“Am I a Good [White] Mother?”: Mad Men and Post(Racial)Feminism

• In Event: Reading Race, Gender, Class, and Identity

Abstract

This project explores “bad” white mothers as part of a broader cultural myth supported and maintained by popular culture, focusing on the critically acclaimed AMC drama, Mad Men. Building on Barthes, we advance a critique of white consciousness by exploring the embeddedness of racializing logics in, first of all, Mad Men’s representations of (white) motherhood through Betty’s character, and second, public discussions of the show through different media outlets. By examining the conditions that allow for the (dis)connection between white women and ideals of motherhood, we hope to shed light on how different ideologies interact when it comes to the (im)possibilities of reinforcing or challenging the motherhood myth. The interaction between post-feminism and whiteness, we argue, is especially important to explore, since it carries potentially limiting implications for our collective imagination about what anti-racist and feminist struggles entail.

Authors

• Susana Martinez Guillem, The U of New Mexico

• Christopher Charles Barnes, U of Colorado Boulder