Discourses Of Motherhood Research Articles

“Vaccines protect both you and your newborn:” A discourse analysis of risk and uncertainty in information about vaccination in pregnancy

Health governance during pregnancy is grounded in cultural norms about good mothering, which centre around self-sacrifice and perceived conflicts between maternal and fetal bodies. Nonetheless, many health choices in pregnancy should have mutual benefits and risks for maternal and fetal bodies, including vaccination during pregnancy. This manuscript presents results from a discourse analysis of 440 texts about vaccines that are recommended in pregnancy in Canada, including inactivated influenza, tetanus-diphtheria-acellular-pertussis, and COVID-19 vaccines. Texts include publicly available online information (e.g., webpages, printouts, posters, videos, and other materials) developed by various authoritative institutions (e.g., public health services, professional organizations, vaccine manufacturers). This study contributes to feminist and risk theorist critiques of public health discourse by exploring how texts deploy emotionally laden technical discourses that govern pregnant individuals towards divergent goals. Specifically, they are governed towards socially desirable health decisions (e.g., vaccination acceptance) and towards agonizing over decision-making as “good mothers.” I analyze how texts pursue this divergent governance in three ways, by deploying discourses that reify conflict between maternal and fetal bodies, organizing the work of making choices around gendered power relations, and activating emotions around mothering responsibilities. My analysis compares how such governance differs across products by available evidence and by the intended purpose of vaccination to protect maternal and/or fetal bodies. I conclude by discussing the value of combining governmentality and cultural approaches to risk theory to understand how the interface of public health and mothering discourses reproduce power relations, and suggest recommendations on how to lessen that reproduction.

Risk, emotion and responsibility: an analysis of the storylines used by vaccine hesitant mothers

Under processes of responsibilisation and individualisation in the ‘risk society’, as well as discourses of intensive motherhood, mothers are expected to make ‘good’ decisions regarding their children’s health. Consequently, decision-making concerning childhood vaccination becomes an emotionally challenging process, as mothers strive to minimise risk while simultaneously promoting and protecting health. Existing research shows that a substantial number of parents of young children have concerns regarding childhood vaccination. This article aims to examine how mothers who identify as vaccine hesitant dynamically construct risk, emotion, and responsibility when accounting for their decisions about childhood vaccination. Based on 15 in-depth interviews conducted in Belgium, this article reports the findings of a discourse analysis. For the latter, we draw on positioning theory and Lupton’s emotion-risk assemblage. The findings report three storylines that mothers discursively construct when discussing risk and responsibility in relation to childhood vaccination, namely a health promotion, a maternal protection and a critical healthcare consumer storyline. These storylines help to clarify the fluid and multidimensional nature of the mothers’ accounts of vaccine hesitancy. Furthermore, the findings provide empirical evidence for the use of the emotion-risk assemblage, as we find that vaccine hesitant mothers construct risk in relation to feelings of safety, control, empowerment, anxiety, fear, worry, intuition, vulnerability, being overwhelmed, pity and contempt. Overall, the findings demonstrate that when accounting for their decisions concerning childhood vaccination, hesitant mothers assume responsibilities within a context of social and gendered vulnerability, which affects their constructions of risk.

Tracing views of the intensive mothering discourse in Latvia and on Twitter (X)

ABSTRACT While each new generation since Latvia regained independence has been slowly edging toward libertarianism and equality, childcare in everyday life is still understood as primarily a woman’s burden, echoing both the intensive mothering discourse of Western neoliberal societies and patriarchal traditions inherited from the Soviet gender system. This article aims to map the saturation of ‘intensive parenting’ discourse and differences in opinion between Latvia’s population and Twitter (X) users by comparing the results of a survey involving both samples.

‘Crossed the line’: Sexuality discourses of motherhood under 15 years in Uganda

AbstractMotherhood under 15 years is constructed as having crossed the line of societal morals and this construction shapes the provision of sexual and reproductive health services (SRH) for mothers under 15 years in Uganda. Using collaborative ethnography and through the lens of discourses and governmentality, I established that adolescent pregnancy is constructed within normative discourses enshrouded in religious and cultural values. What is constructed as non‐normative is regulated through restrictive SRH policies and penalizing discourses which inhibit access to SRH services and care. A paradigm shift in adolescent SRH policies that are rooted in human rights and equity is one alternative required.

Motherhood rights and digital activism: An interview with Francesca Fiore and Sarah Malnerich, content creators of the account @mammadimerda

The work of content creators and digital activists Francesca Fiore and Sarah Malnerich actively engages their followers to criticize both the outdated model of Italian maternalism and the current neoliberal discourse of intensive motherhood. Through their blog and Facebook and Instagram accounts, @mammadimerda, Fiore and Malnerich actively rebuke and critique the proliferation of media images of intensive motherhood as normative and successful. In particular, Fiore and Malnerich take issue with both the sacrificial mother model and the new momism neoliberal idea of the super-mom. They use the self-branding non-farcela (we can’t make it) motto as a feminist critique of gendered parental roles and systemic inequality in the workplace. In their stories and posts, they invite followers to share their experiences as ‘imperfect’ mothers, and they start and promote calls for action on better governmental policies for working mothers. For instance, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Fiore and Malnerich actively mobilized their followers, creating petitions and social media campaigns aimed at pushing the government to re-open schools or provide financial aid in support of women’s employment. In this article, I interview Fiore and Malnerich about their digital activism on mothers and women’s rights in Italy, focusing on their campaigns on gender equality during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I wonder if you will be sad?”: Employing the concept of mentalization psychosocially with low-income mothers

We demonstrate the value of a rapprochement between psychoanalytic work aimed at supporting marginalized mothers and discursive accounts of low-income mothers, providing a psychosocial analysis of data from an interview study with six low-income South African mothers. Employing discourse analysis, we show how instrumental mothering is a dominant and precarious construction in these mothers’ talk. We use the concept of mentalization to track the affective work that accompanies the interactional emergence of this instrumental mothering discourse in a particular interview encounter. The implications of the research are discussed in the light of increasing demands for sociocultural responsive research and clinical practice.

‘Mrs. Don’t Care’: refusing modern Black motherhood in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand

This essay examines the portrayal of modern Black motherhood in Nella Larsen’s Harlem Renaissance novel, Quicksand (1928). Writing in a cultural landscape dominated by discourses of racial uplift, scientific motherhood...

Lanka Mahila Samiti, Mary Rutnam and girls’ education

This article engages with the maternal education politics in late colonial Sri Lanka by looking at the implementation of maternal health in the gendered syllabus of middle-class girls’ schools. After...

Framing the Discourse of Pregnancy and Childbirth: A Content Analysis of WeChat Public Account Posts from the Postfeminist Perspective

In light of the introduction of the three-child policy and the current decline in birth rates in China, there remains a lack of a comprehensive understanding of how the discourse surrounding pregnancy and postpartum is publicly addressed, framed, and navigated within Chinese social media. This study delves into the portrayal and framing of childbirth-related topics on WeChat public accounts, which serve as an open online media platform where Chinese users predominantly access daily information. Employing content analysis with the Complementary Explorative Data Analysis framework, we examined 155 posts about pregnancy and childbirth from diverse WeChat public accounts. This analysis revealed the identification of four generic and four issue-specific frames. Our research sheds light on a postfeminist ideology embedded within the discourses of motherhood on WeChat public accounts, marked by two distinct characteristics. First, it manifests in the juxtaposition of two narratives: the idealization of celebrities and the portrayal of self-independent ordinary women. Second, it operates within the bounds of state censorship, given the substantial influence of the Chinese government in shaping and restricting discussions on gender, reproduction, and motherhood.

‘Mamie Djihad’ and ‘the white widow’: constructing French and British national identities in terrorist times of crisis

ABSTRACT This article considers the media representation of two women who left the west for Islamic State (IS) in the mid-2010s: from France, Christine Rivière, nicknamed “Mamie Djihad” (Granny Jihad); and from Britain, Sally Jones, known as “The White Widow”. Both were white, middle-aged mothers, born and raised in their respective countries, who converted late in life and left behind established lives and (adult) children to join IS. While much has been written on the migration of western women to IS territory, scholarship has focused on younger women and girls who have been represented as groomed and vulnerable to IS propaganda. These two “unlikely jihadists” profoundly unsettled commonsense ideas about who was vulnerable to radicalisation, and, more troublingly, their defections could potentially be read as statements on the desirability of life in the west vis-à-vis IS’s model. Using Critical Discourse Analysis of leading French and British news media, the article demonstrates how journalists represented both women as always-already outside their respective nations through two key narratives: a gendered discourse of abject motherhood and an intersectional discourse that constructed them as abject inside Others. These narratives worked to suture the ideological rupture caused by these women, who were at first glance typically French/British, by demonstrating that they had actually always been on the margins of the national community and had always been dangerous to the nation.

‘It Matters How They See You’: ‘Maternal Activation’ As a Strategy to Navigate Contradictory Discourses of Motherhood and Neoliberal Activism in the Welsh Homelessness System

AbstractDespite increasing attention to the importance of gender as an analytic to understanding neoliberal welfare reform, little attention has been paid to how motherhood operates to structure experiences. We propose the term ‘maternal activation’ to describe how homeless mothers as a group are subject to, and yet repurpose and resist, specific forms of social control characterising neoliberal paternalistic welfare structures. Drawing on a Critical Discourse Analysis of semi-structured interviews with fifty-four frontline homelessness workers, and eighteen homeless mothers, within the newly conditionalised Welsh homelessness system, we argue that homeless mothers have distinct experiences of neoliberal welfare governance. They navigate contradictory demands of attentive caregiving and economically engaged citizenship, amid devaluation of care created by a neoliberal emphasis on entrepreneurialism. However, performing intense motherhood offers strategic advantage for homeless mothers by enabling them to be read as ‘legible’. This highlights the utility of motherhood as a framework to understand welfare citizenship.

Becoming against the construct of normative motherhood

In this article, I reflect on how my positioning along axes of disability, race, and class shapes my interaction with dominant discourses of motherhood and on how these tensions are explored in The Mother, a public installation of my artwork shown in 2023. Situating myself in the liminal space between participation in and resistance to normative motherhood ideology, I invite other disabled mothers—especially other cisgendered, heterosexual white women—to consider how they practice disabled mothering in the context of racial capitalism. Through both the installation and these reflections, I assert that visible disabled mothering can be a powerful act of community care and crip resistance.

White and gendered aesthetics and attitudes of #pandemicbaking and #quarantinebaking

Foodwork is a political matter, and baking is no exception. Many messages are associated with the symbolic significance of baking, such as idealised notions of white, middle-class domesticity, femininity and visibility. The rise in home-baking during the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a surge in social media content, which conveys much about the different meanings ascribed to baking. Relatedly, scholarship on ‘COVID-19 foodwork, race, gender, class and food justice’ highlights that intersecting oppressions are implicated in such matters. Drawing on different lines of research that specify and address structural power relations (e.g. gendered whiteness), I analyse the aesthetics and accompanying attitudes conveyed via Instagram posts about #pandemicbaking and #quarantinebaking. In doing so, I draw and build on critical studies of whiteness and digital food media, and connections between consumerism and COVID-19. This work considers what such online content suggests about the relationship between a ‘feminised, white, aestheticised ethos’ and digital discourse and depictions regarding food, family, domesticity, work and rest. Consequently, this research ponders over whether the labour and framing involved in documenting #pandemicbaking and #quarantinebaking on Instagram reflects a neoliberal form of entrepreneurial ‘freelance feminism’, which is animated by the tension between the ‘frequently polarized figures of “the feminist” and “the housewife”’. I examine the significance of three key themes related to #pandemicbaking and #quarantinebaking: (1) Gendered domestic labour and digital depictions and discourses of motherhood; (2) productivity, pausing and so-called ‘soulfulness’; and (3) domestic minimalism and aesthetics of whiteness. In turn, this article critically reflects on the relationship between mediated constructions of gendered whiteness and baking, while echoing calls for more research that explicitly addresses dynamics between digital whiteness, class, aesthetics, gendered racial capitalism, foodwork, feminism and online content creation.

MOTHERS ON TWITTER (X): EXCHANGING SUPPORT AND NARRATING MOTHERHOOD

As almost all aspects of our lives, motherhood in the 21st century also is influenced and transformed by new media. Parents, especially mothers, use the Facebook, Instagram and even Twitter (X) as digital diaries, as stages for performing an ideal mother’s role, or even “safe spaces” to gain support and the feeling of empowerment. Recent research of motherhood discourses and mothering practices in social media has mainly focused on the evidence of mediation and mediatization. However, limited attention has been brought to examining Twitter in context of mothering. Therefore, this paper focuses on the narratives of a particular cluster of Latvian-speaking mothers on Twitter who use Twitter as a platform for exchanging informational, emotional and physical support, forming a “portable” community. The case study consists of a narrative analysis of 11 in-depth semi-structured interviews with mothers and a thematic analysis of 1111 tweets, gathered from 9 other public Twitter accounts (covering a period of 2 weeks), that have been identified by interviewees as part of this particular Twitter-bubble. The paper provides an insight into the narratives of women, voicing their motherhood struggles and victories in the “safe space” of Twitter’s “bubble” of new Latvian mothers, illuminating also a unique and unlikely use for an asymmetric and decentralized social media platform.

Cruel optimism and ableist assumptions: Ableist discourse, the ‘good’ mother and autism

Drawing upon Berlant's concept of ‘cruel optimism’, we examine the narrative of the website Generation Rescue and its president, Jenny McCarthy. We argue that the form of motherhood put forward, the medicalised warrior mother, is an ableist figure, and we examine ableism through the lens of cruel optimism. For the warrior mother, medical discourse sets the standard for the child, and discourses of motherhood set the standard for the mother. We contend that the simultaneous production of these discourses intersect to enable the production and subjectification of the warrior mother. This intersection is ableist discourse. Although framed as ‘good’ mothering, the version of motherhood presented is cruel to the mother and cruel to the child. The narrative offered presents the autism-free child as the child the committed mother desires and deserves; it also presents the autism-free child as obtainable. This attachment to possibility embeds mothers in a never-ending form of intensive motherhood, her the agent of recovery who cannot accept the child she has and her child the object of continual experimentation that can be normalised via commitment and consumption.

Navigating divorce, single-motherhood and long-distance triathlon: a visual-autoethnography

Whilst discourses of motherhood, such as the ‘ethic of care’ and intensive parenting are powerful and persuasive, no form of motherhood can be acceptable to all. In this visual autoethnography, researcher generated photographs, excerpts from training logs and personal narrative texts are used to explore some of the underlying discourses and assumptions associated with motherhood and sport from the perspective of a single parent. Employing a poststructural lens the author explores the ways in which she has knowingly negotiated her identity as a single mother and competitive-recreational long distant triathlete. The research places a spotlight on the significant support role that children can play in relation to adult involvement in sport, turning the tables on the existing focus on parent-athlete relationships. The findings provide further evidence of the value of sports clubs in supporting the continued participation of mothers, adding to the research on sport and parenthood and family studies.

Making choices but few changes: the discourse of choice and mothers working in research and innovation

ABSTRACT Based on the identification of the discourse of choice in debates on neoliberalism, meritocracy and post-feminism, this article analyses how highly educated mothers position themselves within the discourse of choice and use choice as their discursive resource when reflecting on how their demanding careers combine with motherhood. The data come from 26 interviews with mothers employed in research and innovation in Finland. The analysis reveals five ways in which the mothers positioned themselves within the discourse of choice. It appears these ways are all based on, and produce, the moral primacy of individual self-governance. We treat this as a demonstration of how neoliberalism is internalized and lived. Furthermore, the results show that an egalitarian welfare society whose policies support work–childcare reconciliation does not remove the need to use the individualistic discourse of choice. We suggest that this could be changed by voicing the challenges it poses to many women.

“I Wanted It to Be Flowers and Sunshine, but That Was Not It at All”: A Relational Dialectics Theory Analysis of Black Motherhood

ABSTRACT Research on motherhood in family communication scholarship has traditionally focused on White women’s experiences in the U.S. Few communication studies have reported the experiences of Black mothers in their findings. However, there is still a dearth of scholarship in studies that centralize the voices of Black mothers. While the paths to becoming a mother might be fairly similar, the experiences of mothers differ based on many factors. African American women exist on the margins of race, gender, and the legitimacy of “how they became mothers.” Centralizing the voices of Black mothers in communication scholarship, this study analyzed the stories of 31 African American mothers. Using Relational Dialectics Theory as a theoretical framework, the discourse of intensive mothering (DIM) and the discourse of motherhood as distressing (DMD) emerged from the data. The DIM and DMD interplayed through diachronic separation, synchronic interplay, and dialogic transformation (discursive hybridity).

Feminist from birth: podcasting disruptive discourses of motherhood

Feminist from birth: podcasting disruptive discourses of motherhood

The conundrum of motherhood: house helps and the mediated motherhood discourses in Kenya

The conundrum of motherhood: house helps and the mediated motherhood discourses in Kenya