The Digital Mother

• In Event: 322 - Regular Session. Feminist Thought/Theory

Abstract

This paper considers how digital labor is coded as maternal, or presented as a labor of love. From an digital ethnography and textual analysis of over fifty blogs in the online parenting genre, also referred to as mommy blogs, I find that mothers discuss their digital participation in gendered terms of care and love, while discussing motherhood in starker, more realistic terms of labor and toil. I show that digital technologies and social media platforms increasing operate by offering care for users, whether by tracking moods, offering a network of friends to chat with, or by providing a free space to work out the frustrations of motherhood in neoliberal economies. Or, in other words: our technologies mother us. For women online, motherhood is easily understood as work, while digital participation is discussed in terms of opaque language of positive psychology and post-feminist ideology. I discuss the implications of the shift in the labor of love discourse for feminist thought. Further, by focusing on the often overlooked and presumed technical inept population, mothers, this paper contributes a feminist perspective to discussions of the digital economy.

Author

• Kara M. Van Cleaf, City University of New York-Graduate Center