is considering $5,000 and a medal of honor to entice women to have children, while advocacy organizations, such as MomsRising, find these potential incentives not enough and call for more structural changes such as affordable childcare. 3  Three years prior to this, in 2022, the Supreme Court (with a conservative majority) overturned Roe v. Wade, impacting women’s choices to become mothers. 4  In the legislative branch, the House narrowly blocked a procedural rule in 2025 that would prevent proxy voting for new parents. 5  These headlines reflect a culture that is conflicted over the concept of motherhood. In essence, the culture is attempting to incentivize its population to have children but struggles to create adequate space and support for mothers. For feminist thinkers, these headlines can be interpreted as red flags.

Motherhood has been a contentious topic within feminist thought for decades, in part due to the movement’s “resistance to ‘essential motherhood,’ the concept that motherhood is essential or central to a women’s satisfaction with live or overall purpose.” 6  The “essential motherhood” concept is heightened by general discourses that connect motherhood to biological needs, “creating expectations that distinctively separate the situation of women as mothers than that of men as fathers.” 7  The gendering of motherhood, and the expectation of women to become mothers, thus makes motherhood a concern for all women, child-bearing or child-free. Second- wave feminism of the 1960s through the 1980s saw motherhood as a double-edged sword. It was something that united all women under a shared experience in enduring it, avoiding it, or approaching it, but it was also something that, under a patriarchal system, subjugated women and hindered their social mobility and influence. 8  Second-wave feminists encouraged women to avoid motherhood as an act of a resistance against this oppression. 9  

Third wave feminism of the 1990s and 2000s saw motherhood differently. The third wave took a more individualistic approach to womanhood and rejected the second-wave sentiment that womanhood was a universal experience, instead emphasizing first-person accounts, sex positivity, and “alternate” forms of parenting. 10  So, when addressing motherhood, third-wave feminists saw it as just one of the many options for what a woman can be and even as a potential path towards empowerment. 11

The current wave of feminism, the fourth wave, expands on the second and third wave. The fourth wave is defined by its heavy and productive use of the internet and social media as a way to call out misogyny and to organize. 12  While the fourth wave prides itself on expanding definitions of womanhood and intersectionality, its primary concern is centered on speaking out against sexual assault and reproductive rights. One of the more notable manifestations of this is the #MeToo movement, which began in the early 2000s as a way for women of color to talk about their experiences with sexual assault, but then quickly became an internet phenomenon when several women in Hollywood spoke out against men in power for their sexual misconduct. 13  Initially, it seemed that, in the fourth wave, women were finally able to speak about their individual experiences like in the third wave, while being united by similarities of those experiences like in the second wave. However, as women banded together on the streets of D.C. in protest, a vicious war was brewing on the internet: the “mommy wars.” 

The mommy wars are described as a growing tension between mothers who choose to work and mothers who choose to stay home and they have existed for decades. 14  The wars have evolved into rivalries between different mothering philosophies and practices, in which “now more than ever before, mothers appear to be fragmented into smaller and smaller camps,” 15  likely because of the popularity of mommy blogs and mother-centered content on the internet that has only grown since the 2010s. This is clearly illustrated in “tradwife” advocate Pettit’s interview with The New Yorker cited earlier. Pettit entered the online space after quitting her high-power marketing career to be a stay-at-home mother. What started as a bid to for connection with other mothers turned into an online personality, one that she could not continue to maintain has the internet grew to feature politicized, polished and younger “tradwife” influencers. 16  In a sense, the mommy wars exemplified the double-edge sword of motherhood that second-wave feminists warned against. Peeling back the curtain of motherhood through mommy blogs and short form video, at first, appeared to be a radical act, but quickly devolved into a state of social surveillance. 17  These internet battlegrounds essentially lay the foundation for what we are seeing in the headlines of the 2020s cited above. The mommy wars reflect a culture that simply does not know what to do with mothers. It is perhaps therefore not a surprise that the question about what makes a mother “good” or “bad,” is central to a great deal of contemporary popular culture, including recent films.

A 2020 study showed that films made during the fourth wave  of feminism have shifted in theme and trope usage when it comes to women. 18  Specifically, there has been a decreased use of the “fallen woman” trope and a move towards depictions of flawed women capable of redemption arcs. 19  Likewise, as the fourth wave continues to take shape during the 2020s, and the mommy wars battleground concurrently shifts from online to all three branches of government, it is no surprise that films like Nightbitch (2024) aim to take on the complicated concept of motherhood, as well as make issues central to the mommy wars a central narrative and thematic concern.

Analysis of Nightbitch: Theoretical Framework

As stated previously, Creed’s concept of Feminist New Wave Cinema is meant to revolt against dominant, patriarchal ideologies. The ways in which ideology circulates through popular culture texts, as well as the ways in which such texts can be used to either reinforce or subvert ideology, is explained in  Roland Barthes’ “Myth Today” and Stuart Hall’s “Rediscovering Ideology.” In essence, Barthes’ “Myth Today” establishes “myth” as a system of semiological signs used to tell a story, the purpose of which is to make sense of either history or reality. 20  It is in this way that myth is used to substantiate ideology. According to Barthes, “it organizes a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth . . . it establishes a blissful clarity; things appear to mean something by themselves.” 21  Media, whether it be a magazine cover, a Pulitzer-prize winning novel, or a film, is one such cultural site at which myth in Barthes’ formulation presents itself to the public as an uncomplicated explanation of the world. 

For example, let’s say you open a newspaper, and the front cover story is about a child’s lemonade stand that helped raise funds for his mother’s cancer treatment. Using Barthes’ concept of cultural myth, the boy’s story of resilience and love presents an uncomplicated narrative of grit and allows the reader to believe that whatever situation they are in, they too can pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Just as importantly, it does not  reveal the complicated reality of the systems and structures at play that made the boy start a lemonade stand in the first place.

Stuart Hall complicates Barthes’ conceptualization of cultural myth by suggesting that, in popular culture, myths not only manifest in things like television and film, but can be used as a tool to either reinforce or subvert dominant ideologies. 22  According to Hall, “the media and other signifying institutions” are not “the institutions which merely [reflect] and [sustain] consensus,” but rather those that “[help] produce consensus.” 23  What Hall is saying here is that the platforms of the myths, of the stories we use to make sense of the world around us, are not neutral. Instead, the people in charge of the platforms, and therefore the myths, can manipulate stories to shape public opinion. To go back to the lemonade stand example, when you are reading the article, you learn that the boy started the stand to raise funds for expensive cancer treatments for his mother, and that the medication needed is the more expensive kind because she refused to go to the doctor until it was too late. The article doesn’t tell you that doctor initially dismissed her health concerns in her annual checkup. If you don’t have a similar personal experience with the medical system, then you are led to believe that the problem is the fault of the mother or the doctor, but not the larger issue of the medical gaslighting of women—especially women of color—or the even larger issue of the prohibitive cost of preventative medical care in a culture that does not have universal free healthcare. In essence, the article leads you to believe that this is an issue of individual fault and not a systemic problem. 

Taking into consideration Barthes’ and Hall’s definition of myth and ideology within the context of current and past feminist movements, it would not be far-fetched to claim that motherhood is both a social role and a social institution based on a cultural myth—or, more accurately, the discourses around motherhood are myths. They help us make sense of what a mother figure is and isn’t supposed to be in society, more often than not in ways shaped by dominant ideologies. Motherhood is thus a discursive site that can either function to affirm, call into question, critique, or challenge the dominant ideologies around motherhood. 24  And yet, in popular fiction and popular media alike, despite motherhood being a concept that implicates all women and affects all men, “stories about motherhood”—and therefore arenas of ideological debates on the topic— “are variously shaped by absences and presences, by distance and closeness,” typically between the mother figure and her children or family 25 ; it is only in recent years that mothers themselves have become the central voices of these narratives, such as in Nightbitch—which, as a potential Feminist New Wave film, aims to usurp dominant ideologies of motherhood by creating a new myth of motherhood that is far more liberating and gives agency to mothers.

Before moving on to that analysis in more detail, though, it is worth noting that—to the extent that motherhood in U.S. culture is surrounded by conflicting ideologies that render the figure of “mother” a contested site—when women’s experiences of motherhood brush up against the expectations of motherhood conditioned by cultural myth, motherhood potentially moves into the domain of the abject. According to psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, the abject is something that is both outside the person and what is considered an object or other. It is “a ‘something that I do not recognize as a thing . . . on the edge of non-existence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards.” 26  In essence, the abject is something that exists outside the human psyche and the material world and is only encountered when a person approaches something that upends their understanding of themselves, the material world, or both. As we see in the mommy wars, motherhood is not a truly independent experience of women, due to its social implications, but it is not truly an outside force either, as we see in the backlash of government incentives. It sits in the in-between, the interstitial spaces of the abject. 

According to Kristeva, the reaction to the abject is visceral, usually disgust or fear, but also humor. This reaction allows for the person to continue to exist in the world as they understand it and protects them from what they don’t. Kristeva uses the example of food repulsion in which one might gag or spit out food they don’t like, even if they were first encouraged to eat it out of their own desire or curiosity. Kristeva writes, “ ‘I’ expel it. But since the food is not an ‘other’ for ‘me,’ who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which ‘I’ claim to establish myself.” 27  What Kristeva is getting at here is that experiencing the abject showcases to the person experiencing it what about themselves or others they reject to establish their own sense of self and reality as Real. 

This is precisely the reaction of the protagonist in Nightbitch when she enters motherhood and brushes up against the cultural myths concerning motherhood that she’s been fed by patriarchy. Creed argues that Feminist New Wave cinema centers female protagonists and showcases how they “journey” into abjection, utilizing elements of the horror genre (even in films that are not strictly a horror movies) in order to convey the reality of human struggle from a female perspective. 28  This is arguably true of Nightbitch. Drawing on Kristeva’s concept of the powers of horror, it too shows the same “disturbance of identity, violence, meaninglessness and a collapse of boundaries,” that Creed suggests leads the female protagonists in Feminist New Wave films to confront patriarchy, revolt, and become reborn. 29  It is in this way that Creed contends that the horror film trope of the monstrous-feminine is appropriated and redeployed in Feminist New Wave films as a transformative, liberating figure that rejects social and cultural rituals and creates her own, in the process troubling the patriarchal order by disrupting its laws and language—including, in the case of cinema, the language of visual representation. 30  I now turn in the next section to examining the attempt in Nightbitch to utilize the monstrous-feminine along similar lines, in order to redefine and negotiate dominant ideologies of motherhood through the abject.

The Monstrous, Abject Mother in Nightbitch

In the opening scene of the movie, we are placed into a grocery store where we first see a shelf full of canned food and hear the offscreen blabbering of a young child before our main characters, Mother and her child, enter the frame. As they move through the grocery store, the camera cuts to Mother’s point of view, and, from her perspective, we see another mother struggling with her daughter who keeps throwing things into the cart that are unnecessary. The scene then switches back to objective camera framing and we watch Mother run into a colleague from her life before she became a mom. Mother explains to her child (and to the audience) that the colleague took over Mother’s position at the art gallery after Mother left. The colleague then asks Mother, “Don’t you love getting to be at home with him all the time?” With the camera positioned over the colleague's shoulder and zooming in slowly on Mother’s eyes, she responds: 

It’s complicated though, because I would love to feel content, but instead I feel like I am just stuck inside a prison of my own creation where I torment myself until I’m left binge-eating Fig Newtons at midnight to keep from crying [laughs] and I feel like societal norms and gender expectations and just plain old biology has forced me to become this person that I don’t recognize and I’m just angry all the time, like, all the time.

There is then a cut back to the colleague, framed from over Mother’s shoulder, as the colleague asks the question again and this time Mother responds with “Yeah I do I love it. Yeah, I do. I love being a mom.” At that point, the scene ends with a cut to the opening title, with some unnerving vocalizing and music playing on the soundtrack to create an air of tension.

In this opening scene, the main character directly addresses the dominant cultural ideologies around motherhood in her response to her colleague’s question about being a stay-at-home mom. This is clear when she says “I would love to feel content” In this way, this part of the opening scene gestures towards the ideology of motherhood being essential to a woman's life, as well as the deeply-entrenched cultural belief that women are more naturally connected towards children due to biology. 31  As noted in the previous section, this kind of essentialism is something that feminist thinkers have rejected since the second wave. 32  This line of dialogue therefore implies that Mother once believed in this ideology and expected fulfillment, but has found herself left wanting, as the rest of her dialogue—which is then immediately revealed to be an imagined response rather than her actual response—implies. In this imagined response, Mother also arguably approaches the abject because her sense of meaning as a mother begins to collapse due to this friction between expectation and reality. In this abrasion, she is not who she was before being a mother and she is not who she is supposed to be/expected herself to be. Following Creed, we might also interpret Mother’s imagined response to be a sign that Mother is starting her journey into abjection because the disturbance of Mother’s identity opens up avenues in which the character can confront the fragility of the patriarchal society she is living in, and to revolt. 33  Indeed, Mother explicitly suggests this when she states “I feel like societal norms and gender expectations and just plain old biology has forced me to become this person that I don’t recognize and I’m just angry all the time.”

This moment at the start of the film not only sets up Mother for this journey into the abject, but also aligns Nightbitch with Feminist New Wave films. Creed states that the mother figure in Feminist New Wave films diverges from traditional filmic mother figures who simply love too much and impede the development of their child. Creed uses Babadook (2014) as an example of this, arguing that the “film breaks a virtual taboo on the mother expressing her rage.” 34  By showing that rage, the mother becomes the central figure in a mother-child horror story. Similarly, by having the mother express her rage to the audience in the opening scene in Nightbitch, we notice that the mother figure of Nightbitch is not only at the center of this mother- child dynamic, but the typical horror script is flipped such that it is the child, and not the mother, who is the suffocating force. The subversion of these roles suggest that Nightbitch’s story is being set up to subvert dominant ideologies of motherhood.

However, this moment in the film only exists between the audience and the protagonist. In the world of the story, which we shift back into with the change in camera angle and repeat of the colleague's question, Mother simply states that she loves being a mother. In confronting the abject—which takes form in her colleague,  a ghost from her life from before motherhood who forces Mother to reevaluate her understanding of reality—Feminist New Wave Cinema  would require Mother to choose to revolt, to actually say what she is thinking, which she doesn’t. 35  She chooses to conform to cultural expectations and to say that everything is perfect. This highlights how these dominant ideologies are reinforced culturally. Even in the way that the colleague phrases the question, beginning with a “Don’t you,” upholds the expectation that her work friend must be satisfied with and/or have reached her fulfillment through motherhood. As Hall notes in a different context, “the power here is an ideological power: the power to signify events in a particular way.” 36  The cultural power ideology has on people is in the ways in which signifiers, such as words in a sentence or the structure of a scene, are ordered to portray a specific reality. In this sense, Mother repressing her own emotions, coupled with the colleague's assumptions about motherhood portrays how patriarchal ideologies permeate even interpersonal interactions.

About thirty minutes into the film, the audience begins to follow Mother on her journey into abjection as she begins to morph from “Mother,” to “Nightbitch.” The transformation is a slow and gory process. The transformation begins one night when Mother falls on her back trying to paint with her son. Feeling a bump, she heads to the bathroom and pricks it with needle. It oozes a white pus, which is shown in close-up as Mother digs her finger in it and pulls out a long clump of hair. In addition to the hair, she develops a heightened sense of smell and begins to revisit her old art studio, as well as memories of her own mother. One night, she wakes to the call of a pack of dogs outside her front door. She greets them like old friends, but then they start to attack her. The next day, she experiences a fierce craving for meat and gets a large portion to split with her son at the cafe in the grocery store. With broken forks, Mother and her son dive into the lunch with their hands and face, making animalistic noises. She draws judgmental looks, first from men in the café, and then from other women. Just as she is feeling insecure, a friendly face, an older woman, offers some encouragement by sharing her own stories of time spent with her son. In response, Mother calls out to her “Don’t go Norma. Tell me about your son. Did you work when he was little? Did you make all of the right choices? Is there anything you would have done differently? Tell me the secrets!” But Norma does not turn back or reveal these secrets.

The visual depiction of Mother’s transformation is slow and grotesque. The way that she digs into her skin with her finger, the oozing pus, the dead animals left by the pack of dogs at her front door, shoving her face into food, and barking with her mouth open and full of food are intentionally repulsive, provoking a visceral reaction from the audience. Calling back to Kristeva’s most archaic forms of abjection–food disgust and the corpse—these transformation scenes illustrate Kristeva’s point that it is “not a lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection, but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect boundaries, positions, rules.” 37  These scenes, in the world of the film, disturb Mother’s sense of routine and disturb her sense of identity, which is reflected in her call-out to Norma. What makes the transformation abject to the audience is that these repulsive scenes disturb the culturally-conceived ideal of motherhood. As pointed out previously, essentialist points of view on motherhood position mothers as answering a divine or biological call. 38  Being a mother is supposed to be a beautiful sacrifice. However, Mother’s transformation in Nightbitch pushes against that ideology and reveals an uglier, more conflicted state of motherhood. We see this particularly in Mother’s question to Norma, “Did you make all of the right choices?” It is a loaded question, and also one that is arguably informed by the social pressure to be the “best” mother that has proliferated our culture via the mommy wars. 39  At the same time, Mother’s transformation suggests that motherhood is not a “natural” thing that all women are called to, but rather that motherhood is a confusing process that a woman, even after having a child, must grapple with and grow into.

The Monstrous-Feminine Transformed in Nightbitch

After the scene with Norma, the mother’s husband—also unnamed in the film and listed as Father in the credits—returns from a week-long work trip, and we see Mother engage in self-care in the form of a shower. Getting undressed, she notices a set of nipples running down her stomach, like a dog. Anxiety crosses her face, and the camera focuses on her expression from a low angle. She gets in the shower and she is filmed from behind in a shot that is reminiscent of the shower scene from Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). However, instead of being surprised by a knife- wielding maniac like Marion in Psycho, she jumps when her husband bangs an empty milk carton against the shower door, complaining about having to care for their son. She tells him to get the milk himself and snarkily requests tampons from him, calling this month’s cycle a “doozy.” The scene concludes with a pan to the drain where her menstrual blood spirals down, again mirroring the shower scene in Psycho. The following day, Mother declares that she is giving up her past life entirely to focus on motherhood and, in doing so, she completes her transformation. That night, she fully turns into a dog and then digs, runs, and hunts. When she returns, once more human, she has sex with her husband in the shower, her voice-over stating, “I was once a girl, a woman, a bride, a mother, and now I will be this . . . I am a woman, and I am an animal. I am new but also ancient. I have been ashamed, but I will be no more.” The camera moves from the sex to the drain again, and this time dirt is shown being flushed down the drain, once more mirroring the shot of blood washing down the drain from Psycho.

This is the moment in Mother’s transformation in Nightbitch that goes beyond just the abject and Mother becomes the monstrous-feminine figure of the story. According to Creed, male-directed films utilized the trope of the monstrous-feminine to explore patriarchal fears about female sexuality, while Feminist New Wave films reimagine the monstrous-feminine as an empowering force. 40  Furthermore, “New Wave directors play with the generic conventions of maternal horror by inventing new forms of the mother-child relationship as well as new ways in which the mother speaks in her own voice.” 41  This is something that Nightbitch is also arguably doing in the final transformation scene that is bookended by the two shower scenes. The visual references to the shower scene from Psycho turn that iconic scene on its head. In Psycho, a woman on the run is murdered by the owner of the hotel she is staying at when she is taking a shower. As the story continues, it is later revealed that the murderer was madman with a disturbing relationship to his mother. Nightbitch reverses this by creating a shower scene that is not the literal death of Mother, but rather a metaphorical death that leads to a rebirth. In transforming into the monstrous-feminine, Mother finds the empowerment with which Creed argues Feminist New Wave films imbue the figure of the monstrous-feminine, appropriating and redeploying it as “a liberating and transformative figure.” 42  The shot of her menstrual blood washing down the drain, marking her fertility cycle, can be interpreted as symbolizing the death of her previous being as a childless woman, while the identical shot of the dirt washing down the drain can be interpreted as representing rebirth, a rising from the grave what/who she once was. 

At the same time, conflicting ideologies surrounding motherhood symbolically play out in Nightbitch in the physical transformation of Mother: the essentialist ideology that motherhood alone is a woman’s purpose and the feminist position that being a mother is just one facet of a woman’s life. According to Hall, ideology is often “a site of struggle (between competing definitions) and a stake–a prize to be won–in the conduct of the particular struggles.” 43  In essence, this means that an ideology about a certain social concept can be debated but cannot transcend the society that helped construct the ideology. In Mother’s transformation into the monstrous-feminine, she is symbolically illustrating contemporary debates about motherhood in the U.S., but she doesn’t revolt against the dominant ideology surrounding motherhood. Instead, a the end of the film, following her transformation, she accepts her role as mother, throws herself into motherhood, and abandons her desire to return to her career. As a result, while the film story makes an attempt to undermine the hegemonic belief that a women’s sole purpose is to be a mother by acknowledging that Mother’s life had purpose before motherhood, it ends with her throwing that purpose away in order to embrace the patriarchal model of motherhood. In this sense, Mother’s transformation is pivotal and poignant in the film, but I would argue that it is not necessarily liberating from an ideological standpoint.

What the film presents instead is a monstrous-feminine mother figure that is transformative, but not liberating. This becomes especially evident in the climax scene of the movie, which also happens to be the last instance of abjection in the film. This is the scene in which Mother has dinner with friends from graduate school, “art scene” friends that she had made before motherhood. At this dinner, for which she must journey into the city, her friends talk about their artwork. When they order, the waiter cannot hear Mother. When they get their food, and they are eating, Mother realizes that she is literally not being heard by either her friends or the waitstaff. The camera focuses on her at the head of the table, her eyes drifting hungrily to her friends' plates of meat, as she tries to eat her kale salad but is ultimately disgusted with it. She says, to herself, with the chatter of the restaurant now replaced on the soundtrack by the sound of cicadas late at night, “Oh . . . this kale . . . it’s just pushing it down further. All of them. Rage and disappointment. I thought that I had digested it, but it is still down there, just burning a hole in me. I am not the woman that I used to be . . . she’s down there also in my intestines buried in kale. She’s biding her time or maybe she’s dead, she suffocated.” She then  adds that she feels as though she is insignificant, and tears up as she tries another bite of the kale. However, she can’t stomach it, and she spits it out as soon as it is in her mouth, gagging before jolting upright, barking at her friends, running out of the restaurant, and stealing a burger from a stranger's plate, finally running off into the night transformed into a dog. 

This scene acts as a pivotal turning point in the movie’s story. It is when the monstrous-feminine mother experiences abjection of the self. According to Kristeva, abjection of the self, typically occurs when confronted with a corpse, and is when the abject “shows me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live . . . There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being…The border has become an object. How can I be without border?” 44  There is a sense n which, in this scene in the film, Mother is facing the corpse of her womanhood prior to motherhood. This is captured in the conversations with her old friends that she no longer feels that she can contribute to, and, in this scene, she even refers to her old self as “dead” and “suffocated.” She is facing everything she has thrust aside–her old life, her passions, and her emotions–in order to exist as a mother. 

As previously discussed, Mother’s transformation into nightbitch and thus the monstrous-feminine, represents her brushing up against cultural expectations for stay-at-home mothers. This final transformation at the dinner with her former friends represents brushing up against an entirely different set of cultural expectations concerning mothers who continue to work and/or childless people. 45  It also is the moment in the film that our monstrous-feminine protagonist realizes that she is monstrous, that she exists outside both camps of the mommy wars. The result is a revolt against the either/or ideology of the mommy wars: Mother separates from her husband, shifts to part-time parenting as a result of having joint custody of their son, and returns to making art. In this, Mother also arguably explores what it means to be a woman with a child outside the borders that have been established for her both by patriarchal and and feminist models of motherhood.

However, the film does not end there. Instead, it ends with Mother getting back together with her husband, who has changed his ways, and making a new set of friends—in the process returning to compliance with the patriarchal model of motherhood that she had seemingly rejected. In this light, Mother’s transformation into the monstrous-feminine in the film provides a circumscribed critique of dominant cultural ideologies surrounding motherhood, but ultimately does little to dismantle the patriarchal model of motherhood; it just suggests how women can find ways to potentially live more productively under it. Moreover, the story told by the film is one in which motherhood is positioned only as an individual experience and not at all one that is shaped by the cultural and institutional systems in which mothers exists. The narrative of Nightbitch barely addresses the systems that underpin the issues at the center of the mommy wars, and rather than seeing Mother overcoming systemic issues, we see her overcome interpersonal issues in a story that ultimately implies that an individual can opt-out of the system through self-discovery and willpower. Calling back to Hall’s sentiment that media like film help produce consensus, and on Barthes’ idea that myths “appear to mean something by themselves,” and devoid of historical or social context, 46  this movie appears to create a consensus that motherhood is shaped by the individual experience, reinforcing cultural myths of motherhood due to its erasure of historical and social context.

Conclusion

In the end, Nightbitch attempts to provide a feminist critique of the patriarchal ideologies that surround motherhood, but falls short in this critique. Through thorough ideological and psychoanalytical analysis, it is clear that the film utilizes elements of the horrific to create a monstrous-feminine figure that illustrates the challenges that come with motherhood—challenges that are rarely highlighted in popular film. Likewise, though the film fails to either acknowledge or explore the systemic inequalities that put mothers at a disadvantage, such as inaccessible childcare and maternal healthcare, its use of abjection through horrific elements such as body horror challenges the audience to expand their idea of what a mother can be and offers echoes of previous waves of feminism. It is therefore maybe most accurately characterized as critique that is  circumscribed and that gestures towards certain feminist movements and discourses while stopping short of the kind of ideological subversion found in the Feminist New Wave films it likewise appears to gesture towards. Nightbitch suggests to its audience that motherhood is not women’s defining purpose, but rather a transformation. However, like the frilly incentives the US Government is currently considering to incentivize motherhood, it is yet another film that fails to tackle in any meaningful way the structures in place that contain that transformation.

Footnotes

• 1

  Barbara Creed, Return of the Monstrous-Feminine: Feminist New Wave Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2022), 1.

• 2

  Sophie Elmhirst, “The Rise and Fall of the Trad Wife,” The New Yorker, March 29, 2024, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-trad-wife.

• 3

  Hannah Demissie and Katherine Faulders, “Trump Administration Looking at $5,000 ‘Baby Bonus’ to Incentivize Public to Have More Children,” ABC News, April 23, 2025, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-administration-5000-baby-bonus-incentivize-public- children/story?id=121094707.

• 4

  Mark Sherman, “Supreme Co urt Overturns Roe v. Wade, Ends Constitutional Protections for Abortion,” PBS News, June 24, 2022, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/supreme-court- overturns-roe-v-wade-ends-constitutional-right-for-abortion.

• 5

  Lauren Peller, et.al., “Republicans and Democrats Team Up to Defy House Leadership on Voting for New Parents,” ABC News, April 1, 2025. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/house-gop- leaders-expected-block-proxy-voting-new/story?id=120372013.

• 6

  Helena Henriksson, et.al., “Ambivalent Narratives of Motherhood and Mothering: From Normal and Natural to Not-At-All,” in Narratives of Motherhood and Motherhood in Fiction and Life Writing, ed., by Helena Henriksson et.al., (Palgrave Macmillan 2023), 6.

• 7

  Henriksson, et.al., “Ambivalent Narratives of Motherhood and Mothering,” 4.

• 8

  Gerda Neyer and Laura Bernardi, “Feminist Perspectives on Motherhood and Reproduction,” Historical Social Research 36, no. 2 (2011): 165-166, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41151279.

• 9

  Neyer and Bernardi, “Feminist Perspectives on Motherhood and Reproduction,” 164.

• 10

  R. Claire Snyder, “What is Third-Wave Feminism? A New Directions Essay,” Signs, 34, no. 1 (2008): 175-180, https://doi.org/10.1086/588436.

• 11

  Neyer and Bernardi, “Feminist Perspectives on Motherhood and Reproduction,” 167.

• 12

  “Feminism: The Fourth Wave,” National Women’s History Museum, published December 3,

  2021, https://www.womenshistory.org/exhibits/feminism-fourth-wave.

• 13

  “Feminism: The Fourth Wave.”

• 14

  Jenna Abetz and Julia Moore, “Welcome to the Mommy Wars, Ladies: Making Sense of the Ideology of Combative Mothering in Mommy Blogs,” Communication Culture & Critique 11, (2018): 265.

• 15

  Abetz and Moore, “Welcome to the Mommy Wars,” 266.

• 16

  Elmhirst, “The Rise and Fall of the Trad Wife.”

• 17

  Abetz and Moore, “Welcome to the Mommy Wars,” 267-268.

• 18

  Lydia Guertin, “Hollywood Culture: Portrayals of Romantic Interactions and Gender Tropes Pre- and Post- Sexual Assault Awareness Movements of the 21st Century,” The Young Researcher 4, no.1 (2020): 18-20.

• 19

  Guertin, “Hollywood Culture,” 19.

• 20

  Roland Barthes, “Myth Today,” In Cultural Theory and Popular Culture Reader, edited by John Storey, (Person Educated Limited, 2006), 500.

• 21

  Barthes, “Myth Today,” 501.

• 22

  Stuart Hall, “The Rediscovery of ‘Ideology’: Return of the Repressed in Media Studies,” In Cultural Theory and Popular Culture Reader, edited by John Storey, (Person Educated Limited, 2006), 152.

• 23

  Hall, “The Rediscovery of ‘Ideology’: Return of the Repressed in Media Studies,” 152.

   

• 24

  Henriksson, et.al., “Ambivalent Narratives of Motherhood and Mothering,” 5.

• 25

  Henriksson, et.al., “Ambivalent Narratives of Motherhood and Mothering” 8.

• 26

  Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon Roudiez, (Columbia University Press, 1982), 2.

• 27

  Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 3.

• 28

  Creed, Return of the Monstrous-Feminine, 2-3.

• 29

  Creed, Return of the Monstrous-Feminine, 4.

• 30

  Creed, Return of the Monstrous-Feminine, 12.

• 31

  Henriksson, et.al., “Ambivalent Narratives of Motherhood and Mothering,” 4.

• 32

  Neyer and Bernardi, “Feminist Perspectives on Motherhood and Reproduction,” 162-167.

• 33

  Creed, Return of the Monstrous-Feminine: Feminist New Wave Cinema, 2-4.

• 34

  Creed, Return of the Monstrous-Feminine: Feminist New Wave Cinema, 23.

• 35

  For more on this, see Creed, Return of the Monstrous-Feminine: Feminist New Wave Cinema, 13.

• 36

  Hall, “The Rediscovery of ‘Ideology’: Return of the Repressed in Media Studies,” 136.

• 37

   Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4.

• 38

  Henriksson, et.al., “Ambivalent Narratives of Motherhood and Mothering” 3.

• 39

  For more on this pressure, see Abetz and Moore, “Welcome to the Mommy Wars, Ladies: Making Sense of the Ideology of Combative Mothering in Mommy Blogs.”.

• 40

  Creed, Return of the Monstrous-Feminine: Feminist New Wave Cinema, 4.

• 41

  Creed, Return of the Monstrous-Feminine: Feminist New Wave Cinema, 24.

• 42

  Creed, Return of the Monstrous-Feminine: Feminist New Wave Cinema, 4.

• 43

  Hall, “The Rediscovery of ‘Ideology’: Return of the Repressed in Media Studies,” 137.

• 44

  Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 3-4.

• 45

  Abetz and Moore,“Welcome to the Mommy Wars,” 265.

• 46

  Barthes, ”Myth Today,” 501.