“Global Motherhood”: The Transnational Intimacies of White Femininity

Abstract

This essay examines white femininity as a transnational phenomenon. Specifially, the essay addresses the representational logics of whiteness through which contemporary white women are positioned as ''global'' mothers in popular culture. The larger goal of this is to illustrate how ''intimate'' relations of race, gender, sexuality, and colonialism are negotiated and managed in contemporary positionings of white women as ''global mothers.''

Not “Simply the Breast”

“…As Shome (2011) articulates, in colonial settings, If the full breast is a cultural metaphor for healthy motherhood, then the native servant woman is a "breast giver" to the white woman and her child. But when she returns home, she becomes a "failed" mother to her own child and her nation.…”

“…Images of Jolie with her adopted non-white children reference the racial taboos of a white woman bearing children of color, while her position as a mother of a multi-racial family further accentuates her own racialized presence as a powerful white woman performing rescues of disadvantaged children of color (Shome 2011). Furthermore, her birthing and breastfeeding experiences are discussed in terms that carry subtle distinctions between the authenticity of biological motherhood in opposition to mothering adopted children.…”

“…Lauren G. Berlant (1997) argues that maternal women are subjugated by the laws, policies, and culture that value her primarily as a vessel for gestating, birthing, and nurturing her offspring. Celebrity and motherhood are core myths in Western culture that are continuously policed and adapted (Lauren G. Berlant 2008;Amanda D. Lotz 2006;Raka Shome 2011;Shari L. Thurer 1995;Laura Tropp 2006). Motherhood myths require cultural labor to define archetypal motherhood, from hailing mothers as ideal citizens who are responsible for shaping the minds of future citizens, to representing national identity in maternal bodies, to blaming mothers for societal ills (Barbara Barnett 2005; Ana C. Garner and Karen L. Slattery 2012).…”

“…In recent decades, celebrities such as Princess Diana, Mia Farrow, Madonna, and Angelina Jolie have perpetuated a heteronormative, post-colonial "global motherhood" (Shome 2011) in which white women rescue dark-skinned children while marginalizing native mothers (Duvall 2011). The colonial fears of white children being intimate with the dark-skinned bodies of wet nurses have been replaced to some degree by contemporary fears of Western women being contaminated by breastfeeding dark-skinned infants.…”

Amnesia and the Myth of Discovery: Lessons from Transnational and Women of Color Communication Scholars

“…9 Similarly Shome explores the concept of ''global motherhood'' in relation to neoliberal discourses of race and parenting that once more erase histories and memories of power imbalances and colonialism. 10 Finally taking up the dynamic inter-relationality of ethnicity, hybridity, and transnational flows of culture, bodies, and capital, I examine the reinscription and continuity of old narratives of purity as they serve to foreground whiteness and Eurocentrism within contemporary girl culture and media. 11 All of these case studies braid the global with the local through gender and media without engaging in amnesia or the myth of discovery.…”