Seminars
Motherhood, Consumption and Transition
Presenter details and abstracts
- Carolyn F Curasi - Transitioning into the Empty Nest: The experiences of mothers as they enter a new life stage
- Imogen Tyler - Maternal Publics (and Counterpublics)
- Tina Miller - Engaging with the maternal: tentative mothering acts and the props of performance
- Caroline Gatrell - Embodying Maternal Management: On being pregnant at work
Title: Transitioning into the Empty Nest: The experiences of mothers as they enter a new life stage
Presenter: Carolyn F Curasi (Associate Professor of Marketing at Georgia State University, USA)
In this investigation we seek to better understand the complex relationship between consumer behavior and the psycho-social needs of individuals as they experience different life stage transitions. Specifically, we investigate the life experiences and coping strategies female consumers use to maintain their sense of self amid the turmoil of a major life transition. We explore how women work to maintain their desired identities while negotiating the reconstruction of self in concert with a major life transition.
Our context for this investigation is a focus on the behaviors and experiences of mothers whose grown children have recently left their homes. We sought to better understand the "lived experience" of women who are in the process of negotiating the role status transition of going from being a mother with children in their home to that of being a mother in the empty nest stage of the family life cycle.
Many of our informants experienced extreme distress early in this life stage transition. The feelings of loss and grief that were communicated to us were often similar to the feelings of loss, grief and mourning documented to accompany the death of a loved one. We also found that this life stage transition is frequently accompanied by an in-depth evaluation of informants' roles in life. Prominently, their role as a mother was evaluated, as well as their role as a wife. Roles outside of the home were also evaluated.
Products, possessions, and consumption play a key role in the strategies of these women as they work through this sometimes difficult life stage transition and reconstruct their identities and their relationships with their grown children. We also find a shifting orientation from one of production to one of consumption employed to enact their love and their mothering role as women traverse this life stage transition.
Title: Maternal Publics (and Counterpublics)
Presenter: Imogen Tyler (Lecturer in Sociology, University of Lancaster)
This paper 'Maternal Publics' outlines elements of a new research project which is concerned with mapping the intensification of the visibility of the maternal in arts, literature, politics, popular media, consumer culture and 'everyday life'. The project begins with the premise that the ways in which the maternal occupies public space has transformed in the post-war era. The aim of this project is to track some of the primary ways in which the maternal has become public, appears in public and is imagined in public forms and to consider the meaning and impact of new forms of 'maternal publicity'.
The public rhetoric of the maternal which has emerged in the last three decades is diverse and includes new representations of infertility, 'pregnant beauty', new consumer cultures of the maternal as well as the emergence of celebrity motherhood and more recently the rise of the 'political mother'. My interest in tracking and analysing thinking the new visibility of the maternal in terms of the generation of 'publics', is that I want to think about not only what do the new visual culture of the maternal means but what it does or what it is doing. What effects might mediated fantasies of the maternal be having? What happens when we encounter the maternal not in the enclosed, private, secluded or particular spaces where we might imagine mothering to take place -but in public- in a magazine, a film, a gallery, on a supermarket shelf? What happens when these encounters are not an exception but become established as a norm? What does it mean for the maternal to become a 'capitalized' and for mothers to be thought of primarily in terms of markets and as consumers? What kinds of identifications do market orientated representations and encounters provoke and what kinds of identities are produced as a consequence of these new forms of 'mass maternal consumption'? What kinds of 'imagined communities' are produced by these new representational cultures - and more complexly what kinds of maternals do they make less visible and less communicable?
The majority of my paper will be concerned with tracking and mapping how the maternal has emerged in public and considering what new kinds of publics are being generated through these new representational genres of the maternal. Despite the diversity of representations at stake in the new maternal publicity, I want to trace some of the common features of the new visibility of the maternal. I will suggest, for example, that much 'maternal publicity' can be understood in terms of what Lauren Berlant terms 'the intimate public sphere' (2008). According to Berlant, intimate publics are those in which 'genres of intimacy' have become the primary vehicles for the communication, mediation and the commodification of everyday life. I will argue that the new visibility of the maternal, in all its different aesthetic and generic forms, is primarily defined by the emergence of publics which are characterised and preoccupied with the spectacles and experiences of maternal 'private life'-publics structured by revelation of the intimate; by the communication of maternal bodily experiences and maternal desires; maternal gossip; secrets, and the 'affective' and identificatory transactions that ensue from such intimate exchanges.
Many of the 'maternal representations' I will consider in this paper are decidedly normative in terms of their heterofemininity, their whiteness and the general hygienic fantastic airbrushed and disciplined versions of maternal lives they represent. Indeed, I will argue that these public figurations of the maternal work to cloak the lived messiness and emotional turmoil of maternal experience. The veils of intimacy employed in the new representational genres of the maternal operate, I will argue, as a 'cloaking device' which make lived maternal experiences and particularly maternal ambivalence, more difficult to 'hear' and less visible and knowable.
In the conclusion, I will draw on the idea of a 'maternal counter-public' and on the work of Lisa Baraitser (2008) to consider some of the alternative, political, anti-consumerist and counter-cultural forms 'maternal communities' might (and do) also take.
Title: Engaging with the maternal: tentative mothering acts and the props of performance
Presenter: Tina Miller (Reader in Sociology, Oxford Brookes University)
Becoming a mother for the first time is for many women a tricky undertaking invoking encounters with powerful ideas of nature and instincts and everyday mothering experiences that may be experienced as 'baffling', challenging and uncertain.
This paper will use qualitative longitudinal data to explore the ways in which women prepare for and manage early, tentative maternal acts and performances. This involves them in preparing 'appropriately' and demonstrating aspects of this through acquiring and then using the props of 'good' mothering in order to perform early public acts of competent (and so 'natural') mothering.
The consumption and reproduction of recognizable and socially acceptable elements of 'good mother' discourses provide another dimension of early maternal presentations of new and sometimes uncertain selves and will also be considered. Even when equipped with all the physical props required for performances of modern motherhood the 'risk' of an 'incompetent' mothering performance, especially in public domains, can be perceived as too fraught with 'risk', leading the women to confine themselves to the home.
The findings from a recent qualitative longitudinal study on men's experiences of transition to first-time fatherhood will also be drawn upon in order to explore some of the gendered dimensions of preparing for and doing early mothering and fathering performances. Men's tentative forays into the paternal/parental arena are, in the antenatal period, usually 'facilitated' by their wife/partner.
What is read and when, which classes are attended and by whom and what is purchased in preparation for the baby reinforce both the power of assumptions around biological determinism and the influence of consumption in acts of 'appropriate' preparation.
Title: Embodying Maternal Management: On being pregnant at work
Presenter: Caroline Gatrell (Lecturer in Management Learning and Leadership , Lancaster University Management School)
In this paper, I focus on the relationship between women's reproductive labour and women's employment. Specifically, I examine how pregnant employees are expected to erase their pregnant bodies from workplace 'space'. Drawing on a netnographic study of pregnant workers, I observe how the pregnant body may be abjured at work to the point where women disavow their own pregnancies. This, I argue, is because the pregnant body incites fears, among employers, of unreliability, leakage, breakdown and failure.
I show how, in response to employers' antipathy, pregnant women feel compelled to conceal their pregnant state. Women who consume advice from 'experts' on pregnancy web sites are exhorted to present a body which appears, at work, to be 'healthy' and 'reliable': putting on a 'sparky, professional front'. Woman are advised that leakage, and other physical symptoms of pregnancy - tiredness, nausea, vomiting, expanding waistlines, the threat of leaky breasts and breaking waters - must be rendered invisible within workplace space.
As a consequence of the abjuration of pregnant bodies at work, some employed pregnant women reach the point where they begin to ignore their own basic health needs. Self-denial, on the part of pregnant employees, of fundamental requirements (such as eating lunch) would seem likely to invoke illness. Thus, employers' fearful prophecies that pregnant bodies may be prone to poor health would seem to be, at the same time, self-fulfilling and self-imposed. If pregnant women are discouraged from eating and attending health appointments, it seems unsurprising that some do become ill, and require time away from work as a result.