The Commodification of Motherhood: An Integrated Feminist Social Research Perspective on Mediatisation and Mediation of Mothering in an Era of Consumerism

This project aims to investigate how through the processes of mediatisation and mediation of motherhood in contemporary society both ideas and practices related to motherhood and mothering become increasingly tied to certain patterns of consumption and how consumer-based view of motherhood significantly alters social perceptions of motherhood/womanhood as well as of gender contract at large. Defined here as the commodification of motherhood, the said process forges and entails an increasingly economic perception of motherhood, which, rather than being viewed as a socially significant process and role, is now increasingly tied – in media and other public discourses – to economic relations of acquiring or gaining material goods and adjusting one’s practices to patterns of consumption as those that first and foremost are characterising ‘good’ mothers.

The project looks at how motherhood is commodified in media discourse and how the latter is both a carrier/vehicle of consumer-based mothering, especially in top-down discourses of the traditional media, and how such visions of motherhood are either accommodated/perpetuated and/or contested in bottom-up discourses of new and social media.