Motherhood, mobility and materiality: Material entanglements, journey-making and the process of ‘becoming mother’

Abstract

This paper is about the entanglements or mutually affecting engagements with the material world that occur in the course of trying to becoming mobile with a small baby. Drawing on a rigorous empirical base of 37 interviews with 20 families in East London, we analyse the relationships between discourses of parenting and the material practices of journey-making. Bringing together conceptual work on the new materialism and mobility studies, we advance the concept of mother–baby assemblages as a way to understand mobile motherhood, and consider the emotional and affective dimensions of parenting in public that emerge through journey-making. We argue that the transition to motherhood occurs in part through entanglements with the more than human in the course of becoming mobile (including matter, affects, policies and built form). We further argue that approaching motherhood from the perspective of material entanglements advances geographical scholarship by deepening our understanding of mobility as a relational practice. Finally, we extend conceptual work in Geography as a whole by showing the utility of new materialist philosophy as a means for theorising identity.

Breastmilk as Agentic Matter and the Distributed Agencies of Infant Feeding

“…It also builds on the growing body of scholarship on the spatial, affective and material practices involved in the formation of parental and maternal identities (Aitken 2000;Boyer Dowling 2000;Holloway 1998;Luzia 2010;Madge and O'Connor 2005;Pain et al 2001;Rose 2004), and the concept of breastfeeding as an assemblage composed of human and non-human components (Newell 2013). It also extends work on how parenting practice is shaped in and through engagements with the non-human, such as second-hand baby things (Waight 2014;Waight and Boyer 2018), 'family' cars (Waitt and Harada 2016); and prams and built form (Boyer and Spinney 2016).…”

Radical mobilities

“…This work emphasises how discourse and material embodiment are a 'two-way interaction' (Doughty and Murray, 2016) in which, for example, "mothers and babies, prams and other actors and actants" (Boyer and Spinney, 2016) meet as assemblages. Both subjectivity and mobility (Boyer and Spinney, 2016) becomes through "entanglements with bodies and materials alongside ideas, emotions and affects" (Clement and Boyer and Spinney, 2016). It is helpful to elucidate how both things and ideas matter in the experience of mobile motherhood, for example.…”

Feminist perspectives on third places

“…For women who are mothers, entering third places presents another range of gendered and material challenges. Boyer and Spinney's (2016) research on mother's journey making with prams highlights the difficulties they encounter as they attempt to move beyond domestic places into public places. Steps, small doorways, lack of lifts and public judgement of motherhood often significantly impede mothers' movements around third places.…”