Seminars
Consumption and Contested Motherhood Identities
Presenter details and abstracts
- Amy Traver - A Tension, A Tool: Adoptive Mothers' Consumption
- Linda Layne - Creating and obviating kin ties through consumption: the cases of pregnancy loss and single mothers by choice
- Kathy Hamilton - Consumption and mothering amongst lone mothers on low incomes
Title: A Tension, A Tool: Adoptive Mothers' Consumption
Presenter: Amy Traver, City University of New York
Amy Traver is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the City University of New York at Queensborough and an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Center for the Humanities of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Interested in intersections of race/ethnicity, gender, and identity in contemporary families and educational institutions, Amy is the author of articles published in Qualitative Sociology, Sociological Focus, International Journal of Sociology of the Family, The Journal of Education Policy, and The Irish Journal of Sociology. She has published book reviews in Gender & Society and Contemporary Sociology, and entries in The Encyclopedia of Social Problems and The Praeger Handbook of Adoption. She is also the editor (with Michael Kimmel) of Women, Family, and Class: The Lillian Rubin Reader.
Presentation:
Adoption and consumption exist in tense relationship. From cases of baby selling and bribery to characterizations of adopted children as "hip accessories", adoptive family construction is often likened or linked to markets. As a result, adoption provides a potential lens into what Dorow (2002) describes as the false dichotomy between care and consumption; revealing how discourses/practices of care and consumption are both informed by and reliant on each other.
Significantly, research indicates that consumption is one way most contemporary families convey care and connection. In fact, shopping – for food, clothes, and gifts – is now understood as a significant means by which mothers actively (per)form family and their maternal roles. Thus, consumption must also be recognized and understood as a tool that adoptive parents, particularly adoptive mothers, use to affirm their oft-contested families and statuses.
This presentation will synthesize the literature on adoption/markets and (maternal) family-building/consumption to best understand the tensions of and tool that is adoptive mothers' consumption. To further this synthesis, it will also draw on original data gathered via ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews with more than ninety American parents of children adopted from China.
Title: Creating and obviating kin ties through consumption: the cases of pregnancy loss and single mothers by choice
Presenter: Linda Layne, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York
Linda Layne (PhD, Princeton University) is Hale Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences, and Professor of Anthropology, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York. Her edited books include Feminist Technology (University of Illinois Press, 2010) and Consuming Motherhood (Rutgers University Press, 2004) and Transformative motherhood: on giving and getting in a consumer culture (New York University Press, 1999). She is also the author of Motherhood lost: a feminist account of miscarriage and stillbirth in America (Routledge, 2002). In addition to her writing, she is an award-winning videographer. Her current research interests include single mothers by choice, consumer culture, feminist design, feminist methods, gender and technology, the advancement of women in academe.
Presentation:
In this paper I will review (Layne 1999, 2000a, 2000b, 2001, 2004) the way that consumer goods and services are used by women during a pregnancy and after its demise through pregnancy loss to establish a relationship with a wished for child and counter the social claim if a baby dies before or shortly after birth it was not a real baby and women are not real mothers.
I will also discuss how consumer goods are now being used in the non-medical management of women who have their pregnancy losses at home and the role that the consumer-permeated concept of choice plays in end-of-pregnancy decision-making for would-be mothers.
In contrast to pregnancy loss, where consumer goods are used to create longed-for kin-ties, Single Mothers by Choice provide an example of how the alienating potential of money is being used to obviate unwanted kin ties with biological fathers either through donor insemination or adoption.
Title: Consumption and mothering amongst lone mothers on low incomes
Presenter: Kathy Hamilton, University of Strathclyde
Dr Kathy Hamilton is a lecturer in marketing at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. Her research interests focus on understanding and theorising consumer culture. Key projects have related to consumer disadvantage, family consumption and gender issues, tribal consumption in dance and the consumption of celebrity. Kathy's publications include European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Management, Advances in Consumer Research and Journal of Consumer Behaviour.
Presentation:
This presentation will be based on a research project involving low-income families headed by lone mothers. It aims to demonstrate the lived experience of poverty against the backdrop of a society that is increasingly dominated by consumption. Findings suggest that limited financial resources and the resulting consumption constraints are a source of stress and dissatisfaction. Such dissatisfaction stems from feelings of exclusion from the "normal" consumption patterns that these consumers see around them.
Kathy will explore the role of love in consumer decision making, suggesting that consumption in such families revolves around children as mothers make considerable sacrifices to ensure their children's needs and desires are met. Indeed, some mothers suppress their own needs and desires, or place them on hold, until their children are older.
While the harsh realities of consumer exclusion cannot be denied, findings will also present a more positive outlook as excluded consumers can achieve empowerment through employment of stigma management strategies, creative consumer coping and rejection of the stigmatising regime. The women gain a sense of achievement from their ability to "manage" and place great emphasis on being a good mother, thereby fighting against the negative discourse often associated with lone motherhood. It is suggested that coping strategies can be interpreted as acts of consumer agency that can result in consumer empowerment and have positive affects on self-esteem.