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Love and motherhood in Louis Theroux’s Mothers on the Edge

In our ethnography of a purpose-built mother-baby psychiatric unit (MBU), love was rarely a topic raised by the mothers and staff we spoke with (Kathleen Connellan, Clemence Due, DamienW. Riggs andClare Bartholomaeus2020). In that project,weundertook interviewswith staff and mothers in addition to ethnographic observations of how staff and mothers moved within the space. On the rare occasions where love was spoken about during the interviews, it was in reference to a love of certain aspects of the space, such as the ready availability of natural light, echoing research on psychiatric units more broadly (Kathleen Connellan, Mads Gaardboe, Damien W. Riggs, Clemance Due, Amanda Reimscmidt and Lauren Mustillo 2013). This relatively limited focus on love was not surprising, given that our research sought to explore how both mothers and staff experience the built environment of the MBU. In the literature onMBUsmore broadly, however, love is also noticeably absent (Kathleen Connellan, Clare Bartholomaeus, ClemanceDue andDamienW. Riggs 2017). An exception to this appears in the work of Sonia Masciantonio, Susan R. Hemer and Anna Chur-Hansen (2018), who have examined how attachment theory may serve to reinforce normative assumptions about mother-baby love, potentially to the detriment of women staying in MBUs. Given the relative lack of focus on love in the academic literature, it was somewhat surprising to us that in Louis Theroux’ recent BBC documentary Mothers on the Edge (2019)—which focuses on mothers staying with their children in MBUs located in the United Kingdom—love appeared to be a consistent theme. We say surprising, though given the points raised by Masciantonio et al. (2018), it is not surprising that a documentary about mothers produced for public consumption should focus so closely on love. In this commentary, we seek to briefly explore how love is represented in the documentary. Specifically, our interest, following Masciantonio, Hemer and ChurHansen, is on how women are held to account for what is depicted as a failure of “maternal love,” and what this says more broadly about how women as mothers and partners are expected to act and feel. When speaking with the women included in the documentary, Theroux repeatedly asked about their feelings towards their children, and in voice-overs questioned how it can be that a woman does not feel love towards her child. With one woman in particular—Katherine—Theroux repeatedly informed her that he can see that she loves her child and has a connection with her child. This was in the face of Katherine FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 2020, VOL. 20, NO. 4, 590–593 https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2020.1750782