Consuming M/Otherhood: Pedagogical Regimes of Truth in Parental Consumerism

• In Event: M/othering a Bodied Curriculum: Emplacement, Desire, and Affect

Abstract

Current practices around birthing largely fall into two ideological categories – those that support the dominant medical model, evidenced by the growing number of elective caesarian deliveries and the pathologization of pregnancy, and the increasingly prevalent natural birth movement, which emphasizes vaginal delivery and women’s control of the birthing process (Bryant, et al., 2007; Zadoroznyj, 2001). Along with this bifurcation, a wide spectrum of birthing products and services exists. Each side of the divide utilizes powerful pedagogies of doubt and fear to sell its model of good birthing, good care, and ultimately good parenting. These market-based discourses frequently serve interests that cohere less with human well being than they do with furthering the profit motive.

In this presentation, we illustrate how certain elements of the growing natural parenting movement, despite its espoused commitment to women’s choice, have worked to construct a commodified, rigid notion of parenthood and parent identity. To provide examples of this commodified identity, as well as its links to a highly specific kind of class-based distinction (Bourdieu, 2000), we reviewed Mothering magazine, a widely read publication that claims a commitment to natural childbirth and parenting, as well as the marketing material available via the magazine’s Web site, specifically noting the ways in which the magazine’s authors promote/reinforce the development of a certain consumptive, classed identity in their writing. Finally, using a theoretical construct based on the work of Bourdieu and Gore (1992), we suggest the ways in which this (re)production of identity acts as a public pedagogy of consumer desire – manipulating ideological constructions of distinction, choice, and fear as means to promote consumers of this particular brand (Aldridge, 2003) of parenthood.

To illustrate the polyvocal aspects of these competing discourses and the effect they had on our experience of parenting, we intersperse our academic discourse with a performative script developed from several narratives of parenting. These narratives include autoethnographic vignettes; qualitative data from Mothering magazine; narrative elements from blogs, Web forums, and other Internet sources; and writings from parenting books and guides. Through these voices, we suggest that the available narratives of childbirth and childrearing situate parents between competing and opposing public pedagogies of correct parenting. Thus, the purpose of this presentation is to demonstrate how one’s parental identity is inevitably constructed and constricted by the narratives and images provided by the cultural scripts that circumscribe parenthood.

Authors

• Jake Burdick, Purdue University

• Jonel Thaller, Arizona State University