Norms Of Motherhood Research Articles

#フィリピンママあるある (#firipinmamaaruaru): (Re)presentations of Motherhood in Japanese-Filipino Children’s TikTok Videos

Digital media sites, such as TikTok, are promising spaces that have recently been explored as timely and accessible spaces for analyzing gender, agency, and the wider representation of mixed roots families in Japan. With Japan and the Philippines’ differences in gendered norms, there is an incongruity between the real-life experiences of Japanese Filipino children (henceforth written as JFC) vis-à-vis the gendered expectations and views on motherhood in Japan. This gap is explored through a sample of ten comedic TikTok videos where young JFC users (re)present their Filipino mothers’ identities via the hashtag #firipinmamaaruaru. Using a digital content analysis of their videos, this paper examines JFC’s experiences and perceptions of their Filipino mothers. The analysis shows how Filipino mothers are (re)presented in their children’s videos as bound by the gendered norms of motherhood in Japan. The humor in JFC’s posts points out the reality that their representations of their mothers are not the standard desirable qualities of motherhood as expected in Japan.

Abortion Attitudes Across Cultural Contexts

Abstract: We explored between-country and within-country variability in abortion attitudes, using country-level factors (e.g., gender equality) and individual-level factors (e.g., gender role attitudes) as predictors. Participants from Mexico ( N = 215), India ( N = 215), the United States ( N = 215), and the United Kingdom ( N = 206) were recruited via Qualtrics Panels. Regression models and ANOVAs were used to assess whether estimates of gender inequality, gender role attitudes, motherhood norms, belief in big/moralizing gods, and sexual strategy were associated with abortion attitudes. As predicted, individuals living in countries with greater gender inequality, and more restrictive abortion policy, reported more restrictive abortion attitudes and stronger support for banning abortion. Furthermore, individuals who endorsed more traditional gender role ideologies, who reported belief in big/moralizing gods and who used long-term sexual strategies also reported more restrictive abortion attitudes and stronger support for banning abortion. Exploratory analyses highlight how these relationships vary as a function of cultural context. We can conclude that both contextual factors (e.g., local abortion legislation and gender inequality) as well as individual factors (e.g., gender role attitudes and religious/spiritual belief) shape people’s attitudes toward abortion. Implications regarding the bidirectional relationship between attitudes and policy in reproductive health are discussed.

‘I don’t want them to see me like that’: Negotiating Motherhood Through Prison Visitation

Scholars have highlighted the significant challenges faced by system-involved mothers in adhering to dominant motherhood ideologies. However, a research gap persists regarding the decision-making process of incarcerated mothers concerning child visitation. This study delves into the intricate dynamics of mothers’ decision-making surrounding visitation, shedding light on the interplay between maternal identity, prison environments, and societal norms of motherhood. Through qualitative interviews with forty formerly incarcerated mothers, the study reveals a spectrum of strategies employed by mothers to uphold their maternal identities, including navigating stigma, shielding their children from perceived risks, and engaging in self-sacrificial behaviors in line with societal expectations.

Lived experiences of mothers with postnatal anxiety: a qualitative phenomenology study from Pakistan

ObjectiveThe prevalence of postnatal anxiety is high among women during the first year of childbirth globally. Rates are higher in low and middle-income countries (LMICs), that is, 24%. Existing literature...

Medical communication, internalized “good mother” norms, and feminist self-identification as predictors of maternal burnout

IntroductionA rarely studied source of psychological discomfort for mothers is the communication received from medical professionals in the context of pregnancy, childbirth, the postpartum period, and pediatric care. To address this gap, we examined mothers’ recollections of medical communications that influenced their perceived stress levels in the context of good-mother normativity. We also explored how recollections of feedback on mothering in medical settings were associated with internalization of good-mother expectations, maternal burnout, length of motherhood, and feminist self-identification.MethodsWe collected the data through an online survey administered by a company that pre-establishes business relationships with potential survey takers. The survey-takers were 254 self-identified mothers, who answered open-ended questions about their recollections of medical communications related to good-motherhood norms. The participants also completed measures of maternal burnout, internalized good mother expectations, and feminist self-identification, and answered demographic questions such as age, education, number of children, and how long they had been mothers.ResultsParticipants who recalled discomfort-inducing medical communications that directly or indirectly referenced motherhood norms reported higher levels of internalized good-mother expectations and maternal burnout. A process model showed that the frequency of recalled medical communications, length of motherhood, and feminist self-identification moderated the relationship between the degree of internalization of good-mother expectations and maternal burnout. A significant association emerged between feminist self-identification and the recalled frequency of interactions with medical professionals that increased mothers’ perceived stress stemming from good-mother normativity.DiscussionThe findings of this study contribute to self-discrepancy theory as it relates to the social construction of mothers’ identities by focusing on whether and how often medical professionals reinforce or challenge good-mother social expectations. Another theoretical contribution of this study is that values and beliefs, such as feminist self-identification, can affect the recall of communications about social norms and are significantly associated with levels of internalized expectations and resulting burnout. In terms of practical implications, our findings suggest that medical professionals should be mindful of how they assess patients through the lens of the good-mother norms and also consider addressing the discomfort stemming from such normativity by asking mothers about their perceptions of social expectations and addressing unrealistic beliefs that aggravate mothers’ sense of self-discrepancy.

A call for conscious “anti-preparation” to motherhood

Our privileged position as doctoral students and mothers allows for a critical look at this issue that leads us to propose a form of “anti-preparation” to motherhood, in the sense that women should be called upon to deconstruct the constraining beliefs surrounding motherhood rather than accumulate new knowledge that is sometimes contradictory, often useless, and particularly anxiety-provoking. This is not a call to ignorance, but it does encourage us to temper our consumption of knowledge that can generate beliefs that erode and, above all, invisibilize women’s intrinsic strengths. While some of information surrounding motherhood is essential to know, we suggest that more attention must be devoted to empowering mothers and challenging dominant norms that ultimately don’t always serve them. In short, this plea seeks to challenge the authoritarian function of medicalized knowledge embedded in capitalist and patriarchal norms of motherhood, which work to minimize the intrinsic strengths of mothers. Our intention is not to promote an inclusive view that rests on the commercialization of motherhood, but rather an anti-oppressive approach that legitimizes both the intrinsic strengths of mothers and their facilitating beliefs, whether medicalized or tacit.

Decentering intensive mothering: More fully accounting for race and class in motherhood norms

AbstractIn 1996 Sharon Hays published The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood describing the ideology of intensive mothering calling upon mothers to engage in a time‐intensive, expensive, and expert‐informed style of mothering. In this article, I describe the historical circumstances giving rise to intensive mothering and how structural and historical realities diverge across race and class. I argue that enactments of motherhood are varied, forming a mosaic of motherhood enactments informed by mothers' social locations, including their positions in racialized and classed hierarchies. Mothers operating from marginalized locations innovate and resist intensive mothering, while also being judged by these norms, despite often lacking the resources to meet them. Privileged, primarily White mothers, have been able to harness their resources to achieve intensive mothering and redefine what constitutes good mothering to match the style of mothering they practice. Among some privileged, predominantly White mothers, I contend an even more intense version of intensive mothering is being practiced, with some moving beyond being “expert informed” to positioning themselves as the experts who possess specialized knowledge superior to that of medical and educational experts. All told, I argue that mothering enactments are more diverse than is often portrayed by the concept of intensive mothering.

Introduction

Introduction

What makes a good mother? Two decades of research reflecting social norms of motherhood.

Over the past two decades, scholars have investigated a multitude of different aspects of motherhood. This article provides a scoping review of research published from 2001 to 2021, covering 115 Social Science Citation Index-referenced papers from WEIRD countries, with the aim of reconstructing social norms around motherhood and mothers' responses to them. The analysis is theoretically based on normological and praxeological concepts. The findings reveal five contemporary norms of motherhood that reflect both stability and increasing differentiation, and are related to five types of mothers: the norms of being attentive to the child (present mother), of securing the child's successful development (future-oriented mother), of integrating employment into mothering (working mother), of being in control (public mother), and of being contented (happy mother). Relying on an intersectional lens, we analyze mothers' heterogeneous responses to these norms of motherhood, and examine how neoliberal demands build on and perpetuate inequalities.

Spoiled Friendships and Perverted Foods in Yōko Ogawa’s The Diving Pool

This essay analyzes Yōko Ogawa’s The Diving Pool, in which the woman characters' ‘improper femininities’ are expressed through the rupturing of commensality. Ogawa's protagonists cause direct harm to those around them as a direct response to patriarchal norms of motherhood and child-rearing, as the novel explores how patriarchal capitalism and alienation destroy possibilities for female solidarity.

Taking turns: lesbian couples’ decision of (first) birth mother in Sweden

ABSTRACT This article presents an analysis of how lesbian couples in Sweden negotiate birth motherhood in a context where equality is thought to be achieved by being and doing the same [Gullestad, M. (2002). Invisible fences: Egalitarianism, nationalism and racism. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 8(1), 45–63. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.00098]. We do so by studying narratives of how 20 couples arrived at the decision of who will be the (first) birth mother, a decision unique to a small group of parents with theoretical implications for motherhood norms, kinship and within-couple decision-making extending beyond the couples themselves. Most couples interviewed planned to have two children and take turns carrying, a plan that to some extent solves the challenge of equality and sameness. Genetic links were downplayed and instead, the embodied and often desired experience of pregnancy was foregrounded. In deciding who would be the (first) birth mother, the couples’ reasoning centred on age and desire, both presented as harmless and ‘natural’ determinants that defused a potentially disruptive decision.

돌봄 빚의 미로: 『리틀 도릿』이 그리는 확산적 경제공동체와 모성서사의 기만

This article examines the emerging peculiarities of mid-nineteenth-century economic communities as depicted in Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit by introducing the concept of “care debt.” The novel has often been read as a critique of debt-based finance capitalism, and William Dorrit has been understood as the victim of the “wiles of insolvency” which epitomizes the economic system of the era. I attend to the sense of inadequacy that lingers even after Mr. Dorrit pays off his debt to emphasize the significance of the incomprehensible network of care debt in Little Dorrit. This article defines care debt as the communal anxiety generated by the injustice of failing to acknowledge the care work that sustains communities. Care work in this novel is part and parcel of the monetary economy, and it operates as the unseen layer that enables financial exchanges and other material circulations. In particular, this article points to Victorian expectations of motherhood as the major communal understanding that immediately contributes to obfuscating the economic value of care work. While the norms of motherhood facilitate exploitative practices, care debt continues to accumulate in the narrative and protrudes in the form of interpersonal conflicts. Characters futilely try to pay off the debt or obnoxiously pretend that no such debt exists, but care debt persists as a communal feeling that is to be distinguished from personal ethics. By narrativizing the insolvency via the trope of a mother with a secret, Little Dorrit successfully demonstrates the intimacy between care debt and monetary debt. My analysis of the collective chaos caused by the financial system in Little Dorrit eventually involves pushing against the idea of communities―especially family and country―as coherent, comprehensible units. Care debt operates as a useful critical concept that allows us to understand the expansive nature of communal boundaries which coincides with the historical perplexities of capitalist development in nineteenth-century England.

A Socio-Ecological Approach to Understanding the Perinatal Care Experiences of People with Intellectual and/or Developmental Disabilities in Ontario, Canada.

Accessible and quality care during the perinatal period is critical for optimal maternal and neonatal health. Using the socio-ecological model, the purpose of this study was to explore barriers and facilitators that shape the perinatal care experiences of people with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities (IDD). Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 individuals with IDD in Ontario, Canada, who had given birth within the past 5years. Interviews focused on care experiences before, during, and after pregnancy. Data were analyzed using a directed content analysis approach, and the socio-ecological model guided analysis. Barriers at the societal (e.g., cultural norms of motherhood), policy/institutional (e.g., child protection policies and practices), interpersonal (e.g., inadequate formal and informal support), and intrapersonal levels (e.g., internalized stigma) contributed to participants having negative perinatal care experiences. Conversely, we identified facilitators on the interpersonal level (e.g., positive interactions with perinatal care providers and familial and social service supports) as positively shaping participants' perinatal care experiences. Findings reveal that the perinatal care experiences of people with IDD are shaped by several interrelated factors that largely stem from societal-level barriers, such as dominant (stigmatizing) discourses of disability. To improve the perinatal care experiences of people with IDD, there is a need for interventions at multiple levels. These include the development of policies to support perinatal care for diverse populations and training care providers to enact policies at the institutional and interpersonal levels.

Chinese Women’s Reproductive Justice and Social Media

ABSTRACT By utilizing rhetorical analysis with a focus on agency and feminist rhetoric, this article focuses on China’s most popular pregnancy and mothering app – Babytree – to examine how users assume the mantle of technical writers, writing their pregnant and mothering experiences into online narratives and selling them to generate income. This article shows how Chinese women take advantage of the technical affordances of Babytree to share their embodied experiences and, in so doing, respond to and push back against the traditional norms of motherhood and healthcare provision. The women whose experiences are examined here participate in social media as a way to reenter job markets by using their embodied experiences, thus asserting their rhetorical agency politically and economically while implicitly critiquing the traditional situation of contemporary pregnant women and the state of motherhood in China.

Social Support Mediated by Technology. A Netnographic Study of an Online Community for Mothers

New mothers experience social isolation, and they sometimes lack experience in interacting with their babies. Social support accessed via information and communication technologies (ICTs) can help mitigate such difficulties. Social media groups, in particular, offer opportunities for interacting with other mothers, thus locating an alternative and potentially powerful source of support. In this study, we describe such an online community of mothers in Romania, aiming at capturing the mechanisms of social support in the group, and also, schematically, the changing norms of motherhood they are related to. The paper expands on a four-dimensional analysis of social support – informational, emotional, affirmational, and instrumental components (Langfort et al., 1997; Leger & LeTourneau, 2015). It then introduces the results of the netnography we conducted in the context of a three-week data gathering period in the observed community. We suggest that the physiognomy of support we observed is related to changing normative models of motherhood in this Eastern-European nation. In helping each other, the mothers we observed also expressed their difference from older generations, and their personal and professional aspirations.

Análise das construções possíveis de maternidades nos estudos feministas e da deficiência

Resumo: Neste ensaio teórico analiso aproximações e distanciamentos entre os estudos feministas e os da deficiência nas produções do cuidado e de maternidades, por meio da discussão da elaboração de uma norma para as experiências humanas; dos estudos da deficiência; dos estudos feministas da deficiência e da ética do cuidado; da construção de uma normativa materna e suas implicações para mulheres vivendo com deficiências. Nos estudos feministas da deficiência, mães com deficiência ou mães de crianças com deficiências apontam que a instituição da maternidade patriarcal as interpela de maneira distinta, pois não são compelidas, mas desestimuladas a se reproduzirem e cuidarem, desfavoravelmente posicionadas na hierarquia reprodutiva. A partir de suas experiências, evidenciam diversas possibilidades maternas, para além da maternidade normativa.

“I Take Everything Back That I Said”: Ambivalence and Motherhood in Mildred Pierce

This article discusses motherhood in James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce (1941). It argues that academic criticism so far has neglected the important contribution Cain’s text makes to debates concerning motherhood norms in the post-Depression years. The article takes as its central concern the fraught relationship between Mildred and her daughter, Veda. Building on Sianne Ngai’s theory of “ugly feelings,” the article claims that Mildred’s ambivalent emotional responses to her daughter reveal how social norms obstruct mothers’ agency. Rather than categorically rejecting Veda’s bad behavior, Mildred’s anger, pain, fear, and jealousy are retracted immediately after they surface. As such, Mildred’s maternal emotions are ambivalent and should be perceived as ugly feelings that have the potential to diagnose situations of obstructed agency. This article thus argues for the complexity of Cain’s representation of motherhood and shows how mothers’ ambivalent emotions reveal limited agency in their navigation of social norms.

Policy Change and Partisan Politics: Understanding Family Policy Differentiation in Two Similar Countries

AbstractThis article looks at how different electoral competition dynamics can result in differentiated party positioning on childcare and family policy. Italy and Spain are compared using a most similar case design. The presence of women in politics, the socioeconomic profiles of the voters of the two main left-wing and right-wing Italian and Spanish parties, and opinions on traditional norms of motherhood explain different policy trajectories and higher incentives for the conservative party in Spain to converge toward the social democratic party in more progressive views of family policy.

Medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth in the pages of Claudia, 1961-1990.

The role of the women's magazine Claudia as a pedagogic device in the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth in Brazil is discussed. The analysis of issues from the magazine's first three decades shows how information in this field was presented and taught, articulating elements of biomedicine, technology, and consumption. Under the aegis of the supremacy of scientific rationality and politics of risk, pregnancy and childbirth were resignified and incorporated into new medical and technological regimes, which included the need for women to internalize the desire and obligation to be healthy during pregnancy and produce healthy children. Claudia translated new scientific and medical knowledge for its readers, along with new norms of motherhood, reflecting the complexity and multiple agency of medicalization.

Mothering Brooklyn

AbstractThis paper examines how Brooklyn retail signage represents how gentrifying women struggle for claiming space in public and the way in which different intersectional identity formations are used and implicated in transforming urban space. In exploring different ethnographic dimensions to retail storefronts, we show how women, many of whom are college-educated, married, and new mothers, play a significant role in redefining Brooklyn and cultural norms of motherhood more broadly. Yet, as newly arriving women emerge as key players in the gentrification project, they experience backlash against their public roles. We explore how women also employ race, inequality, and patriarchal notions of heteronormative sexuality as a cover for their public challenges to patriarchal power. Drawing on visual ethnography, interviews, and digital archival material we argue that the ambiguity of word play accomplishes both the pushing of normative boundaries as well as the protective cover of public meanings.