Director of Operations Meets Gangster from the Mother-hood: Consumer Culture and the Marketing of Maternal Identities (original) (raw)

Representations of the maternal in consumer culture reinscribe the interests of the dominant culture through a mechanism of repression and wish fulfillment, whereby maternal anxiety is assuaged with promises of empowerment and adulation. In a world with few existential bearings, in which community has been degraded through the disembedding and sequestering of personal experience, individuals acquiesce to mediated representations and consumable identities to protect against cognitive dissonance and ontological insecurity. However, mothers are particularly vulnerable to the cultural forces of mediation and commodification, given their struggle to negotiate the disjuncture between the institutional demands of motherhood and their personal knowledge of mothering. By deconstructing maternal identity as represented in the “World’s Toughest Job” and “The Mother-hood” YouTube commercials, this article explores the power of consumer culture to sell images of motherhood that women can neither...