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In the first half the 1990s, Kees van Kooten and Wim de Bie appeared in twelve television skits as Carla and Frank van Putten, mother and son. Each instalment follows a fixed narrative development, in which Carla’s domineering behaviour causes deep frustration with Frank. I investigate how these skits relate to Momism: a psychiatric and sociological discourse that ascribes a large number of ‘disorders’ with men – including asthma, autism, homosexuality, and schizophrenia – to an incorrect upbringing by a mother who either suffocates (too hot) or neglects (too cold) her son. Van Kooten and De Bie are commonly thought to make subversive satire. However, by way of a narratological analysis I show that, with the exception of the first two skits, the viewer is consistently invited to laugh at Carla as a bad mother.

Since the appearance of her early-career bestseller Gender Trouble in 1990, American philosopher Judith Butler is one of the most influential (and at times controversial) thinkers in academia. Her work addresses numerous socially pertinent topics such as gender normativity, political speech, media representations of war, and the democratic power of assembling bodies. The volume Bodies That Still Matter: Resonances of the Work of Judith Butler brings together essays from scholars across academic disciplines who apply, reflect on, and further Butler's ideas to their own research. It includes a new essay by Butler herself, from which it takes its title. Organized around four key themes in Butler's scholarship - performativity, speech, precarity, and assembly - the volume offers an excellent introduction to the contemporary relevance of Butler's thinking, a multi-perspectival approach to key topics of contemporary critical theory, and a testimony to the vibrant interdisciplinary discourses characterizing much of today's humanities' research.

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