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To study how twenty-first-century fairy tale retellings recombine villainy and motherhood, this chapter analyses two mother figures in Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019): Aurora's godmother, Maleficent, and Aurora's soon-to-be mother-in-law, Queen Ingrith. I argue that Mistress of Evil attempts and fails to trouble the Good/Terrible Mother binary, ultimately reconfirming traditional notions of the Good Mother, by juxtaposing two mother villain characters. Ingrith first appears to be the epitome of the Good Mother, but the film quickly reveals that she is actually the stereotypical evil mother-in-law who uses the Good Mother image to mask her villainy. By exposing Ingrith's lie, the film debases the myth of perfect motherhood, suggesting that the image of the ‘Good Mother’ is only used to vilify other women in order to control people, but it also uses the Good Mother image to highlight how Terrible Ingrith is. Maleficent, on the other hand, vacillates between twenty-first-century images of the Terrible and Good Mother, specifically the aberrant and supermother. Rather than balancing these images and depicting a more nuanced motherhood, the film switches Maleficent completely between these two extremes, making her seem more villainous when she is aberrant and more motherly when she steps into the role of supermother. Whereas the representation of Ingrith highlights the lie of the Good Mother, Maleficent is forced into becoming a variation of that image. I argue that while Mistress of Evil attempts to reveal the pernicious nature of the Good Mother myth, it ultimately reconfirms it for a new generation of women.

Purpose – Informed by an intersectional perspective, this chapter examines how middle-class, immigrant Tamil (an Indian regional group) Brahmin (upper-caste) profess/ional women organize motherhood in the U.S., by identifying the arrangements of mothering they develop, and the conditions under which these emerge.Methodology/approach – Data is based on a year-long ethnography among Tamils in Atlanta, and multi-part, feminist life-history interviews with 33 first-generation, Tamil professional women, analyzed within a constructivist grounded theory method.Findings – Tamil immigrant motherhood emerges from the interplay of Tamil women's social location as an immigrant community of color in the U.S. and their agency. Paradoxically racialized as model minorities who are also culturally incommensurable with American society, Tamil women rework motherhood around breadwinning and cultural nurturing to mother for class and ethnicity respectively. They expand the hegemonic model of Tamil Brahmin motherhood beyond domesticity positioning their professional work as complementary to mothering, while simultaneously reinforcing hegemonic elements of mothers as keepers of culture, responsible for ethnic socialization of children. Mothering then enables them to engender integration into American society by positioning families as upwardly mobile, model minorities who are ethnic. This, however, exacts a personal toll: their limited professional mobility and reduced personal leisure time.Originality/value – By uncovering Tamil immigrant motherhood as structural and agentic, a site of power contestation between spouses and among Tamil women, and its salience in adaptation to America, this chapter advances scholarship on South Asians that under-theorizes mothering and that on immigrant parenting in which South Asians are invisible.

The term “parenting” has come to assume a specific sociological meaning: it defines parents’ role and agency not only with regard to their children, but also to the state, medical doctors, psychologists and educators. How normative stances toward parenting affect the lives of parents has started to be analyzed in the social sciences, however less is known about how the “culture of parenting” impacts on the way migrant families take care of their children. The purpose of this paper is to untangle the conceptual and disciplinary roots of parenting studies stemming from early anthropological studies of kinship and ethno-psychological theories, through to the anthropology of childhood and child rearing and the current socio-anthropological studies of parenting. This review offers conceptual tools for the creation of a critical perspective on migration and parenting.

The paper acknowledges the theoretical and empirical gap in the study of migration and parenting by illustrating the sparse and interdisciplinary literature which has dealt with migration and parenting.

The paper discusses the presented literature’s limits and potentialities in light of the new culture of parenting.

The paper addresses future paths for ethnographic work.