Women without Alternatives: Neonaticide and Preservation by Freezing
Type de matériel :
87
Véronique Courjault killed three of her children and kept two in her freezer; Dominique Laude-Sansuc killed and kept one of her children in the family freezer for two years. Choosing to work on the basis of two documentary films about these women’s trials, we tried to understand the motives that pushed them not only to choke their children at birth, but also to preserve their bodies. The father is always excluded from pregnancies that end up in neonaticide. The essential triangle father-mother-child does not exist; the pregnancy is experienced in loneliness or in ignorance. At birth, these women do not find their child, but a devastating anguish in her place. They silence the creature that they have encountered, but they do not make it disappear. Being unable to separate themselves from it, they preserve it, with the risk—which they probably seek—that the bodies be discovered by a family member.
Réseaux sociaux