UC Irvine

In the cultural and media context of the late 2000s, a series of performances of motherhood revealed a conflicted state of "ideal" contemporary American maternity and struggles over what constitutes the labor of women's work. Prompted by the images of these performances, which crossed popular digital media registers including the blogosphere, reality TV, and film, I address issues of motherhood attendant to a postfeminist, neoliberal era wherein performances of motherhood are often communicated through 2.0 platforms that stress interactive and relational communication between media icon and audience. By examining popular cultural texts through a scholarly lens, I point to tropes of motherhood that emerge during this particular postfeminist moment of digital visual culture: the stay-at-home career enabled by new technologies and economies, the over-extended mother, and the threat of the dystopian, technologically-dependent mother and mother-to-be. By moving from examining the performance of motherhood over different platforms of delivery from the blogosphere, read on a personal or home computer, to reality TV, watched at home on a personal computer or a television, to film, which opens in a public theater, I point to the way in which different digital-era media platforms, which operate with different levels of "domestication" and formal histories, offer specific stories about motherhood and different opportunities for mothers to either break down or re-adhere to traditional models of femininity. The conceptual framework of a 2.0 model refers not only to the interactivity that is the new, cultural model which frames the production and reception of these texts, but it also references a digital era in which personal computing and screen objects are used for social networking. I contextualize these representations of motherhood in postfeminist, digital, visual culture as a historically specific extension of and re-imagination of traditional models of femininity and motherhood that emerge in the broadcast era. These representations, and this specific visual culture, pose a critical site of analysis and gender study at this moment in their ability to articulate our culture's negotiation of gender in relation to new models of technology, power, and economic anxiety in a recession era.