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Good Mamas and Fuzzi Bunz: The American Cloth Diapering Community in the Early Twenty-First Century

Fri, November 7, 8:00 to 9:45am, Westin Bonaventure, Floor: Level 1, Santa Anita A (L1)

Abstract

Diapering a baby might seem to be one of the least rewarding chores of early childhood care. Indeed, this task often serves as a cultural shorthand for parental sacrifice and the literal “dirty work” of childcare. But self-described cloth diaper “junkies” speak playfully about their diapering choices. Employing the language of addiction, religious conversion, and personal transformation, they find in this most mundane of activities significant gratification. In the words of members of online cloth diapering boards: “I literally became obsessed.” “I’m a convert.” “I am a diaper junkie.”

My paper explores the politics of parental (but mainly maternal) commodity activism through a study of contemporary American cloth diapering. This practice is one of the most visible components of “attachment parenting,” a parenting style that celebrates so-called “natural” parenting traditions: co-sleeping, “baby-wearing” (the frequent use of baby slings and carriers), extended breastfeeding, home birthing and midwifery, gentle discipline, and organic food. While the cloth diaper movement has been largely invisible in academic research, my paper uses diapering as a lens for exploring contemporary debates about the best (and most personally satisfying) parenting practices, and for reflecting on the pleasures of parental consumerism.

Toward this end, I use an archive of several online cloth diapering boards that have operated over the past decade to explore the cloth industry’s growth in recent years. I also consider the history of countercultural consumerism from the 1960s onward, to set contemporary parenting ideologies into conversation with long-term parenting trends. The American cloth diaper movement first emerged in the wake of new diaper technologies (effective, affordable disposable diapers) in the 1960s; from that point onward, choosing cloth increasingly became a way to signal one’s attention to simple living, frugality, good health, and environmental awareness. In recent years, in the wake of rising environmental, financial and health concerns, and the growth of online parenting communities, cloth diapers have been culturally resurgent among very diverse groups of American parents, broadening this consumer counterculture to include cohorts of mothers who otherwise might not find points of connection with one another.

Babies and small children figure in these communities as the lucky recipients of soft, healthy, and cute diapers. At the same time, the mothers who dominate these conversations focus explicitly on their own tremendous pleasure in “stalking” merchandise and finding the perfect and most delightful products for their young children. At one end of the market, this pleasure takes the form of paying up to $300 at auction for the perfect, hand-dyed, individually crafted diaper from a high-status boutique brand, or building a diaper “stash” worth thousands of dollars. At the other end, mothers trade second-hand diapers, and frugality is its own reward. What many of these parents share, in the words of FuzBaby diaper maker and cloth activist Lori Taylor, is the task of “making the mundane astonishingly beautiful.”

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