Abstract
How do mothers navigate motherhood in an age of precarity through their engagement with digital media? Mothering through Precarity sets out to answer this question through 29 interviews with working- and middle-class mothers—including a subset who blog extensively—in Rust Belt Pennsylvania, as well as participant observation in a local, Christian mothering community. Usefully, the authors also examine the mothers’ activity across a broad swath of digital forums, such as local Facebook groups, couponing sites, mommy blogs, health and parenting sites, photo apps, and casual games.
Mothering through Precarity delves into the affective labor that animates women’s work in the family as they tirelessly strive to be the “best mom.” Facing layoffs, job insecurity, and precarious health care, the mothers share a sense of their primary emotional tasks: cultivating appreciation for family and ensuring the family’s future happiness, tasks made necessary, the authors contend, by the destabilizing forces of neoliberalism. Believing that family happiness depends on family autonomy, mothers organize their efforts around its privatization. In this way, mothers’ affective labor is a crucial mediating force whereby mothers neutralize the impact of precariousness on their families and shield the family from the volatilities of civil society, the market, and the state.
Digital media culture offers a convenient and powerful platform for mothers to achieve these ends, the book maintains. In what the authors dub the “mamasphere,” digital media provides readily accessible, affective communities brimming with an endless supply of inspiration, advice, and opportunity for mothers to enhance family life and display their appreciation for family. As the authors show, even their most mundane engagement with digital media, such as snapping family photos and posting them to Facebook, or more considerable efforts, such as couponing and launching online business ventures, provide key opportunities for creating intimacy and inscribing family moments as happy ones. Even in their examination of the more collective mothering communities, the authors find that mothers produce “individualized solidarities” with the aim of promoting family autonomy.
Mothering through Precarity is at its best when it demonstrates digital media as a crucial mechanism by which mothers daily discipline themselves to feel ever more optimistic and upbeat in spite of the pervasive uncertainty they feel. It also provides a cogent formulation of contemporary motherhood as simultaneously containing anxiety and optimizing happiness for the family. In doing so, the authors effectively meld Marianne Cooper’s (2014) concept of “security projects” with Jennifer Silva’s (2013) “mood economy.”
In addition, the authors develop the nice idea of “affective infrastructures” to capture how ordinary affects shape what we think is possible and necessary for adequate mothering, specifically, extraordinary flexibility and resilience. They accentuate the mothers’ admirable abilities to adapt to precarity, and how these capacities build resilience, although at times glossing over the emotional costs precarity brings to bear on the mothers’ lives and the oppressive and homogenizing effects of neoliberal forces.
The book has three primary problems. First, for a volume titled Mothering through Precarity, the idea of insecurity is strangely undertheorized, even ahistorical (despite a “history” chapter). Is the mothering that the authors evoke so sensitively somehow unique to this particular era? Did mothers in earlier epochs not strive to be mostly cheerful, to nurture family appreciation and autonomy? Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking (1989) posited cheerfulness as a universal maternal task, for example. Relatedly, while the authors note that some of their interviewees enjoy economic security, the book leaves unanswered whether mothers without precarious situations also face these pressures. How similar or dissimilar is their digital media use? While the authors pose precariousness as an explanatory framework for their findings about motherhood, it functions more as a potent backdrop.
Second, the authors also do not always make clear the links between their claims and their evidence. Most notably, the authors fail to distinguish between interviewees who identify as “mommy bloggers” and those who do not engage with digital media in this way. Yet they assert, for example, that contemporary motherhood entails a “4th shift” of family appreciation achieved through engagement with digital media. Their claims might overstate the importance of “digital entanglements” if they rely mostly on mommy bloggers, for example, but because these two samples—the regular mothers and the bloggers—are simply mixed together, readers are not able to assess this independently.
Finally, we found the absence—in the narratives of mothering presented here—of other family members such as grandparents or even spouses noteworthy, as if they were absent from the world of mothering, which was populated instead by commercial sites with advice about bottle-feeding and bedtime rituals or by bloggers with large followings. The absence of other voices made the isolation of these mothers—who live in primarily heteronormative, nuclear family contexts—seem even starker.
The book nonetheless plumbs the core tasks and anxieties of contemporary mothering well. Suitable for undergraduate and graduate courses at the intersection of family, gender, and media, we recommend this book, and in particular chapter three and the Conclusion, for sections highlighting the use of digital media in families.