#mothersday: Constructions of motherhood and femininity in social media posts

Capdevila, Rose; Dann, Charlotte; Roper, Sandra; Locke, Abigail

doi:10.1177/09593535221107832

Cited by 12 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…These conflictual feelings may provoke even higher distress in light of the culture of “intensive mothering,” which prescribes that “the child absolutely requires consistent nurture by a single primary caretaker and that the mother is the best person for the job” (Hays, 1996, p. 8). Thus, mothers may interpret feelings that are inconsistent with this approach as illegitimate (Capdevila et al, 2022; Kestler-Peleg, 2023).…”

Section: Concluding Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“I felt like a bad monster was rising up in me”: Empirical and clinical evidence of maternal disintegrative responses in the context of infant care

Chasson,

Taubman – Ben-Ari,

Erel-Brodsky

2023

Feminism & Psychology

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In this paper, we sought to give voice to the unspoken issue of mothers’ disintegrative responses—that is, intrusive thoughts and dissociative experiences—in the context of infant care. Three methodologies were employed: (a) in-depth interviews were conducted with 23 Israeli women up to 3 months postpartum; (b) 126 Israeli women up to 12 months after childbirth responded to an open-ended questionnaire; and (c) a clinical case study was performed. Mothers referred to intrusive thoughts as “attacks,” and related primarily to three themes: fear of losing their grip, aggressive fantasies, and guilt and shame. Dissociative experiences were described as vague and elusive, with three major themes emerging: detachment, disorientation, and helplessness. We argue that the findings correspond with psychosocial approaches whereby disintegrative responses may be an indication of maternal ambivalence and a reflection of “contagious arousal” in which the mother identifies with the experience of the infant. The findings offer a new direction to clinicians working with mothers by suggesting that the mother's openness to these responses may be an opportunity for her to acknowledge subjective and repressed parts of herself and undergo a process of reintegration out of disintegration.

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Section: Concluding Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“I felt like a bad monster was rising up in me”: Empirical and clinical evidence of maternal disintegrative responses in the context of infant care

Chasson,

Taubman – Ben-Ari,

Erel-Brodsky

2023

Feminism & Psychology

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“…Alongside Mackenzie (2017, 2018, 2019), contemporary motherhood studies feature a growing body of interdisciplinary work that variously explores how members go about the business of doing motherhood in digital environments, including open-forum sites such as Mumsnet (Kinloch & Jaworska, 2021; Pedersen, 2016), Instagram and Twitter (Astudillo-Mendoza & Cifuentes-Zunino, 2022; Capdevila et al, 2022), online blogs (Coffey-Glover, 2020; Ringrow, 2020), and in more private interpersonal contexts including messaging services such as WhatsApp (Lyons, 2020). Mackenzie and Zhao (2021) highlight that one significant feature of online motherhood interactions is the (re)production of knowledge and expertise.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Mackenzie (2018) reflects that, whilst some subversion of traditional motherhood narratives does occur in these digital environments, it remains difficult for members to move beyond the normatively gendered boundaries of motherhood whilst maintaining their status as good mother. Similarly, Capdevila et al (2022) highlight that whilst digital environments create novel spaces for mothering to be enacted, the discourses that abound are often founded in normative notions of good motherhood.…”

Section: Categories and The Moral Ordermentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Contemporary feminist research has explored the mediated enactment of motherhood across a host of online and social media platforms (e.g., Astudillo-Mendoza & Cifuentes-Zunino, 2022;Capdevila et al, 2022;Lazard, 2022;Mackenzie, 2017Mackenzie, , 2018Mackenzie, , 2019Pedersen, 2016) and, whilst the online environment has certainly created new and expansive sites for mediated motherhood, McRobbie's (2013) work also emphasises that more traditional media outlets, including the popular press and daytime television, continue to provide platforms that serve the mediated enactment of motherhood. Our interest is in motherhood as it plays out between speakers in live interactive settings on daytime television.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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“Speaking as a mother”: A membership categorisation analysis of child-centric talk in a UK daytime television talk show

Foster

Kilby

2023

Feminism & Psychology

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In this study, we explore motherhood as an interactionally emergent identity category that speakers construct and lay claim to in talk, and as a category that is imbued with moral expectations of how incumbents should behave. We analyse 18 child-focussed debates from British daytime television talk show, This Morning. Engaging a postfeminist framework, we use membership categorisation analysis to explore how, and to what effect, women deploy claims to motherhood. We report three main findings: (a) Speakers routinely quantify their motherhood credentials in the development of a “mother-cum-expert” identity; (b) speakers who construct motherhood in accordance with neoliberal norms of “good motherhood” habitually trump the arguments offered by other speakers, including those with professional expertise; (c) any challenge to essentialist norms of womanhood and/or motherhood become accountable matters. We conclude that whilst there is power in motherhood insomuch as it vests some women with expertise and elevates their rights to be heard on child-focussed matters, the speakers in our study nevertheless construct motherhood in a manner that (re)produces and elevates essentialised notions of gender and narrow versions of motherhood.

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“…We move on from the sharing of breastfeeding images to considering the sharing of motherhood images on a particular day of the year, in Rose Capdevila, Charlotte Dann, Lisa Lazard, Sandra Roper, and Abigail Locke's paper (2022, pp. 336–356).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%