Celebrity Mom Research Articles

From the womb to the world: a study of pregnancy narratives by celebrity moms in India

This article examines how celebrity moms in India are self-constructing their public persona through their pregnancy narratives. As a form of personal narrative, pregnancy narratives provide important insights into the...

Fit for Motherhood: The Glocalization of Maternal Physical Activity in Mother and Baby Magazine

Fit for Motherhood: The Glocalization of Maternal Physical Activity in <i>Mother and Baby</i> Magazine

“Who Doesn’t Want to Be This Hot Mom?”: Celebrity Mom Profiles and Mothers’ Accounts of Their Postpartum Bodies

In this article, we explore mothers’ responses to celebrity mom body (CMB) profiles in popular magazines. Drawing from objectification theory, we frame CMB images as one component of the ubiquitous sexualization of girls’ and women’s bodies, and ask how these images influence mothers’ views of their postpartum bodies. While a good deal of previous research examines the media portrayal of pregnant and postpartum bodies, very few studies go on to ask how these images affect mothers’ self-image and their relationships with men. During in-depth interviews, we showed our sample CMB images and found that most mothers evaluated themselves negatively; however, we add that they evaluated themselves in different ways depending on their social class and educational backgrounds. All mothers identified negative effects of CMB images on men, which diminished mothers’ feelings of sexual attractiveness to male partners.

Playing Pregnancy: The Ludification and Gamification of Expectant Motherhood in Smartphone Apps

Like other forms of embodiment, pregnancy has increasingly become subject to representation and interpretation via digital technologies. Pregnancy and the unborn entity were largely private, and few people beyond the pregnant women herself had access to the foetus growing within her (Duden). Now pregnant and foetal bodies have become open to public portrayal and display (Lupton The Social Worlds of the Unborn). A plethora of online materials – websites depicting the unborn entity from the moment of conception, amateur YouTube videos of births, social media postings of ultrasounds and self-taken photos (‘selfies’) showing changes in pregnant bellies, and so on – now ensure the documentation of pregnant and unborn bodies in extensive detail, rendering them open to other people’s scrutiny. Other recent digital technologies directed at pregnancy include mobile software applications, or ‘apps’. In this article, we draw on our study involving a critical discourse analysis of a corpus of pregnancy-related apps offered in the two major app stores. In so doing, we discuss the ways in which pregnancy-related apps portray pregnant and unborn bodies. We place a particular focus on the ludification and gamification strategies employed to position pregnancy as a playful, creative and fulfilling experience that is frequently focused on consumption. As we will demonstrate, these strategies have wider implications for concepts of pregnant and foetal embodiment and subjectivity. It is important here to make a distinction between ludification and gamification. Ludification is a broader term than gamification. It is used in the academic literature on gaming (sometimes referred to as ‘ludology’) to refer to elements of games reaching into other aspects of life beyond leisure pursuits (Frissen et al. Playful Identities: The Ludification of Digital Media Cultures; Raessens). Frissen et al. (Frissen et al. "Homo Ludens 2.0: Play, Media and Identity") for example, claim that even serious pursuits such as work, politics, education and warfare have been subjected to ludification. They note that digital technologies in general tend to incorporate ludic dimensions. Gamification has been described as ‘the use of game design elements in non-game contexts’ (Deterding et al. 9). The term originated in the digital media industry to describe the incorporation of features into digital technologies that not explicitly designed as games, such as competition, badges, rewards and fun that engaged and motivated users to make them more enjoyable to use. Gamification is now often used in literatures on marketing strategies, persuasive computing or behaviour modification. It is an important element of ‘nudge’, an approach to behaviour change that involves persuasion over coercion (Jones, Pykett and Whitehead). Gamification thus differs from ludification in that the former involves applying ludic principles for reasons other than the pleasures of enjoying the game for their own sake, often to achieve objectives set by actors and agencies other than the gamer. Indeed, this is why gamification software has been described by Bogost (Bogost) as ‘exploitationware’.

“Am I a Better Mother Than You?”

This article explored the relationship between media exposure and contemporary motherhood based on social comparison theory (SCT). Based on previous studies indicating the flood of media discourse of celebrity moms and mothers’ heavy reliance on the Internet, this article focused on celebrity mom and the Internet, respectively, as channels through which ideal motherhood is communicated. It was hypothesized that exposure to these channels would reinforce the ideology of contemporary motherhood characterized by intensive mothering, and promote comparison and competition. The questionnaire survey, conducted among 533 Korean mothers, revealed that exposure to celebrity mom discourse and online childrearing information was associated with the endorsement of the intensive mothering ideology, social comparison orientation (SCO), or competitiveness. Moreover, exposure to celebrity mom discourse was associated with the endorsement of intensive mothering ideology and SCO only among mothers who work outside the home, suggesting that celebrity moms serve as role models for them.

She Gives Birth, She's Wearing a Bikini: Mobilizing the Postpregnant Celebrity Mom Body to Manage the Post–Second Wave Crisis in Femininity

This essay evaluates the new post-pregnant quickly slender, even bikini-ready, body as a rhetorical phenomenon within the broader context of the new momism and the post–second wave crisis in femininity. The rhetorical analysis of the quickly slender celebrity mom profiles reveals that the new momism is far more complex rhetorically then just backlash and cooptation; rather, the new momism is a sophisticated and complex backlash, and it works rhetorically to simultaneously acknowledge and refute (erode) feminist gains. The quickly slender, even bikini-ready, body also works as a rhetorical device to strategically manage the post–second wave crisis in femininity in ways that continue to re-establish both mothering and beauty as the most important components of femininity, while reinforcing the domestic division of labor that continues to persist between women and men in the private sphere despite the fact that unencumbered (without children) men and women's lives are much more similar today.

Mothering Across Borders: Narratives of Imigrant Mothers in the United States

Over the past several decades, motherhood has gained a heightened visibility in U.S. popular culture. A combination of disparate phenomenon - the increased media coverage of celebrity moms, the development of targeted marketing strategies, the appearance of mommy lit and mommy memoirs, the prominence of mama bloggers in cyberspace, and the growing political advocacy of mother's rights - has propelled increasing numbers of images of as well as mothers' voices, into the public sphere. Many of the books, magazines, essays, websites, and blogs penned by mothers have reflected the full complexity of mothers 'lives and experiences, thus challenging cultural narratives about what it means to be a good mother (Hewett 2006a, 2006b). Yet despite this outpouring, and despite evidence of a growing diversity among the mothers who are writing and speaking, few if any of these narratives reflect the experiences of immigrant mothers. During the same period of time, quite a few negative images of immigrants have surfaced. These images have a longer history; as scholars such as Leo Chavez (2001, 2007) and Katrina Irving (2000) argue, racist images of, and mythologies about, immigrants have circulated throughout the twentieth century. The 1980s and 1990s have been marked by the flourishing of a nativism movement that has publicly voiced multiple objections to immigration, particularly from Latin America (Perea 1997; Chavez 1997). This recent surge of anti- immigration sentiment has focused on immigrant women's bodies, most of all those of Mexican immigrant women (Chavez 1997, 2007). The resulting narratives in the popular media portray immigrant women (particularly their reproductive rates) as posing serious threats to the (Chavez 2007, 87) - a nation that continues to be defined by Anglos, its legitimate citizens (88). Chavez (2007) further observes that anti -immigrant discourses and images do not simply remain in the popular realm but can have real political consequences. Indeed, since 9/11, increased consciousness about national security has led to stepped-up deportations, increased workplace raids, increased border security, the construction of hundreds of miles of a border wall, the confinement of undocumented immigrants in detention centers, the separation of families, and incidents of human rights violations. Given this hostile climate, one can understand the obstacles preventing immigrant mothers from sharing their stories - as well as the need for them. One exception to this silence lies in the ongoing research by a group of feminist social scientists studying gender and migration, who not only have begun to analyze and theorize the experiences of immigrant women but also have started to collect personal narratives from many of their subjects. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Ernestine Avila (2007) identified the increasing phenomenon of motherhood, the practice of mothers living and working in different countries from those of their children, thus resulting in a care deficit in many third world/global South nations (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003, 8). These scholars are examining the impact of transnational mothering on families as well as on mothers themselves, asking whether the practice of taking on new duties as breadwinners enables immigrant mothers to break free of oppressive ideologies of motherhood - or whether gendered ideologies remain rigid and unforgiving, demanding performances of supermothering across the borders of time and space (Parrenas 2005, 103). As a feminist literary critic, I have found much of this research instructive and useful. Indeed, the insights provided by social science, on the one hand, and cultural productions such as literature and film, on the other, can prove quite illuminating when considered together. Literary studies reminds us that creative texts do not provide transparent windows onto the world, but rather individually crafted frames that require us to ask questions about issues of representation and interpretation - to think about how we see in addition to what we see. …

Introduction

Introduction Nicole Cooley (bio) and Pamela Stone (bio) On a warm fall afternoon last year, we sat on small wooden chairs in the hallway of an elementary school. It was the end of a school day. In a corner, a large fish tank bubbled and glowed. Young children ran up and down the hall with backpacks, lunchboxes, juice boxes, and library books. The school hallway was loud but joyful—children shouted, sang, and played around us. And everywhere there were mothers. Moms in exercise clothes pushing strollers, women wearing business suits holding their Blackberries, babysitters and nannies, as well as an occasional dad. In the middle of this, in the hallway, we sat together with our notebooks and pens to draft the call for papers for this issue. We were here, at this elementary school in northern New Jersey that Nicole's daughters attend, with the work of mothering happening all around us, to work on this special issue titled Mother. The moment marked one of the many synchronicities and ironies that have imbued this issue. We sat together in the elementary school hallway because Pamela had been in the area giving a talk on mothering at a local university and Nicole could not secure child care for her young children that afternoon. Meeting at the school allowed us to have time to discuss Mother. Indeed, reflecting on this experience, we realized that this elementary school was the perfect setting to mark the beginnings of this special issue. We are accustomed to the constant blurring of boundaries between home and work; between mothering and teaching/writing; between, ultimately, our personal and professional identities. In fact, as we look back on our work on this issue, we are aware of the irony of our writing and thinking about mothering being constantly interrupted by mothering and, in general, by care work. This ranged widely, from comforting a five-year-old with a fever to helping a college student son find an internship to single parenting while a partner is traveling abroad to seeing a husband through emergency surgery. In her famous study about women writers, Silences, Tillie Olsen describes the constant interruptions of mothering [End Page 13] and notes that "habits of years—response to others, distractibility, responsibility for daily matters—stay with you, mark you, become you" (1978, 39). Yet, as professors/writers who are mothers, we both found ourselves used to—even expecting—such boundaries to be disrupted and called into question. The interruptions and disruptions had become an integral part of our lives as professional working mothers. We were not surprised that they became part of the experience of editing this issue too. We embraced coediting this issue because of our shared sense of having entered a "motherhood moment" in both our personal and professional lives as well as in the culture at large. From celebrity mom baby-bump sightings to recent televised debates between "stay-at-home moms" and "working moms," from "welfare mothers" to "Alpha moms," images of motherhood are circulating in our culture as never before. Motherhood, we felt, demanded a new look. Our call for papers elicited a record-breaking number of submissions, testifying to the vigor and energy of scholarship in this area. While we didn't receive papers on all the topics on our wish list, the work we received spanned a broad spectrum of subjects, disciplines, approaches, and methodologies, highlighting the cross-cutting nature and interdisciplinarity of scholarship on motherhood. Furthermore, the volume and quality of creative writing submissions we received reveals that questions about mothering are being raised by many writers across poetry, fiction, and nonfiction prose memoir. For several reasons, for the title of this WSQ special issue, we chose Mother. First and foremost, mother is both a verb and a noun. One can be a mother. One can also mother, as an action. "Mother" invokes the Virgin Mary at the same as it is an expletive—and we enjoy that irreverence. When thinking about our title, we considered the term alongside other possibilities, namely, Motherhood and Mothering. But neither captures the sense of the word that most intrigues us here. Feminist theorists like Adrienne Rich have observed that there...

Confessions of a Celebrity Mom: Brooke Shields's Down Came the Rain: My Journey through Postpartum Depression

In “Confessions of a Celebrity Mom: Brooke Shields's Down Came the Rain,” I look at Brooke Shields's recent memoir of postpartum depression as exemplifying the mythic thinking that, according to Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, characterizes autopathography as a genre. In particular, I examine the rhetorical strategies and appeals by which, in the context of her celebrity, Shields defends herself against the shame and stigma attached to postpartum depression in a culture that both idealizes and devalues motherhood. The memoir is an honest yet canny disclosure of intimate moments of depression, shame, and suicidal thinking: in it, the author both exposes herself to the public eye (and attacks by Tom Cruise) and, drawing on the allure of her celebrity, veils herself and her privileged life from any real scrutiny.

Still something else besides a mother? Negotiating celebrity motherhood in Sarah Jessica Parker's star story

This essay examines media coverage of the rise of Sarah Jessica Parker, from jobbing movie actress to A-list television superstar and fashion icon, following her starring role as sex-columnist fashionista Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City (HBO, 1998–2004). Significantly, during this same period Parker also became a mother, giving birth to her son by actor Matthew Broderick in 2002. If motherhood in the twentieth century at least has conventionally been constructed as at odds with glamour, style and trend-setting, Parker's fortunes indicate a changing cultural landscape. Celebration of the “celebrity mom”, twinned with the emergence of the aspirational “yummy-mummy”, have become highly visible preoccupations widely evident across contemporary representations of motherhood, the ramifications of which are explored here. Examining interviews conducted with the star in women's magazines drawn largely from the United Kingdom and United States through 2002–2006, the essay explores Parker's role as a “celebrity mom” and how this coverage of her consistently adopts a confessional mode and intimate address in order to dispel any apparent conflict wrought to her prior celebrity by her new maternal status.

Confessions of a Celebrity Mom: Brooke Shields’s Down Came the Rain: My Journey through Postpartum Depression

In “Confessions of a Celebrity Mom: Brooke Shields’s Down Came the Rain ,” I look at Brooke Shields’s recent memoir of postpartum depression as exemplifying the mythic thinking that, according to Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, characterizes autopathography as a genre. In particular, I examine the rhetorical strategies and appeals by which, in the context of her celebrity, Shields defends herself against the shame and stigma attached to postpartum depression in a culture that both idealizes and devalues motherhood. The memoir is an honest yet canny disclosure of intimate moments of depression, shame, and suicidal thinking: in it, the author both exposes herself to the public eye (and attacks by Tom Cruise) and, drawing on the allure of her celebrity, veils herself and her privileged life from any real scrutiny. Dans « Confessions of a Celebrity Mom : Brooke Shield’s Down Came the Rain », j’ai jeté un regard sur le récent mémoire de Brooke Shields portant sur la dépression postpartum comme exemple de la pensée mythique qui, selon Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, caractérise l’autopathographie comme un genre. En particulier, j’ai examiné les stratégies rhétoriques et les appels en fonction desquels, dans le contexte de sa célébrité, Brooke Shields se défend contre la honte et le stigmate lié à la dépression postpartum dans une culture qui à la fois idéalise et dévalue la maternité. Le mémoire est une divulgation honnête mais quand même rusée de moments intimes de dépression, de honte, et d’idées suicidaires : dans ce livre, l’auteure s’expose aux regards du public (et aux attaques de Tom Cruise) et, tirant parti de sa célébrité, occulte son personnage et sa vie privilégiée contre tout réel examen.

The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women. Susan J. Douglas &amp; Meredith W. Michaels

The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women. Susan J. Douglas & Meredith W. Michaels. New York: Free Press. 2004. 383 pp. ISBN 0-7432-5999-8. $15.00 (paper). This is a fun read. Susan Douglas (professor of communications at University of Michigan and of one) and Meredith Michaels (philosopher at Smith College and of five) have written a very funny and very powerful book about the new momism, a set of ideals, norms, and practices that sets standards of success that are impossible to meet, requiring a combination of selflessness (devoting herself 24/7 to her children) and professionalism (the skills of a therapist, pediatrician [Dr. Mom], consumer products safety inspector, and teacher). The opening passages contrast familiar reality of everyday childrearing with expectations of mothering. They begin with this scene-you are standing in a checkout line in a grocery store with a 3-year-old having a meltdown because you did not buy him latest Lunchables, surrounded by magazines with cover stories featuring gorgeous, moms who gush about how is sexy and how they love getting up in middle of night to feed or sooth him, while your teenager, who has not spoken in days except to say you've ruined my life, followed by everyone else has one, is sulking in car with a new rap-metal band Piss on Parentals blasting). This hellish scene transitions seamlessly into what a good would do once she got home (transform process of putting groceries away into a fun game with up-beat Raffi songs playing in background. Then while you steam broccoli and poach chicken breasts in Vouvray and Evian water, you and kids would do a jigsaw puzzle in shape of United Arab Emirates. Your husband returns home so overcome with admiration for how well you do it all that he looks lovingly into your eyes, kisses you and presents you with a diamond anniversary bracelet ... children chattering away happily, help set table and then eat their broccoli. After dinner, you all go out and stencil driveway with autumn leaves). This opener provides a taste of what is to come, both in terms of style and themes. Douglas and Michaels, both self-avowed mothers with an attitude problem, argue convincingly that this intensive mothering is just a new, hipper version of the feminist mystique. They also show how image of new, improved mom is contingent on images of delinquent, bad Indeed, one of most interesting passages describes history and import of linguistic shift from mother to mom with infantilizing/patronizing term now norm for soccer moms, stay at home moms, or celebrity moms, while mother is reserved for bad ones-single, teen, welfare, or working mothers. Because of witty style, original scholarship on which it is based is not immediately obvious. Douglas and Michaels did content analyses of news, women's magazines, television shows, Hollywood movies, and parenting manuals. Any one of these studies (imagine watching 30 years worth of news coverage on motherhood) would be impressive, and they have a lot of material to work with as they so amply show motherhood has been a media obsession since mid-80s. …