The Escalating Price of Motherhood: Aesthetic Labour in Popular Representations of ‘Stay-at-Home’ Mothers

Abstract

The devaluation of domestic, reproductive, emotional and maternal labour has been extensively critiqued by feminist scholars and activists. Women’s domestic labour is normalised as ‘housework’, considered to have no material or economic recognition (Federici 2012), and childrearing and looking after the home are still often equated with ‘doing nothing’ (Crittenden 2010). Many have argued that cultural and media representations play a constitutive role in normalising the devaluation and thus exploitation of women’s productive and reproductive labour. The media legitimise the continuing lack of social, political and economic recognition and reward of motherhood by symbolically naturalising and masking maternal labour, for example, by representing mothers’ work as ‘natural’ and a product of intrinsic maternal love (Douglas and Michaels 2004). Building on this scholarship about the cultural construction of maternity, in this chapter we highlight aesthetic labour as a new(ly) added, previously unrecognised dimension of contemporary maternal labour that has emerged under neoliberalism.