We Need to Talk

about Family
We Need to Talk
about Family:

Essays on Neoliberalism,
the Family and Popular Culture

Edited by

Roberta Garrett, Tracey Jensen

and Angie Voela
We Need to Talk about Family:
Essays on Neoliberalism, the Family and Popular Culture

Edited by Roberta Garrett, Tracey Jensen and Angie Voela

This book first published 2016

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2016 by Roberta Garrett, Tracey Jensen, Angie Voela

and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-9529-6

ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9529-3


TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction .............................................................................................. viii

“The Fantasies are Fraying”: Neoliberalism and the Collapse
of a Progressive Politics of the Family
Roberta Garrett, Tracey Jensen and Angie Voela

The Biopolitics of Neoliberalism

Chapter One ................................................................................................. 2

24-Hour Nurseries: The Never-Ending Story of Care and Work
Camille Barbagallo

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 22

Invisible Labour: Care Provision for Infants and Children at UK Art
Schools
Kim Dhillon

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 41

“Mother Work”, Education and Aspiration in British-Bangladeshi Families
Rifat Mahbub

Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 59

Dutiful Sons and Debt: The Case of Chinese “Money Boys”
Chia-Hung Benny Lu

Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 76

Against Resilience
Tracey Jensen

Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 95

Understanding the Rise of “Neuroparenting”
Jan MacVarish, Ellie Lee and Pam Lowe

Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 118

Safe for Life: Neoliberalism and Mothers’ Milk
Olivia Guaraldo
vi Table of Contents

Meditating the Neoliberal Family

Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 138

Selling Heaven: Evangelical Natalism in 19 Kids and Counting
J.A. Forbes

Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 157

Homonormativity in Representations of Gay Fathers on Television:
Reproductive Citizenship, Gender and Intimacy
Clare Bartholomaeus and Damien W. Riggs

Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 177

The Lonely Cloud: Intensive Parenting and Social Media in Neoliberal
Times
Anneke Meyer and Katie Milestone

Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 199

Birthing Babies in the Blogosphere: Gendered Labour and Entrepreneurial
Motherhood in Cyberspace
Anija Dokter

Maternal Reflections: Ambivalence and Anxiety

Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 224

Cavorting in the Ruins? Truth, Myth and Resistance in Contemporary
Memoirs
Roberta Garrett

Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 245

Reconstructing the Neo-Indian Mother through Memoir
Sucharita Sarkar

Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 270

The New Ties that Bind: Helicopter Parenting and Surveillance
Karen L. Lombardi

Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 289

“Just What Kind of Mother Are You?”: Neoliberal Guilt and Privatised
Maternal Responsibility in Recent Domestic Crime Fiction
Ruth Cain
 We Need to Talk about Family vii

The Psychic Life of Neoliberal Families

Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 314

The End of Alice, Not the End of the Oedipus Complex
Erica D. Galioto

Chapter Seventeen ................................................................................... 333

“Western Civilisation Must Be Defended”: Neoliberal Values in Teenage
Literature
Angie Voela

Chapter Eighteen ..................................................................................... 353

What’s Awesome? Coercive Elements and the Threat of Child Sacrifice
in The Lego Movie
Louis Rothschild


INTRODUCTION

“THE FANTASIES ARE FRAYING”:

NEOLIBERALISM AND THE COLLAPSE
OF A PROGRESSIVE POLITICS OF THE FAMILY

ROBERTA GARRETT, TRACEY JENSEN

AND ANGIE VOELA

We are the first generation in recent history that does not know if our
children will have a better life than us. Over the past thirty years the dream
of upward mobility, stable and securely paid employment, and the
possibility of forming durable intimate relationships has dissipated. In
Lauren Berlant’s words, the “fantasies are fraying” (2011, 3). The family,
as we know, has only ever succeeded through a gendered and generational
exercise of power under which some members flourish and others are
exploited. Under the sexual division of domestic labour, the breadwinner
—whose masculinity was confirmed and enhanced through his capacity to
provide—required the unpaid and unrecognised domestic labour of his
dependent wife in order for all the requirements of social reproduction to
be achieved each day. Indeed the demands of twentieth-century
democratic socialism for a “family wage”—a wage generous enough to
sustain and reproduce the family—relied absolutely on the exploitation of
women via this gendered division of labour.
Under neoliberalism the complex machinations of the nuclear family
fantasy—a problematic space which relies on the exercise of such
gendered and generational power, but also a space where political claims
to a generous, stable, secure family wage can be made—have indeed
started to fray. The extension of market forces and the search for
evermore-elusive profit margins have taken their toll on labour. Workers
have seen their wages stagnate during the final decades of the twentieth
century, along with the erosion of worker benefits and rights. The
pendulum of power has swung decisively away from labour and towards
 We Need to Talk about Family ix

capital. At one end of the spectrum, the intensification of work and the
normalisation of long-hours working culture have undermined the time
and energy available for private family life. At the other end, the rise of
precarious, low-paid work, often without any guaranteed hours and with
few employment securities (such as sickness or maternity benefits) has
created additional pressures for workers.
The family has often been imagined as a potential tamer of markets: a
haven in a heartless world and a site where equality and solidarity could be
fostered in the next generation. As Nancy Fraser (2013) comments,
second-wave feminism in particular imagined “the family” to be a site of
patriarchal power—but one that could be transformed via collective,
radical political action and sustained via the ethos of democratic socialism
and its commitments to egalitarian redistribution. Just as this political
climate sought to distribute individual value and material resources more
equitably, along class lines, there was also a sense in which it could be
harnessed to inculcate and foster a fuller sense of human potential,
unrestrained by gendered norms and expectations. Neoliberalism, as Fraser
notes, blew such dreams out of the water: free-market ideologies were
“miraculously” resurrected after the fall of Communism and amplified by
rampant globalisation. The resurrection of this ideology can be seen in the
eruption of neoliberal family formations—the hypercompetitive,
neotraditionalist mobile family seeking to capitalise on the uneven spread
of resources in order to maximise the futures of its own children.
Concerns about the effects of neoliberalism-capitalism upon individuals
and groups are not new. When Lasch examines the basic operating
principles of American society in the Culture of Narcissism (1979) he
describes a thriving, confident culture on its way to casting off its
moorings to traditional authority and values. The phenomena described by
Lasch—in spite of the limitations of his approach (Kilminster, 2008)—are
not mere variations of laissez-faire liberalism and the pursuit of happiness,
but radical revisions of established norms.
Sennett (1999, 2006) and Bauman (2007) express concerns about the
erosion of individuality under capitalism and the growing discontent with
modern life. Modern individuals struggle to keep up with the traditional
dreams of success and affluence and have to grapple with the loss of the
value of labour, the casualisation of the workforce, the rise of
managerialism and the knowledge that everyone is expendable and
replaceable.
In the political sphere, contemporary neoliberalism is widely examined
as the legacy of Thatcher and Reagan, whose political visions of unfettered
free-market economies were built on the solid foundations of the
x Introduction

biopolitical engineering Foucault so brilliantly discusses in The Birth of

Biopolitics (2004). Neoliberalism is usually defined as the expansion of
economic thinking in all spheres of human activity, including the family,
with emphasis on individualism and practices of extending and
disseminating market policies to all institutions and forms of social action
(Brown 2003). Neoliberalism is all or some of the following: an
aggregation of ideas, a discursive formation, governmental programmes,
an over-arching ideology, a hegemonic project, an assemblage of
techniques and technologies for the formation of subjects. In that sense,
we should think of neoliberalism not as a concrete doctrine but as
“enabling certain behaviours and not others” (Gilbert 2003, 7). It is
generally accepted that the “neo” in neoliberalism refers to the growth of
the corporation and the corporate mentality (Hardin 2014, 215). Further, it
is generally agreed that neoliberalism potentiates individuals, but
discourages collectivity, is essentially antithetical to democratic values
(Giroux 2005, 13) and is characterised by a loss of democratic and
collective values and by intensive ideological manipulation (Brown 2006,
307).
Neoliberalism regularly promulgates the discourse that it is a self-
evident and “inevitable” state of affairs— the only alternative (Giroux,
2005). This doxa, widely accepted and rarely questioned, goes hand in
hand with the role of a state. The modern neoliberal state seems to have
abdicated the traditional responsibility of taking care of its most vulnerable
citizens, in direct proportion to engineering the responsible, entrepreneurial
and financially independent ones. The individualistic conception of
selfhood central to neoliberalism (Gilbert 2013, 11) accepts that an
individual is both an ideal locus of sovereignty and a site of governmental
intervention. The individual is a rational, calculating unit, looking after her
or his own needs. Moral responsibility is equated to rational action. A
“mismanaged” life is unacceptable (Brown 2003, 15). Despite being
forged by rigid biopolitical processes, the individual is always seen as a
free subject. Self-care and the ability to provide for one’s own needs are
considered paramount (Brown 2006, 694). We are reminded at this point
of the catastrophic effects of neoliberal austerity on families, communities
and individuals, the growing indifference of the average individual for the
other’s predicament, and the sense that there is no way out (Fischer 2009).
The dream of neoliberalism thus enables new kinds of fantasies,
anxieties and defences. The family retreats into itself and becomes more
atavistic and competitive. This is the impoverished psychosocial context in
which family is emplaced. To take care of oneself and one’s family in the
neoliberal sense means to create a realm of invulnerability, a denial of
 We Need to Talk about Family xi

mutual interdependence, a dis-engaged engagement with one’s psyche and

the world. Layton calls this attitude (after Rodger and Banfield) “amoral
familialism”. The latter is defined as “behaviour which follow[s] the
dictum that the individual should maximise the material and short-run
advantage of their nuclear family and assume that everyone else in the
community w[ill] behave similarly” (2010, 312).
Neoliberalism as a failure of the caretaking social environment is not a
private matter but a public one. It not only results in the traumatised
patients seen in psychiatric clinics and therapists’ offices but also in jaded
“functional” citizens. It results in the explosion of hatred, phantasies of
grandeur, persecution and superiority (Layton 2010, 309). It reactivates
aggressive behaviours like nationalism, sexism and racism: regimes of
inflexible binary thinking that produce a false sense of secure identity by
excluding and excommunicating the vulnerable or repulsive Other.
Considering neoliberalism as a failure of the caretaking environment does
not absolve individuals of their own share of responsibility. Layton
poignantly calls this “our mutual implication in each other’s suffering”
(2009), and speaks of a lack of accountability and empathy both at an
individual and national level (2009, 106).

The Biopolitics of Neoliberalism

A key concern of this collection is to explore the ways in which intimate
and domestic life serves as a crucial site for the exercise of biopolitical
power; that is, forms of governance which operate through the
administration and management of life force. Through regulating—and
importantly, taming—“the family”, reproductive power can be made
docile and put to work under larger systems of labour power. By attending
to the ways in which reproductive practices and family life come under
scrutiny, surveillance and control, we can start to track how family
regulation is put to work under neoliberalism.
These concerns about the biopolitics of family life have troubled
theorists throughout the twentieth century. In The Policing of Families,
Jacques Donzelot tracks the ways in which mothers are transformed into
agents of the state, assisted by philanthropy, social work, mass education,
family courts and psychiatry. He shows how nineteenth- and twentieth-
century educational, judicial and medical discourses in France come to
increasingly regulate and proselytise the normal and desirable family
image and experience. Through such policing, the institution of the family
becomes a crucial site for the extension of state power over workers and
produces new figures in need of social control: such as the delinquent, or
xii Introduction

“problem” child. Significantly, Donzelot highlights how such regulatory

regimes have different consequences for working-class and bourgeois
children: they are all equally surveilled by penal authority but the latter
have access to extracurricular activities and investments which help
guarantee the reproduction of privilege from one generation to the next.
The family, then, is anything but a private institution but rather a key site
of biopolitical power—in Donzelot’s words “a protector of private
property, of the bourgeois ethic of accumulation, as well as the guarantor
of a barrier against the encroachments of the state” (1997, 5). The family,
as both “queen and prisoner” (7) of the social world, inhabits a
contradictory position: one where it is denounced for its hypocrisy and
egocentrism, marked by interminable and unending crisis and absolutely
crucial to the exercise of state power over its citizens.
One motivating desire in this collection is to explore how these
processes unfold under contemporary neoliberalism, in a context in which
state power has ostensibly been rolled back and in which liberal freedoms
have ostensibly been extended. Drawing on the insights of feminist
political philosophers (notably Nancy Fraser), we have asked how has the
crisis of the welfare state, brought about by the fracturing of a social
democracy consensus and its supplanting by neoliberalism, effected the
machinery of state power and its impact on families? How have central
assumptions about labour markets and families been interrupted by
neoliberalism? How has social policy geared towards family life been
reimagined under neoliberalism? How has the biopolitics of the family
been transformed by neoliberalism? To that end, our first section, The
Biopolitics of Neoliberalism, includes seven very different chapters that
explore how the dimensions of reproductive power and practices are lived,
regulated, and resisted under neoliberalism.
In “24-Hour Nurseries: the Never-Ending Story of Care and Work”,
Camille Barbagallo examines the recent demand for twenty-four-hour
childcare. She makes her case with reference to the radical shifts in the
labour landscape, the rise of untypical employment for women, the less-
well-paid jobs mothers often have to accept, the gender gap in
opportunities, the lack of support by formal or informal networks of
support, and so on. She then turns to the past—precisely, to four decades
ago—when flexible arrangements for working mothers and lone parents
were an integral part of the feminist agenda. Drawing on qualitative
research, as well as official reports and statistics, Barbagallo reveals the
pressures, inequalities and insurmountable difficulties that once made
round-the-clock childcare an important feminist issue. Fast-forward to the
present-day: the picture does not seem to have changed all that much; if
 We Need to Talk about Family xiii

anything it has become worse. Barbagallo demonstrates how neoliberalism

emptied out the dream of “unchallengeable flexibility for mothers” as a
socialist and utopian vision, replacing it with arrangements of reproductive
and domestic labour that reinforce gender divisions, restrict women’s
opportunities and ultimately reveal the present demand for twenty-four-
hour childcare as an impossible solution for women in the workplace.
In “Invisible Labour: Care Provision for Infants and Children at UK
Art Schools”, Kim Dhillon examines the failures of art schools and higher
education institutions to provide adequate and sustainable childcare
provision for students and teachers. Examining the hidden and
counterarchives of the Royal College of Art, Dhillon reflects on the
practical and informal strategies that were mobilised to make space for
collective care and shows how progressive alternatives to current care
arrangements came to be erased. Drawing on interviews with art school
students, Dhillon exposes the impossibilities of being an art student with
care obligations. Childcare—now more formalised and expensive—is
increasingly erased from the institutional life of the art school, with
children literally prohibited from entry. Under the current priorities of art
school administration, Dhillon argues, it is outward-facing professional
practice that is valued rather than the experimental infrastructures of
everyday childcare that might help to enable art students with children to
complete their course. She situates these histories and counterhistories of
art colleges’ care provision within a broader crisis of access to the creative
world and asks what kinds of demands and strategies might need to be
articulated to address this.
In her chapter “‘Mother Work’, Education and Aspiration in British-
Bangladeshi Families”, Rifat Mahbub draws on interviews with educated
Bangladeshi-British mothers to explore the intensive “mother work”
through which they demonstrate and perform their citizen value. Mahbub
argues that Bangladeshi diasporic mothers are able to exercise agency and
control (in contexts which continue to racially discriminate against them as
professionals) by investing in their children’s educations, through
acquisition of knowledge of the British education system and by
developing their children’s confidence and educational capacity. Through
such “mother work” Mahbub’s respondents can distinguish themselves
from both “illegitimate migrants” and from working-class white mothers
who fail to navigate the educational system with confidence.
In “Dutiful Sons and Debt: the Case of Chinese ‘Money Boys’”, Chia-
Hung Benny Lu draws on his ethnographic work with the Money Boys of
Shanghai. He examines how his respondents (a group of male sex
workers) are engaged in forms of self-making and practices of “filial
xiv Introduction

selfhood”, which animate concepts of family debt, kinship and

intergenerational obligation. He shows how such filial obligations are
negotiated in a context of Chinese family biopolitics, characterised by
intensified pressures to “save face” and under new conditions of precarity,
insecurity and stigmatisation for migrant and queer sex workers.
In “Against Resilience”, Tracey Jensen examines how the measurement
of child poverty has been undermined by policymakers, supplanted in part
by neoliberal discourses of “resilience”. Such discourses direct public
debate away from collective strategies aimed at tackling the scandals of
inequality, and elevate the individualised, mobile and self-possessed
“responsible family” as the neoliberal solution to inequality via their
capacity to bounce back from insecurity and precariousness. Drawing on a
case study of “resilience resistance”—the Focus E15 mothers of East
London—Jensen explores how innovative and vibrant campaigning can
incubate an exciting constellation of support, highlighting potential
avenues for resistance and speaking back to neoliberal statecraft.
In “Understanding the Rise of ‘Neuroparenting’”, Jan MacVarish, Ellie
Lee and Pam Lowe chart the eruption of neuroscience discourse across
British social policy. They show how the “brain claims” of neuroscience
and in particular the significance of “the first three years” in cementing the
future capacities of children has been taken up across social work,
midwifery, health visitor training and across parent-training programmes
in ways that naturalise cyclical explanations of poverty and repeat the
“child-saving” movements of the nineteenth century. Their critical reading
of neuroparenting highlights the deeply problematic assumptions of
parental deficit that underpin such policy shifts, as well as the ways in
which particular groups are once again cast as “dysfunctional”.
In “Safe for Life: Neoliberalism and Mothers’ Milk”, Olivia Guaraldo
examines the discourses around the importance of breastfeeding by
drawing on Foucault’s notion of biopolitics. She starts with Adrianne
Rich’s tenth-anniversary edition ([1976] 1986) of From Woman Born and
uses this seminal feminist text and the ten-year span between the first and
the anniversary edition as a guide to the changes that took place over that
decade, before turning her attention to the present-day. Guaraldo traces the
developments and tribulations of the feminist demand for breastfeeding
and links it to feminist debates around taking care of, and being in control
of, one’s own body. She then examines the early alliance in the US and
Europe of feminist breastfeeding activism with mainstream activist groups
like La Leche League. Guaraldo then examines how the medical
profession and mainstream public opinion adopted a call for breastfeeding,
but in ways that counteracted the feminist activists’ position on the issue.
 We Need to Talk about Family xv

She shows how breastfeeding began to be promoted as “natural”, “good”

and, above all, an act of responsible mothering and citizenship. In that
sense, Guaraldo documents not only the advent of neoliberal discourses
but also, and crucially, the concurrent erosion of feminist ones. She also
provides a clear overview of Foucault’s biopolitics and a clear link to the
status of breastfeeding in the present day, in which the dominant view is
that it is still widely seen as natural, “best for baby”, “doing one’s best for
one’s child” and for the future healthy individual, and, of course, preserves
the “mystique” surrounding the “mummy knows best” discourse of
childrearing.

Mediating the Neoliberal Family

This collection discusses a mature phase of neoliberalism, and we argue
that (after three decades of political and economic rationality, privatisation,
deregulation and a rolling back and retrenchment of the state from social
provision) the institution of the family has been thoroughly “neoliberalised”.
In bringing together a body of research into the lived experiences,
representations and psychic life of neoliberalism, we have sought to create
a space in which to critically examine the shape and texture of the
neoliberal subjects who are animated within discussion of the
entanglements of familial relations. As such, we approach neoliberalism
less as a consistent political ideology and more as a “sensibility” (Gill and
Scharff, 2011)—that is to say: a set of pressures, constraints, influences
and requirements.
The chapters in the section Mediating the Neoliberal Family consider
how neoliberalism manifests in spheres and practices of mediation: via
cultural scripts, contradictory discourses and technologies of self-
making—all of which privilege and interpellate subjects who are rational,
self-enterprising and calculating, and are shorn of wider social and
collective obligations. The work of the contributors in this section
stretches across generations and phases of neoliberalism, yet all remain
immersed within it. This collection of chapters examines media and
cultural forms circulating around the neoliberal family (both
representational and self-representational) that reveal the contradictory
interpellations of neoliberalism: to enjoy more, to consume more, to self-
manage, to work and transform oneself and one’s family, to self-regulate,
to submit to disciplinary technologies, to monitor and identify potential
waste and deficiencies. These chapters examine a regime of desires and
cultural discourses that create a feeling of impossibility for those
enmeshed within them. Neoliberalism, as the chapters in this section show,
xvi Introduction

creates a kind of familial brittleness—a supplanting of more collective

“porous” parenting and of familial subjects with a more atomised and
competitive set of familial discourses. Such mediations expose the
rationalist, competitive edge of how we create families in a time of
diminishing social expectations (Bhattacharyya, 2015) and in a context
underpinned by the withdrawal of security and the rolling back of the
welfare state. The familial subjects who emerge through this neoliberalist
discursive formation are marked by the tyranny of “choice”; even those
who experience little in the way of either freedom or autonomy are
exhorted to understand themselves in these terms. These chapters critically
explore the costs and consequences of such incommensurability. They
(along with the rest of this edited collection of essays) show the
psychosocial and cultural life of neoliberalism, how neoliberal ideas are
produced and circulated across media and culture and how such discursive
formations “get inside” of us. From the nominally “open” but
overwhelmingly middle-class-mother-focused social media sites discussed
by Anneke Meyer and Katie Milestone, to the “mommyblogs” and vlogs
addressed by Anija Dokter, this section explores how and where
neoliberalism is congealing, its points of tension and attention, the
moments where we become complicit or compliant to the demands and
requirements of neoliberalism. This section also examines the
representational politics of the neoliberal family on prime-time television,
including fantasies of autonomous pro-natalist evangelical Christianity
circulated on reality television (as discussed by J.A. Forbes) and how
potentially radical families headed by gay fathers are sanitised and
commodified via homonormativity in prime-time drama (as discussed by
Clare Bartholomaeus and Damien W. Riggs). Across these cultural forms
there remains a tacit knowledge that it are “good” familial choices and
practices which produce happiness, security and success, and that failure
and struggle can only be understood via discourses of individual pathology
and deficiency.
In “Selling Heaven: Evangelical Natalism in 19 Kids and Counting”,
J.A. Forbes tracks the connections between neoliberalism, the Protestant
work ethic, and eschatological evangelism, through a critical reading of
the American reality television programme 19 Kids and Counting, which
follows the evangelical and “supersize” Duggar family. Examining the
narrative of the programme, Forbes argues that 19 Kids and Counting
illustrates the normalisation in American popular media ecology of near-
impossible exemplars of the family, reductively constructed as self-
determining rather than interdependent. Forbes argues that present-day
evangelical eschatology circulates powerful ideologies of thrift, hard work
 We Need to Talk about Family xvii

and self-denial and he discusses how its iteration on reality television

represents the pop mainstreaming of far-right natalist philosophy.
In the chapter “Homonormativity in Representations of Gay Fathers on
Television: Reproductive Citizenship, Gender Roles and Intimacy”, Clare
Bartholomaeus and Damien W. Riggs examine the everyday representational
politics at play in four prime-time television programmes in which gay
fathers are central characters: Modern Family, The New Normal, Sean
Saves the World and House Husbands. All four programmes, the authors
argue, reinforce and endorse neoliberal discourses about the family and
seek to normalise a specific homonormative version fatherhood that is at
ease with neoliberalism. What appears initially to be a new genre that
pushes the frontiers of mainstream family television forward in paradigm-
shifting ways is, Bartholomaeus and Riggs argue, actually a series of texts
which reiterate dominant gender norms and which are both complexly
conservative and progressive in their presentation of gay fathers, who are
characterised in these shows by their habits of consumption and by their
desexualisation. The authors trace how the complex and troubled fictional
representations of gay fathers on television serve to regulate and
instantiate markers of being a “good, neoliberal, reproductive citizen”.
In “The Lonely Cloud: Intensive Parenting and Social Media in
Neoliberal Times”, Anneke Meyer and Katie Milestone examine how
British mother-focused social media such as Mumsnet and Facebook
shapes, invites and fuels practices of intensive parenting within the twin
contexts of neoliberalism and postfeminism. As the authors demonstrate,
the neoliberal imagination favours individual provision, self-reliance and
responsibility over state intervention and collectivism, while postfeminism
promotes empowerment through individual choice and consumer freedom.
Social media, as Meyer and Milestone document, offers a cultural space
for digital motherhood that is oriented towards neoliberal and postfeminist
expressions of intensive parenting. Their analysis examines the part played
by social media in a broader regendering of intensive parenting. The
retreat of mothers into domestic space and the “rationalisation” of family
life manifests as parents seek a competitive edge in a race for scarce
resources. They show how mother-focused social media both shores up
nuclear familial ideology and exposes the contradictory jarring of the
values of such intensive parenting with neoliberalism.
In the chapter “Birthing Babies in the Blogosphere: An Analysis of
Gendered Labour and Entrepreneurial Motherhood in Cyberspace”, Anija
Dokter examines the neoliberal textures of the practices of “mommyblogging”
and specifically of video-blogging (“vlogging”) birth. Examining media
and public debate about birth-bloggers and birth-vloggers, Dokter exposes
xviii Introduction

the circuits of disdain and vitriol that circulate around the “mommyverse”,
accusations of “overshare” and exhibitionism, and the devaluation of
online maternal self-expression. Dokter’s analysis argues that birth-
bloggers and -vloggers are engaged in a complex set of practices that
subvert maternal ideals of modesty, silence, and selflessness even as they
appear to naturalise neoliberal values through the construction and display
of entrepreneurial subjectivities. She situates these practices within a
broader marketisation of motherhood and childbirth and in developing a
critical account of the economics of mommyblogging, she offers an
innovative account of how mothers participate in and resist systemic
inequalities that devalue and disparage them. Dokter argues that we must
recognise the unpaid emotional labour, the fears and anxieties surrounding
birth and the abject maternal body, the pressures to optimise and capitalise
on intimate moments, and the class/gender nexus of exploitation within
which the practices of mommyblogging and vlogging are situated.

Maternal Reflections: Anxiety and Ambivalence

Feminist critiques of the patriarchal, capitalist construction of motherhood
stretch back into the roots of Enlightenment thought and the birth of
modern Western feminism. Not surprisingly, resistance to the hegemonic
mothering role emerged in tangent with the rising eighteenth-century cult
of domestic life and the romantic idealisation of childhood. The figure of
the tender, demure and self-sacrificing mother was the visible face of an
underlying gender/class ideology in which affluent mothers were
essentially recruited by the (expanding) nation state in order to contain and
control the threat of working-class femininity, thereby solidifying existing
class-power relations in a time of increasing radicalism and political
dissent (Donzelot 1997, Abrams 2002, McRobbie 2013). Protest against
both the ideology of compulsory motherhood and the valorisation of a
particularly limiting and class-bound version of this role has been a
constant theme within women’s political struggles and creative expression
ever since. Nevertheless, there are certain cultural and historical moments
in which the dominant values, attitudes and social practices in and through
which mothering takes place become so onerous and antipathetic to
women’s socio-economic status and psychological well-being that
feminist scholarly attention is forcefully directed towards this issue.
The immediate aftermath of World War Two (in which women were
strong-armed back into the domestic sphere after the relative freedoms and
possibilities of the war years) incubated the wave of resistance to the
consumer-led construction of the suburban housewife/mother figure of the
 We Need to Talk about Family xix

1950s in second-wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s. In the last two
decades, the neoliberal repudiation of post-war social democracy and
welfarism has both intensified state and media interest in different
parenting styles and vastly increased divisions of wealth and status
between mothers of the different social classes. Withering state support for
mass education and health provision, alongside the creeping normalisation
of vast inequalities at every level of human experience, has been
accompanied by the forceful promotion of a culture which blames and
shames the poorest of families and the most disempowered of mothers
(Tyler 2008, Jensen 2012). As many of the contributions to this volume
demonstrate, there is little question that the neoliberal rhetoric of self-
governance, choice and individualism has worked to polarise public
perceptions of mothers and mothering practices along class lines. While
post-war popular culture was often patronising and sexist in its
sitcom/soap opera depiction of working-class mothers (e.g. as good-
hearted, domesticated drudges), from the late 1990s onwards poorer mothers
were openly vilified. Government rhetoric and popular representations
joined forces in depicting “underclass” mothers as ignorant, slovenly and
lacking in maternal feeling. In contrast, middle-class mothers were
deemed to have the required levels of (expert-led) knowledge, skills and
ambition to steer their charges towards sound psychological and physical
development and educational and career success. As the chapters in this
section make abundantly clear, middle-class mothers are also those that
enjoy access to a variety of modes of self-expression and representation.
However, as we will see, they rarely appear to relish their assigned role as
privileged guardians of the neoliberal family.
If there is one theme that dominates the contributions to this section, it
is dark cycle of anxiety, guilt and resentment that recurs insistently in
accounts of modern motherhood. Such themes occurs even—or perhaps
especially—in accounts produced by the kind of affluent, educated
“yummy mummies” who are imagined as “smug” and “self-satisfied” in
their role.
In “The New Tie that Binds: Helicopter Parenting in the Culture of
Postmodernism”, Karen L. Lombardi examines Amy Chua’s controversial
maternal memoir/parenting guide Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.
Lombardi unravels the contradictions within Chua’s text, exploring and
contextualising the guilt and ambiguity that underlie Chua’s clumsy and
blustering endorsement of “pushy parenting”. Lombardi’s thoughtful
treatment of Chua’s much-reviled work eschews personal criticism in
favour of a measured analysis of the determining factors that have given
rise to both a particular mode of hypercompetitive parenting and a
xx Introduction

groundswell of unease regarding the psychological effects of such

methods. As Lombardi demonstrates, Chua’s ethnicity and her teeth-
gritting determination to orchestrate her children’s success may have
become the focal point of social ambivalence towards “intensive”
mothering, but its origins lie in a range of neoliberal socio-economic
policies that have destroyed middle-class parents’ confidence in their
children’s future, breeding desperation and mutual suspicion.
In her chapter “Cavorting in the Ruins? Truth, Myth and Resistance in
Contemporary Memoirs”, Roberta Garrett continues this section’s analysis
of contemporary maternal reflections through a close textual analysis of
two controversial maternal memoirs penned by neomodernist female
writers: Julie Myerson’s The Lost Child and Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath: on
Marriage and Separation. While both writers were accused of cashing in
on their failure to maintain the “perfect” middle-class, neotraditional
family (Myerson’s teenage son becomes a heavy drug user, Cusk’s
marriage ends in divorce and lone parenthood) Garrett’s reading suggests
that the outrage produced by these texts was provoked more by their
distanced and critical relationship to the neoliberal mothering role than
their writerly exploitation of intimate material. Garrett highlights the
presence of a “frame” narrative in each text—one (Myerson’s) historical
and biographical and the other (Cusk’s) mythical and literary—in which
contemporary “common-sense” attitudes towards parenting and the
promotion of a particular form of hyperprotective, “wholesome” middle-
class family life are tested, and found wanting.
In “Reconstructing the Neo-Indian Mother Through Memoir”, Sucharita
Sarkar addresses the experience of affluent Indian mothers. The chapter
cautions us against regarding such parenting practices and their attendant
maternal dilemmas as exclusively Western phenomena. Sarkar traces the
dissolution of the traditional Indian family due to the effects of globalised
neoliberal policies and the media’s emphasis on the “new” Indian woman.
Her framing commentary indicates that, despite brimming with an
optimism rare in Anglo-American accounts of modern motherhood, Indian
mothers face a double dose of mothering pressure. While the older idea of
the self-sacrificing mother is still redolent within Indian culture, this is
now twinned with a neoliberal emphasis on performativity and self-
governance at number of levels. Sarkar’s diarists are acutely aware of the
increasing pressure to remain glamorous and alluring after childbirth and
to display competence in micromanaging a range of children’s activities
while still pursuing a professional career. Sarkar’s perceptive reading
highlights the resentment and anxiety that regularly pierces the surface of
 We Need to Talk about Family xxi

the diary accounts, despite their nominal reiteration of the celebratory

public rhetoric regarding women’s increased choices in neoliberal India.
In the final chapter in this section, “‘Just What Kind of Mother Are
You?’: Neoliberal Guilt and Privatised Maternal Responsibility in Recent
Domestic Crime Fiction”, Ruth Cain broadens our survey of maternal
writing from popular memoirs to a cycle of popular fiction in which many
of the same themes recur. Cain’s chapter on the domestic crime novel
defines and dissects this recent trend in the popular crime genre, in which
the guilt and resentment so characteristic of maternal diaries and memoirs
becomes the plot driver for the darkest of domestic fantasies. As Cain
argues, in novels such as Sophie Hannah’s A Room Swept White or Paula
Daly’s Just What Kind of Mother Are You?, children are often the victims
of the maternal resentment and aggression generated by heightened
pressures and a lack of psychological and emotional support. The
punishment for maternal failure is not only the public humiliation and
“mother shaming” which haunts middle-class maternal writings, but the
possibility of imprisonment or death.
This section of the volume highlights both the overwhelmingly middle-
class basis of maternal self- representation within neoliberal culture; its
central preoccupations; and the guilt, anxiety and resentment that
neoliberal mothering produces even for its most privileged subjects.

The Psychic Life of Neoliberal Families

Whether we examine neoliberalism theoretically or in its concrete
articulations, it is important to understand how the psyche experiences and
responds to the mental representations of the contemporary dominant
socio-economic and cultural system. Two approaches are relevant to the
present volume and are mentioned here to provide necessary context for
the papers in the psychoanalytic section entitled: The Psychic Life of
Neoliberal Families; namely, a Lacanian approach developed by Žižek
(1999) in his account of the effects of the decline of traditional paternal
authority in contemporary modernity, and an object relations approach that
considers contemporary behaviours as defences against the trauma of
neoliberalism (Layton 2009, 2010).
Žižek draws on Lacan, for whom the formation of the bourgeois
nuclear family resulted in the convergence and eventual merging of the
two aspects of the Father: the pacifying Ego-Ideal (put simply: the
positive, creative superego) and the ferocious superego. In simple terms,
this means that the socio-symbolic order and the authority of the Father
(or, his role as guarantor of law and order) are dependant upon belief—
xxii Introduction

specifically, upon all of us believing in authority, an inclination Žižek does

not hesitate to call “a symbolic fiction” (1999, 369). The fundamental shift
in contemporary modernity is that belief in authority has been irreparably
eroded.
However, Žižek is careful not to blame modern malaise on a lack of
strong paternal figures. The propensity to see through authority, the ability
to see that the Other (Father / social order) does not pull the strings of our
very existence (1994, 58), is always a radical and liberating insight. The
big challenge, of course, is what we do with the knowledge that “the Other
does not exist”—that is, that the social-cultural-political sphere is fluid and
to a large extent, inconsistent. Modern culture is plagued by the failure to
recognise the radical potential of this realisation, and by the effects of its
denial.
In this section we explore manifestations of the collapse of symbolic
authority in modern culture. For the moment, let us call its effects by the
collective name “loss of symbolic efficiency” (Žižek 1999, 328). The key
Lacanian argument is that the loss of symbolic efficiency produces
regressions to earlier sadistic, masochistic and aggressive modes of
enjoyment (jouissance). This is because the decline of the Father who
represents “no” (i.e. prohibition) makes enjoyment difficult, if not
impossible. To put this another way, the eradication of the figure that
represents prohibition does not mean that everything—every form of
enjoyment—is permissible. If no Oedipal prohibition is set in place (in
triadic terms, if there is no separation of the child from the mother, or
immediate gratification with no delay or sublimation), then enjoyment
becomes problematic. At an individual level, the decline of authority has
various effects. Symbolically, prohibitive norms are increasingly replaced
by imaginary ideals. Injunctions to “be yourself” and “achieve your
potential” have become mantras of neoliberal culture, yet often result in
very contrary effects: a sense of personal crisis, uncertainty, and the
undertaking of frantic activities to fill the void (Žižek, 1999).
A different approach to neoliberalism is offered by Layton (2009,
2010). Drawing on the psychoanalytic tradition of Winnicott and Bollas,
and especially on the human need for containment and the capacity to bear
frustration, Layton proposes that we should see neoliberalism as the
systematic failure of a caretaking environment. For Layton, collective
identities are forged in particular historical moments under particular
conditions and in relation to other identities. At the same time, every
culture produces norms of recognition (Butler, cited in Layton 2009, 113),
i.e. “normative unconscious processes” (114). Such norms are rarely
internalised or altered without conflict, especially at times of momentous
 We Need to Talk about Family xxiii

socio-economic change. Contemporary neoliberalism is such a time, and a

particularly difficult and traumatic one. The weakening of intermediary
institutions, rising poverty and inequality, and the increasing precarity of
everyday life mean that we are now in the grip of a terrorised state of mind
(Hall et al. 2013). In other words, we are becoming used to being
traumatised.
To approach neoliberalism as a systematic failure of the caretaking
environment (Layton 2010, 308) means to see it as failing to provide the
containment we need, both as babies and as adults, in the social
environment. The reaction to trauma is important in psychoanalysis.
Traumatised individuals often chose to ignore or repress their painful
experiences, resorting to denialism, disavowal and fantasies—all regularly
observed as responses to the uncertainties of contemporary life. Confronted
with an unbearable situation, the ego splits in the process of defence
(Freud 1991b). Separating and disavowing the painful part allows for
temporary peace of mind—an ultimately perverse solution to social trauma
(Layton 2010, 304–6). Disavowal (i.e. simultaneously knowing-and-not-
knowing) is a bid to contain anxiety by turning away from the truth.
Layton draws our attention to the scope of this defensive stance: our
capacity to hallucinate our way out of painful tensions (306), she notes,
can be a source of creativity, “but when that capacity becomes a regularly
practised disavowal of the truth of dependence, interdependence and
vulnerability, we have the makings of a perverse situation […] this is
precisely the situation created by neoliberalism, and more recently by
neoconservativism” (Layton 2010, 306).
Considering the demise of the traditional role of authority and the
failure of the caretaking social environment, the psychoanalytic chapters
of the present volume explore shifts in the patterns of desiring, variations
in enjoyment and the changing dynamics of the Oedipus complex in the
neoliberal family.
In “The End of Alice, Not the End of the Oedipus Complex”, Erica D.
Galioto offers a Lacanian reading of A.M. Homes’ novel The End of Alice
(1996). The novel focuses on the correspondence between Chappy, a
paedophile prisoner in his fifties, and a nineteen-year-old girl who plans to
seduce a younger boy (her twelve-year-old neighbour). Galioto proposes
and successfully shows that the two characters are not so much isolated
products of dysfunctional families or private pathologies, as average
products of widespread psychosocial shifts. Because of neoliberalism’s
desire to promote individualism and demote the authority of the Lacanian
big Other, the latter no longer has the power it once had to confer identity.
As a result, the individual (subject) is always uncertain about her or his
xxiv Introduction

place and constantly tries to define herself/himself. More important,

because of the removal of the paternalistic relationship between state and
society, neoliberal post-Oedipal family dynamics only achieve anti-
paternal relationships between parents and children. Individuals and
groups therefore think that, or are thought to, uphold the Law, while their
practices reveal a regressive descent into sadistic and masochistic
patterns—whether in engagement with one another, or in relations of
enthrallment. The latter is exemplified in the master-apprentice
relationship in The End of Alice between Chappy and the (unnamed) girl—
a dyad making up their own rules of inter-subjective communication,
libidinal exploration and enjoyment as they go along.
In “‘Western Civilisation Must Be Defended’: Neoliberal Values in
Teenage Literature”, Angie Voela examines the relationship between the
father and the son of Rick Riordan’s (2005) teenage fantasy Percy Jackson
and the Lightening Thief. In this novel, neoliberal principles merge with
neoconservative imperatives which bind together “family form, consumer
practices, political passivity and patriotism” (Brown, 2006, 701). In Percy
Jackson, the young twelve-year-old hero Percy learns that his biological
father is the god Poseidon. He is transported to Camp Half-Blood, a camp
of children like himself, soon to be dispatched on a mission to find the bolt
of Zeus in order to avert a war between the Olympians and a consequent
annihilation of human civilization. Two characteristics are particularly
noteworthy, argues Voela: the detached, harsh superegoic qualities of the
father (Poseidon) and the gradual submission of the son (Percy) to the
father’s desire. This new father-son relationship is a marked departure
from the widely accepted belief that all individuals must achieve psychic
independence from their parents. The proposed new arrangement, justified
by a state of emergency brought on by the imminent threat to the West,
effectively requires that the son remains attached to the father.
The restructuring of the father-child relationship shows that
neoliberalism is unable to offer a helpful response to the classic Oedipal
questions: “who am I?” and “what am I (in relation to my parent’s
desire)?” and, by extension, “what is my place in the world of symbolic
relations?”. Responses such as “you are nobody”, or “you are a mere
mortal” do not foster individuality. At the same time, fantasies of
clandestine armies of combat-ready youths undermine the principles of
civic transparency and democracy.
One is tempted to ask at this point if a good or even a (drawing on
Winnicott) “good-enough” parent-child relationship is possible under
neoliberalism. The possibility of such a relationship is examined by Louis
Rothschild in his chapter “What’s Awesome? Coercive Elements and the
 We Need to Talk about Family xxv

Threat of Child Sacrifice in The Lego Movie”. The Lego Movie is a story
within a story. The animated part focuses on the adventure of young
Emmet, a Lego figure and worker who lives in an indifferent, apolitical
and anxiety-free universe. Emmet’s life changes the day he falls through a
crack in the floor to a different Lego world. He is sought after, and more
or less forced to join a resistance movement against Lord Business, the
boss who runs Emmet’s world and who plans to immobilise it by
permanently gluing all the Lego pieces in place. In the film’s live-action
(i.e. non-animated) scenes, Emmet and his plastic friends are toys in the
hands of a young boy who plays in the basement of his family home with
an elaborate set of Lego buildings, which belong to his father. The son’s
imaginative play is an attempt to register his discontent with the father’s
restrictions.
Rothschild’s reading of the Lego movie operates on two levels. On the
one hand, it examines the unfolding of Emmet’s story as the gradual
awakening of an indifferent mind and the transformation of a hesitant
follower of instructions into a confident, innovative builder. On the other
hand, it explores the conditions under which the diegetic live-action father
and son may built a relationship that can evolve and flourish unimpeded,
not fixed by the “glue” of too many inflexible regulations. Drawing on
British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, Rothschild considers children’s
play as a safe environment in which creative and destructive tendencies
are situated and transformed within an evolving social network. The Lego
Movie’s live-action boy faces an equally formidable task: how to extend a
compelling but, at the same time, peaceful demand to the father to be more
understanding and flexible. Rothschild shows that both father and son
must work together towards that end. An effective break with neoliberalism
is seen, in this text, not as a new, secret bond between the father and the
son (something that would not escape the confines of amoral familialism)
but as the flexibility of the Law, and the narrative suggests that when the
Law is bereft of good grace, or a spirit of flexible generosity, people are
immobilised, or “glued”, into a frozen universe.

This Collection
In putting together this collection, our aim has been to draw together
insights from across our shared disciplines of cultural studies, literary
theory, psychoanalysis, psychosocial studies, social policy and sociology
in order to explore the amoral familialism of the neoliberal moment. Our
Call for Papers generated an ambitious collection of work, which explores
the social and psychosocial formations of amoral familialism, the
xxvi Introduction

psychoanalytic inner life of neoliberalism, and a rich and troubled field of

cultural representations and mediations.
The chapters in this collection signal the trouble with the neoliberal
family: in particular, the gulf between the conditions of family life and the
formation of new fantasies. Neoliberalism has always been split between
socio-economic realities and the expectations of where we “should” be.
The obligation to enjoy means we are always living in a state of deferral:
with the anxiety of being left behind, and with the hope that the best is yet
to come, a condition described as “cruel” by Berlant (2011). The cruel
optimism fostered by neoliberalism is also deeply nostalgic about family
and seeks to retrieve the imagined family of the past. The chapters in this
collection resonate and congeal around these troubled feelings of
disaffection and nostalgia. It is evident that many long for a new politics of
the family, one that can resist the neoliberal pull towards atavism, isolation
and competitiveness while also offering more than just a marginally less
sexist or less homophobic reformulation of the traditional family. The
work in this collection can only begin to address this project. Nevertheless,
the range and breadth of the cultural forms addressed here provide a much-
needed corrective to the somewhat androcentric critical emphasis on the
macrostructures and systems of the neoliberal world. Neoliberalism is
reshaping relationships and fantasies at the most personal and intimate
level, and can only be resisted through a sustained critical engagement
with the specific cultural relationships, processes and forms through which
this expressed and perpetuated.

References
Abrams, L. 2002. The Making of Modern Woman. London: Routledge.
Bauman, Z. 2007. Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty. London:
Polity Press.
Berlant, L. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham and London: Duke University
Press.
Bhattacharyya, G. 2015. Crisis, Austerity and Everyday Life: Living in a
Time of Diminishing Expectations. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Boyers, R. 2004. “The Culture of Narcissism After Twenty-Five Years.”
Raritan 24(2): 1–20.
Brown, W. 2006. “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservativism,
and De-Democratization.” Political Theory 34(6): 690–714.
—. 2003. “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy.” Theory and
Event 7(1). Retrieved online. DOI: 10.1353/tae.2003.0020
 We Need to Talk about Family xxvii

Campbell, J. 1993. The Hero with the Thousand Faces. London: Fontana
Press.
Donzelot, J. 1997. The Policing of Families. Translated by Hurley, R.
Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
Foucault, M. 2004. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de
France 1978–1979, trans. Burchell, G. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Fisher, M. 2009. Capitalist Realism, Is There No Alternative? Winchester:
Zero Books.
Fraser, N. 2013. Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism
to Neoliberal Crisis. London: Verso Books.
Freud, S. [1923] 1991a. “The Ego and the Id” in On Metapsychology,
trans. Strachey, J., 339–408. London: Penguin Books.
—. [1923] 1991b. “Splitting the Ego in the Process of Defence” in On
Metapsychology, trans. Strachey, J., 457–464. London: Penguin Books.
Giddens, A. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the
Late Modern Age. London: Polity Press.
Gilbert, J. 2013. “What Kind of Thing is Neoliberalism.” New Formations
80–81: 7–22.
Gill, R. and Sharff, C. 2011. New Femininities: Post-feminism,
Neoliberalism and Subjectivity. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Giroux, H. 2005. “The Terror of Neoliberalism: Rethinking the
Significance of Cultural Politics.” College Literature 32(1) 1–19.
Hall S., Massey, D. and Rustin, M. 2013. “After Neoliberalism: Analysing
the Present.” Soundings 53(1): 8–22.
Hardin, C. 2014. “Finding the ‘Neo’ in Neoliberalism.” Cultural Studies
26(2): 199–221.
Homes, A. M. 1996. The End of Alice. New York: Scribner.
Jensen, T. 2013. “Tough Love in Tough Times.” Studies in the Maternal
4(2): 1–26. Retrieved online. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/sim.35
Kilminster, R. 2008. “Narcissism or Informalisation? Christopher Lasch,
Norbert Elias and Social Diagnosis.” Theory, Culture & Society 25(3):
131–151.
Layton, L. 2010. “Irrational Exuberance: Neoliberal Subjectivity and the
Perversion of Truth.” Subjectivity 3 (3): 303–322.
—. 2009. “Who’s Responsible? Our Mutual Implication in Each Other’s
Suffering.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 19(2): 105–120.
Lasch, C. 1979. The Culture of Narcissism, American Life in an Age of
Diminishing Expectations. NY: Norton Books.
Lyotard, J. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
xxviii Introduction

McGowan, T. 2003. The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the

Emerging Society of Enjoyment. New York: SUNY Press.
McRobbie, A. 2013. “Feminism, the Family and the New Mediated
Maternalism.” New Formations 80–81: 119–137
Rich, A. [1976]1986. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and
Institution. New York: W.W. Norton and Co.
Riordan, R. 2005. Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. London: Puffin
Books.
Rustin, M. 2010. “Looking for the Unexpected: Psychoanalytic
Understanding and Politics.” British Journal of Psychotherapy 26(4):
472–479.
Sennett, R. 2006. The Culture of New Capitalism. New Haven: Yale
University Press.
—. 1999. The Corrosion of Character: Personal Consequences of Work in
the New Capitalism. NY: WW Norton Company.
Stein, R. 2010. For Love of the Father: A Psychoanalytic Study of
Religious Terrorism. Stanford: Sanford University Press.
Stiegeler, B. 2014a. Symbolic Misery, Volume 1: The Hyperindustrial
Epoch. London: Polity Press.
—. 2014b. The Lost Spirit of Capitalism. London: Polity Press.
—. 2009. Acting Out. London: Polity Press.
Tyler, I. 2008. “‘Chav Mum, Chav Scum’: Class Disgust in Contemporary
Britain.” Feminist Media Studies 8(1): 17–34.
Winnicott, D. W. [1971] 2005. Playing and Reality. London: Routledge
Classics.
Žižek, S. 1999. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political
Ontology. London: Verso.
—. 1994. Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out.
New York: Routledge.
THE BIOPOLITICS OF NEOLIBERALISM
 CHAPTER ONE

24-HOUR NURSERIES:
THE NEVER-ENDING STORY
OF CARE AND WORK

CAMILLE BARBAGALLO

‘Childcare’ has the ring of something closed-off, finished, which some

people—mostly mothers—know all too much about, and from which other
people shy prudently away (Denise Riley 1983a).

In June 2012, the Russell Hill Road Day Nursery in Purley opened its
doors, registered to provide care for fifty-six children from six months to
five-years-old. However, unlike other childcare settings, Russell Hill is
registered to provide overnight care for up to twelve children per night
(Morton 2012). The nursery’s overnight services run from 7 p.m.–7 a.m.,
which in effect means that the nursery provides 24-hour childcare. For
those familiar with the history of British feminism and the original
demands of the Women’s Liberation Movement, the news that 24-hour
childcare is finally available, nearly forty years after feminists first raised
the demand, could be noted as yet another win for the feminist movement.
In many ways, the availability of 24-hour childcare is testament to the
significant impact that feminism has had: we have, as is often claimed,
come a long way. At the same time, the provision of 24-hour childcare
delivered by the ever-growing privatised for-profit care market, points to
complex contradictions at play in what appear as choices, but are often
experienced as less than ideal solutions for working parents, and in
particular working mothers. These tensions are at the centre of this
chapter, which tells a story, in three parts, detailing how both feminism
and neoliberalism have reconfigured the practices and processes of caring
for children as well as the organisation of work and family.
The story begins at the 24-hour nursery and asks why any parent would
want or need a 24-hour nursery. The increasing necessity for 24-hour care
disrupts the notion of choice that is often implied in childcare provision
 24-Hour Nurseries: The Never-Ending Story of Care and Work 3

that provides flexibility. This is because when the operation of choice is

structured within the context of wage dependency, the only real choice
becomes work. It seems relatively uncontroversial to posit that 24-hour
childcare speaks to the ever-increasing reality of women’s waged work
under neoliberalism. Within parents’ need for 24-hour childcare, we find
that wage-earning has come to increasingly dominate life, seeping into all
hours of the day and night. Working conditions are increasingly
precarious, particularly in low-status jobs, and often result in low wages.
The second part of the story also begins at the 24-hour nursery—not as
a childcare service, but as the echo of a demand made four decades ago.
The four original demands of the Women’s Liberation Movement were:
equal pay, equal educational and job opportunities, free contraception and
abortion on demand, and free 24-hour nurseries (www.bl.uk/sisterhood).
In the second part of the story told here, there is an echo in which we can
hear the chants of the Women’s Liberation Movement, as well as the long
discussions about childcare as central to the struggle for women’s
economic and social autonomy, and the drafting of working papers about
the family and capitalism. What context produced this demand, and who
drafted it? What has been lost in the passage from its articulation—when
the demand was for free, state provision of 24-hour childcare—to now?
The third part of the story takes place in the aftermath, at a nexus from
which we may examine the conflicts that emerge at the intersection of
neoliberalism and feminism. The gap between the historical desire for, and
current necessity of, never-ending childcare speaks to some of the
gendered conflicts that are at play within neoliberalism, and to a moment
when feminism, and specifically liberal feminism, has reached an impasse.
On the one hand women’s increased access to waged work has produced
significant and sustained transformations in gender relations, not only in
relation to women’s financial autonomy from men but also in the
possibilities for women’s subjectivities. However, women’s access to
decent, well-paid and meaningful waged work has been highly uneven,
and has in fact reproduced and reinforced hierarchies of race and class.
These divisions between women, whilst not new, have only deepened
during the last forty years of neoliberal governance. They present a real
problem for contemporary feminist politics, which seeks to both continue
and extend the gains that women’s movements have made in the terrain of
work and to address the terrain of the family and the politics of
reproduction. Whilst some women may be able to “have it all”, it is clear
that this is not an option available to the majority of women.
Through investigating the feminist demand for 24-hour childcare and
the current provision of such care by the privatised childcare sector, we are
4 Chapter One

able to grasp some of the gendered and racialised dynamics of neoliberalism;

specifically: the continued tensions between women’s desire for their
long-fought-for economic independence, the realities of waged work, and
the gendered characteristics of care. These tensions also reveal a process
of co-option, in that the original demand for 24-hour childcare was for
community-controlled and state-funded childcare—however, the 24-hour
childcare that has emerged has developed via a privatised childcare sector
that charges parents, and therefore bears little resemblance to the models
of care originally imagined. Within the context of the privatisation of care,
24-hour childcare has been stripped of its previously imagined radical
potential to undo the sexual division of labour. Having been emptied of its
utopian desires, it is useful to consider what feminist potential remains
within 24-hour childcare and to locate the discussion of childcare within
broader discussions of social reproduction and to explore “the dual
characteristics of reproduction” (Federici 2012).

Part I: Home and Work

So, why would any parent want or need 24-hour childcare? In media
reports at the time of the opening of Russell Hill Road Nursery, the owner
Natalie Salawa explained that her motivation for providing 24-hour
childcare came about after parents in the area who work shifts and
weekends expressed the need for extended childcare hours (Morton 2012).
In another media article, parents’ need for flexibility was again stressed:
“it is not just single parents and shift workers who need the £53.52-a-night
service in today’s 24-hour work culture […] [w]e also have couples who
are perhaps bankers and lawyers and one is working away and the other is
on a case—it gives them that flexibility” (Croydon Advertiser, 7 August,
2012).
Leaving aside the question of whether middle-class professional
couples would use a 24-hour nursery as opposed to the services of a
domestic servant, nanny or au pair, a common feature that emerges is that
of extended and atypical working hours. In responding to parents’ requests
for extended childcare, the provision of 24-hour care at Russell Hill
confirms the statistics: the UK has the highest rates of atypical working in
Europe and there are very high levels of atypical working conditions
among parents (Lyonette 2011). Put simply, working atypical hours is now
more common in the general working population than working a standard
nine-to-five, five-day week (Statham and Mooney 2003). A 2002 study by
La Valle et al., using information from over 5000 randomly selected
households with children, found that 53 percent of employed mothers
 24-Hour Nurseries: The Never-Ending Story of Care and Work 5

frequently work atypical hours, compared to 20 percent who do occasional

atypical work and only 27 percent who don’t work atypical hours. For
employed fathers, 79 percent frequently work atypical hours, 14 percent
do occasionally and 7 percent never do so. The combined working patterns
of couples showed that in 43 percent of dual-earner households, both
parents frequently work atypical hours. In just 12 percent of dual-earner
households, neither parent works atypical hours.
It is not just that workers are now working differently to previous
generations; in 2015, 73.3 percent of people in Britain aged between 16–
65 were in work—the highest rate of employment since comparable
records began in 1971 (ONS 2015). Of the nearly three-quarters of the
adult population who are in employment, 78.1 percent of men were in
work, together with 68.5 percent of women. The statistics of female rates
of employment (like those of overall employment rates) were the highest
rates since comparable records began in 1971. The dramatic increase in
female employment has been largely driven by increases in women with
dependent children entering the workforce, to the extent that the
employment rate of women with dependent children (69.6 percent) was
slightly higher in 2014 than the rate for women without children (67.5
percent).
The scale of the transformation can be grasped if we compare mothers’
employment rates; the 1961 Census shows that only 12 percent of women
with preschool children were working at that time, a number that has
jumped to nearly 70 percent five decades later. Jane Lewis (2008) argues
that childcare has become a more pressing policy issue for governments
due to rapid and dramatic changes to households, with families
increasingly comprised of and dependent on 1.5 earners (i.e. one full-time
and one part-time wage) or, on two full-time earners. The phenomenon of
the “dual-earning” household (in which two adult members are in work) is
no longer an emerging trend—rather, it is the overwhelming reality for
families in Britain (Dex 2003).
With atypical working hours fast becoming the norm for many parents,
it is unsurprising that Russell Hill is not alone in providing 24-hour
childcare. Reporting on a new service established by London’s Brent
Council in 2014, Zoe Williams highlights employment trends by noting
that work is: “less secure, contracts are zero hours, people are taking part-
time jobs not because they’re more convenient but because they can’t get
full-time work. This is what’s driving unusual hours, the sheer
precariousness that leaves parents unable to set terms” (Williams 2014).
The difficulties that dual-earning and lone-parent households are
currently facing in the new “flexible” and “atypical” labour markets has
6 Chapter One

been highlighted, especially in relation to the implications for the care of

children and effects on family life (Rutter and Evans, 2012; La Valle et al.
2002; Barnes et al. 2006). Some of the common issues faced by parents
working atypical hours include: not being available to eat evening meals
together; not being available to go on family holidays, to read and play
with children or to help with homework; and not being able to take
children to after-school and sports activities, or to visit family and friends
(La Valle et al. 2002).
The La Valle et al. study (2002) adopted a definition of atypical work
as: “work at the weekend and work during the week before 8.30 a.m. and
after 5.30 p.m.” (2003, 3). Barnes et al. (2006) point to a number of issues
that arise in attempts to define what is considered “normal” and “atypical”,
however their research also posits that working at atypical times is now the
norm, rather than the exception. The problem of choice also emerges in
relation to “flexible” and atypical work. The research by La Valle et al.
(2002) shows that a large majority of mothers (75 percent) said that
atypical hours were a requirement of their job rather than a choice, and a
majority of mothers working atypical hours said they would prefer to work
different hours (2002, 15). Lone mothers were more likely than partnered
mothers to say that their working hours were a requirement of their job.
The image that emerges from flexible and extended childcare services is
one of working mothers increasingly needing childcare services during
times of the day and night which previously would be have been
considered “family time”, or, at times in the evening when many workers
are in fact (or should be) asleep.
On the one hand, it is useful to consider that in Britain women’s
increased participation in waged work has occurred alongside other
significant social changes such as: changes to divorce laws, access to
contraception and abortion, and shifts in the social stigma associated with
cohabitation and single parenthood (Thane and Evans 2013). From this
perspective it is possible to generalise that more people, particularly more
women, now have more choice, freedom and opportunities in respect to
relationships, reproduction and— perhaps in more limited ways—the kind
of contributions they make to families (Lewis 2006).
However, women’s increased access to waged work in the UK, rising
sharply from the 1970s (and hence tracking the emergence and rise of
neoliberalism), has occurred alongside considerable transformation in the
role of the state and a reconfiguration of how publicly funded social
services—such as education, care, health and welfare—are delivered and
funded.
 24-Hour Nurseries: The Never-Ending Story of Care and Work 7

The changes that have occurred in labour and gender relations to meet
the demands of an increasingly 24-hour economy, and a corresponding
increase in atypical working hours, have produced profound reconfigurations
in how families structure their working patterns and care responsibilities
(Lewis 2008, 2013). In highlighting these transformations (specifically,
families’ increasing reliance on formal and institutional childcare
provision) it is important to note the things that have not changed: the
centrality of family and the informal care provided by immediate, as well
as extended, family members continues to dominate care arrangements in
Britain. Research has shown that parents who work at atypical times
generally rely on partners/ ex-partners or grandparents to meet their
childcare needs (La Valle et al. 2002; Woodland et al. 2002). In fact, both
among two-parent and lone-parent working households, irrespective of
hours worked, families more often use grandparents for childcare than
other types of formal or informal provision (Woodland et al. 2002, 33).
The relatively high cost of formalised childcare (especially of such
care when provided outside normal working hours) is certainly one of the
considerations that informs families’ decisions about care arrangements. In
some ways, the rational choice to seek the cheapest childcare option
(which in Britain, overwhelmingly means for parents to access childcare
from grandparents (Grandparents Plus Report 2009), and in particular,
from grandmothers) follows the neoliberal suggestion to undertake
decision-making using a cost-benefit analysis. Certainly, many families do
choose this option, with grandparents providing the largest source of
childcare in Britain after parents themselves. Furthermore, the value of the
childcare provided by grandparents was recently estimated at over £3.9
billion per year (Grandparents Plus Report 2009). It’s important to draw
out that alongside the obvious economic benefits of the “free” childcare
carried out by family members, there is also a cultural reaffirmation of the
care provided within the family, and also, of the (traditional, gendered)
work being undertaken by grandmothers-as-carers.
Increased rates of female employment, contextualised within the
emergence of neoliberalism, can be further understood in this way: the
potentially progressive aspects of women’s increased access to wage-
earning have been undermined by a deepening of women’s dependence on
work outside the home, in increasingly precarious conditions that leave
many parents, particularly mothers, unable to set the terms of their
employment. The complex relationship between women’s desire for
financial autonomy and the experience of wage dependency is further
complicated by a reduction in male employment, particularly the destruction
8 Chapter One

of the family wage that had once been sufficient to support a working-
class family (Gill and Scharff 2011).
Beginning in the late 1960s, long-term and uneven economic, legal and
political reforms and reconfigurations occurred which have increasingly
transformed the British economy from an economy based on manufacturing
industries into one based primarily on the knowledge, finance and service
sectors (Harvey 2006, McDowell 2013). Alongside new-job creation in
high-skill, high-wage professional and managerial occupations, the last
two decades in the UK has also seen a reduction in middle-wage
occupations and the growth of lower-wage service occupations—a trend
towards the polarisation of the economy into high-quality and low-quality
jobs (Goos and Manning 2003).
The shift in the labour market from manufacturing jobs to knowledge
and service industry jobs has not been gender neutral: female employment
in professional occupations has increased and there has been strong growth
in female employment in the personal service occupations (Sissons 2011).
A growing polarisation between “lousy and lovely jobs” (Goos and
Manning 2003) has developed, alongside transformations in household
earnings with families increasingly dependent on having two earners. In
this sense, women’s waged work has enabled many families to absorb the
changes brought by deindustrialisation and the overall decline in male
wages (Hochschild and Machung 2003). Lewis notes that: “women have
changed the nature of the contribution that they make to the household
considerably by increasing their employment rate and hours of work, but
men have not increased their hours of childcare and housework to
compensate” (2008, 499).
What these statistics indicate is that beyond the now common
observation that more women are in paid work, the so-called “traditional”
male-earning and female-caring roles that men and women were expected
to perform within families have changed dramatically, and these changes
have impacted on the organisation of work that takes place within
households. While some new domestic arrangements have emerged to
accommodate both men and women undertaking paid work (including
more equitable distribution of household tasks, and the contracting out of
undesirable household work to the service industry), overwhelmingly,
domestic and care work remains “women’s work” whether that work is
unwaged (Hochschild and Machung 2003) or waged (Anderson 2000).
Of course the much-celebrated model of the “traditional family” was
never a truly accurate reflection of complex social realities: significant
numbers of women have always worked for wages, lone parents—mainly
lone mothers—have successfully raised children, and men cannot always
 24-Hour Nurseries: The Never-Ending Story of Care and Work 9

be relied upon to provide for their families (Thane and Evans 2013). Lewis
(2001), however, argues that the traditional family is more than a
generalised historical formation: there are specific historical periods
during which (in some countries, for members of some social classes) the
traditional male-earning / female-caring model was common—for
example, for many Western working- and middle-class families in the
years following the Second World War. The post-war period was, as
Thane and Evans (2013) argue, a historically unusual time of near-
universal marriage, with average marriage ages being at that time
exceptionally low. However, they make the point that this supposedly
“golden age” only lasted until the 1970s, when divorce and cohabitation
rose dramatically.
Theories of postcolonial and black feminists (Collins 2000, Mohanty
2004, Davis 1983) have consistently argued against the use of gender as a
primary lens through which to make sense of women’s lives and have
argued for the use of an intersectional framework. While it is useful to
think of the emergence of 24-hour childcare in Britain as having been
produced by, and at the same time as producing significant transformations
to, gender relations, such transformations have been uneven, and at times,
contradictory. One of the reasons for this is that transformations of gender
relations have intersected with changes to how both class and race are
experienced and structured. An engagement with these tensions requires
interrogating both the dynamics of racialisation and class identity which
have both structured, and been structured by, profound changes to the
labour market.
Lone parents—of whom 92 percent are lone mothers (ONS 2012)—
along with women of colour and migrant workers, continue to be
disproportionately represented in “lousy jobs”, mostly in the service
sector, where they experience low wages, precarious employment
contracts, and lack of union representation (Wills et al. 2010). The
concentration of lone mothers in low-paid, precarious employment has
profound and structural implications considering that 26 percent of
households with dependent children are lone-parent families (ONS 2012)
and that the poverty rate is 30 percent for children in lone-parent families
where the lone parent works part time, and 22 percent where the lone
parent works full time.
To answer the question of which parents need 24-hour childcare: it is
primarily dual-earning and lone-mother households, increasingly working
atypical hours that need flexible and extended hours of childcare. There is
nothing particularly new about men working atypical hours. As Lyonette
(2011) argues, atypical working hours were relatively invisible as a
10 Chapter One

problem when the male-breadwinner / female-unwaged-carer model was

the dominant form of the organisation of gender and labour. For many so-
called “traditional” households, the organisation of labour both outside and
inside the home meant that one parent—usually the mother—was
available for childcare. It is the shift to dual-earner households, with sharp
increases in maternal employment, which has precipitated an increase in
the provision of atypical (and increasingly, 24-hour) childcare.
Furthermore, the increasing need for “never-ending childcare” points to a
landscape that is, after nearly forty years of neoliberal dominance,
saturated with work (Gershuny 2000). Of course, the relationship between
gender, employment and care has a long history; however, forty years ago,
the articulation of the need for 24-hour childcare was rooted in hopes for a
more utopian, feminist, future.

Part II: Back to the Future and the Demand

for 24-Hour Nurseries
The Women’s Weekend held at Ruskin College in February 1970 was the
first national gathering of the emerging Women’s Liberation Movement
and became “an opportunity for women concerned about women’s
oppression in this society to come together to discuss their common
situation” (Conference document, 1970). Between 1970 and 1978 there
were eight national Women’s Liberation Movement conferences. At the
first gathering at Ruskin four demands were discussed. These demands
were passed at a subsequent national conference held in Skegness in 1971.
The demands were equal pay, equal educational and job opportunities, free
contraception and abortion on demand, and free 24-hour nurseries
(www.bl.uk/sisterhood).
In the first edition of Red Rag (1973), a socialist feminist magazine,
Florence Keyworth writes that the four original demands were: “the things
women must have if they are to take hold of their own lives and develop as
independent human beings instead of being prisoners of the family and
half-pay wages slaves—pushed into unskilled jobs and forced to stay in
them” (1973, 3).
It is the fourth demand, that of free 24-hour nurseries that animates this
chapter. To understand how 24-hour childcare became one of the original
demands of the women’s movement it is necessary to both situate the
demand within a wider analysis of the post-war family and women’s
confinement to the domestic sphere and also to consider both the context
in which the demand was made, and who was demanding 24-hour
childcare.
 24-Hour Nurseries: The Never-Ending Story of Care and Work 11

To do so it is necessary to delve a little further back, into post-war

Britain. That is, to look to an era when many of the women who were to
become active in the Women’s Liberation Movement were still being
cared for at home by their mothers. Pat Thane (2011) makes the important
point that it was not common for children of any class to be looked after
exclusively by their mothers until after the Second World War. Not only is
there nothing natural or essential about intensive full-time mothering, it
does not have a particularly long history. In 1953, John Bowlby published
Child Care and the Growth of Love (1953). The book is credited with
having created the phenomenon known as “Bowlbyism”, synonymous in
the post-war period with the promotion of the centrality of the mother-
child relationship and with “keeping mothers in the home” (Riley 1983b,
100). The book was highly influential and widely read with the first
edition, published in 1953, reprinted six times in ten years, and the second
edition—published in 1965—reprinted fourteen times.
Jane Lewis goes as far as to argue that in the post–war years Bowlby’s
ideas of continuous mothering “seemed to have achieved the status of
essential truth” (1992, 22). In addition to Bowlby’s insistence of the
centrality of the mother-child relationship, his work also “reinforced the
view that the two-parent family was the bedrock of a stable society and
any deviation should be condemned” (Thane and Evans 2013, 85). In
Working Mothers and Their Children (1963) Yudkin and Holme argue:
“‘there can be little doubt that among the major contributing factors to the
general disapproval which our society extends to mothers of young
children who work outside the home, and the corresponding guilt of the
mothers themselves, are the theses of Dr John Bowlby’” (cited in Comer
1972, 29).
The feminist criticism and critique of Bowlbyism grew throughout the
1960s and 1970s, decades that saw important shifts in behaviour,
employment patterns and attitudes. Many in the Women’s Liberation
Movement criticised and questioned Bowlby’s research methods and
analysis, highlighting that the book’s findings were based on a report that
was a study of institutionalised children, extrapolated by Bowlby to a
generalised theory of care for all children. Feminists raised serious
concerns that his theories had led to “instilling guilt and suffocation in a
generation of mothers” (Riley 1983b, 100), and that he denied the
independent life of the mother with his exclusive stress on maternal care
without taking seriously the question of alternative forms of childcare.
One of the papers Child-Rearing and Women’s Liberation (1970)
presented by Rochelle Wortis at the first Women’s Weekend at Ruskin
College in 1970 provides a useful insight into the emerging feminist
12 Chapter One

critique of theories of maternal care and the notion that “[w]omen are
conditioned to expect that their major responsibility to society and to
themselves is as wives and mothers” (Wortis 1970). Directly connected to
the dominance of Bowlbyism, the paper highlights that “it is popularly
assumed that the individual home provides the best environment for
raising healthy children” and, furthermore, that “the domestication and
subordination of women is perpetuated by modern psychology” (Wortis
1970). The paper argues that no matter how egalitarian society becomes
with respect to educational and job opportunities, women’s ability to
participate in society “depends on a change in childrearing practices and in
family responsibility” (Wortis 1970).
Sheila Rowbotham (1989) explains that the idea of the demand for 24-
hour nurseries was initially gained from the (admittedly, unsuccessful)
attempts to get campaigns for more nursery provision started in the early
1970s. In speaking to mothers, Rowbotham reports that a common
complaint was that women couldn’t go out in the evening, and that there
was no flexibility in the childcare that was on offer. Riley recalls a similar
motivation behind the demand: “the wish for some unchallengeable
flexibility for mothers” (Riley 1983a, 133). Here, the desire for more
flexible childcare appears not to be a call for mothers to have more child-
free time for working purposes, but a recognition that mothers, particularly
during the Bowlby years of intensive mothering, simply needed some time
away from their children.
As much as the demand for 24-hour nurseries encapsulated desires for
flexibility, there is also something quietly dystopian and perhaps
deliberately disturbing in its articulation. At the time, “many people took it
to mean that the same children stayed there 24-hours-a-day” (Charlton
1975, 6). In the 1971 edition of Enough, the Bristol Women’s Liberation
Journal, Angela Rodaway articulates a direct criticism of the demand for
24-hour nurseries, asking “did we really imagine under-fives being
delivered at ten [in the evening] and collected at six when women came
off shifts? Did we want 24-hour schools?” (quoted in Rowbotham 1989,
132).
From the outset, there was considerable disagreement about how to
approach and tackle the question of childcare, both within the Women’s
Liberation Movement and more broadly, in trade union campaigns that
addressed discrimination against women in employment and pay
conditions. Reflecting in Red Rag on attempts to initiate a national
campaign around the demand for 24-hour nurseries, Valerie Charlton
(1975) writes that the “demand for 24-hour nurseries in common with the
other demands was intended to cover the immediate needs of the most
 24-Hour Nurseries: The Never-Ending Story of Care and Work 13

hard-hit women, including women night workers” (ibid.). However, she

notes that whilst the concept of socialist childcare was crucial for the
women’s movement, as an isolated demand “plonked onto an alienating
capitalist [system], it created formidable contradictions” (ibid.). Women’s
labour market participation was only starting to slowly increase in the
1960s, and hence women outside Women’s Liberation frequently argued
that all the problems of caring for children in the isolation of their own
home were preferable to the daily grind of some rotten job, given that
money wasn’t the deciding factor (ibid.). Charlton argues that one of the
problems with the demand was that it was asking for more of what
already existed and hence “had limited appeal for those with a remnant of
choice, both in and out of the movement” (ibid.).
Despite repeated clarifications and the continued attempts by feminist
scholars (Riley 1983a, Rowbotham 1989) to provide considerable evidence
to the contrary, the charge of feminism’s betrayal and disinterest in
motherhood prevails. In part the image of feminism being against
motherhood is borne from a profound suspicion of early feminist attempts
to unravel the mythologies of motherhood. Women in the early days of the
Women’s Liberation Movement were indeed critical and loudly
dissatisfied with dominant constructions of motherhood but, for them, this
did not mean that they were attacking women with children; it was
motherhood, not mothers, that was the problem. This conflict with
motherhood also points to the tensions and limits present in the aspiration
of women’s independence. Here the aspiration of independence, as
something to be achieved as much for women with children as those
without, is caught in tension with the resistant desire for autonomy and
ability to exceed the constraints of the role of motherhood. The demand
for 24-hour nurseries, as clunky and impersonal as it was, managed to
capture one of the central contradictions of gender subjectivities under
capitalism. The disquiet it produced, from misunderstandings and
embarrassment to downright rejection, is testament to the affective
dynamics of the demand, in that it takes hold of biological reproduction
and explicitly attempts to shift the work of childcare from the realm of the
private to a terrain in which the care and responsibility of children is
socialised.
Considerably different political perspectives regarding work, motherhood
and women’s oppression existed within the women’s movement and it was
around the problem of childcare—what it was, who and what it was for—
that some of these tensions emerged. One approach to the question of
caring for children, and one that differed from making demands on the
state for more or better nursery services, was the establishment of self-
14 Chapter One

managed radical projects, such as the Dartford Park Children’s Community

Centre which opened in 1972 and was initiated by members of the Camden
Women’s Group. In Childrens’ Community Centre: Our Experiences of
Collective Childcare (1974), a booklet of parents’ experiences in
establishing Dartford Park Children’s Community Centre, the authors
write that: “the first idea for the Centre came from a group of women in
the Women’s Liberation Movement, some of whom had worked
unsuccessfully on the campaign for 24-hour nurseries and who realised
that the only way they would get nursery provision before their own
children went to school would be to start their own nursery” (Booklet
1974, 3). In addition the authors note that: “examples of the emotionally
deprived ‘latchkey’ child, the child brought up in institutions, are there to
convince us that the ideal environment for the emotional stability of a
child is one in which the relationship with its mother plays a dominant
part” (Booklet, 1974, 10).
A similar booklet, Out of the Pumpkin Shell (1975) produced by “a
group of women and men, parents and non-parents in the Women’s
Liberation Playgroup in Birmingham” (1975, 1) argues that: “women’s
identity is [...] very bound up with her role as a mother and this makes it
very difficult to criticise that role” (1975, 3). Pointing to structural
implications of constructions of women as always-already-mothers, they
continue that “this over-intense interdependence of the mother and child
seems to reflect a family structure which has more to do with the needs of
capitalism for unpaid domestic labour, small units of consumption and
mobility of labour than it had to do with what is good for the mother,
father or child” (ibid.).
There was a clear tension. On the one hand, there was a vision of
prefigurative forms of childcare that rejected traditional nurseries “as
hotbeds of sexist ideology and authoritarian organisation” (Charlton 1975,
5) and imagined childcare that would address the isolation of mothers and
challenge the structures of the nuclear family and the sexual division of
domestic labour. On the other, there was the argument that childcare both
enabled women to decide whether to undertake waged work outside the
home, and was needed in order for such work to be undertaken. During the
1970s the tension between these two approaches persisted and Rowbotham
writes that, whilst “in later years they were to merge pragmatically, [they]
remained theoretically unresolved” (1989, 132). In tracing the connections
and discontinuities between the two parts of the story we have heard so
far—the feminist demand for 24-hour nurseries and the provision of 24-
hour care by the privatised market—the complexity of both the provision
 24-Hour Nurseries: The Never-Ending Story of Care and Work 15

and the consumption of care emerges as an issue that needs to be

addressed.

Part III: We’ve Come a Long Way

To claim that feminism has transformed the everyday lives of families,
changed who does what in the home and also produced significant
adjustments in the world of work, is not to argue that all the demands,
desires and dreams of a supposedly unified feminist project have been
fulfilled. Far from it. Not only has there never been a central, agreed-upon
notion of what feminism constitutes, the changes and gains that feminism
can lay claim to did not start in the 1960s—they are rooted in the first
wave of feminism that included thousands of women and many men in the
late 1800s and early 1900s in the long and bitter struggle for female
emancipation and legal reform in Britain (Ramelson 1967).
To make visible the complexities involved in reproductive labour,
particularly in care work, is to note that the work of reproduction involves
caring for bodies and relationships. In this most basic definition, it
involves producing and maintaining people (Glenn 1992). However, the
reproduction of people does not occur in a neutral or abstract way; we can
frame this another way, by speaking of the “dual characteristics” of
reproduction (Federici 2012).
To emphasise the duality of reproduction, as feminist scholar Silvia
Federici (2012) does, is to draw attention to the tensions and contradictions
at the centre of the processes and practices of social reproduction: a tension
that is directly related to what reproduction does within capitalism and
how it operates. In societies dominated by capitalist social relations,
people are reproduced as workers. It is through multiple processes of
reproductive labour both within the family, in communities and in
institutions like schools, nurseries and the hospital that we are educated,
maintained, disciplined and trained as workers. However, the duality of
reproduction that Federici (2012) outlines points to a simultaneous
moment occurring alongside the production of labour power. Humans are
reproduced not as labourers, but as people whose lives, desires and
capabilities exceed the role of worker. People are not reducible to their
economic role. People struggle, are involved in conflicts and are capable
of resistance. In this way reproductive labour can be said to have two
functions: it both maintains capitalism, in that it produces the most
important commodity of all—labour power—while at the same time it
reproduces life, and has the potential to undermine the smooth flow of the
accumulation of profit by producing autonomous subjects who can, and
16 Chapter One

do, resist the rule of capitalism. The contributions and insights from
autonomist Marxist feminist such as Federici (2004, 1975), Dalla Costa
(1995, 1975) and Fortunati (1995) regarding the gendered dynamics and
characteristics of reproduction under capitalism were initially gained from
their involvement in the Women’s Liberation Movement and in particular
in the “Wages for Housework” campaign.
Returning to the contemporary provision of 24-hour and extended
childcare, we find a cluster of care work that has been emptied of its
utopian and socialist vision of “unchallengeable flexibility for mothers”
(Riley 1983a, 133). Instead we find that it is mothers who are being
required to be evermore flexible, to withstand the demands of working day
and night, whilst also having to pay other women to care for their children.
Gone, too, are the desires for prefigurative forms of childcare that would
undo much of the nuclear family structure—care that was to be provided
free of charge and under community control. Moving in a different
direction, the contemporary provision of 24-hour childcare is (and
increasingly so) provided by for-profit companies. As the formalised
childcare sector grew significantly in Britain from the late 1990s (Lewis
2013), women’s growing rates of participation in the waged labour force
became increasingly reliant upon, and facilitated by, childcare provided by
grandparents—in particular, that provided by grandmothers (Grandparents
Plus Report 2009). In instances of both informal and formalised childcare
(in which 98 percent of workers are women), caring for children remains
work that is overwhelmingly done by women. Which begs the question of
whether we, or at least some of us, have come that far after all.
The emergence of 24-hour childcare demonstrates how neoliberalism
attempts to develop along what appear to be “progressive” lines, in this
case by capturing (some) women’s desires for equality in the workplace.
In doing so, neoliberalism has increased women’s access to wages, while
rerouting the processes of transformation via market mechanisms. This
process can be understood as one in which, at the same time as women
have demanded and gained economic, legal and social autonomy from
men, capitalism has embarked upon a global project (via structural
adjustment in the global North and South) of “setting free”—and
capturing—feminised labour power.
These transformations intersect with changes to the domestic sphere, in
that women have demanded—and in limited but real ways, gained
freedom from the conditions of unwaged and “unfree” reproductive labour
in the home—only for that work to be contracted out to other women in
the waged service and care industries. These divisions, hierarchies and
inequality between gendered subjects have entrenched other hierarchies
 24-Hour Nurseries: The Never-Ending Story of Care and Work 17

and modes of exploitation. The growing inequality between women has

led some women of colour and migrants’ rights activists to talk about
liberal feminism benefitting some women and not others (Glenn 1992,
Romero 2002, Anderson 2000). One of the troubling aspects in the
struggle for improved labour conditions for care, service and domestic
industries’ workers is the question of who has to undertake the social,
reproductive work of making and remaking people—and under what
conditions (Barbagallo and Federici 2012).
Such transformations, from both below (via social movements) and
above (in neoliberal policies), have necessitated uneven and long-term
reconfigurations of class, race and gender relations. These changes have
been unfolding for the last four decades, and have been fundamentally
shaped by the childcare choices (and lack thereof) available to mothers.
The complex contradictions and conflicts that structure and produce
reproductive labour within capitalism produce equally complex possibilities
and limitation for parents, particularly for mothers.
On the one hand, the 24-hour nursery is a site in which capital is
maintained, insofar as it creates the conditions for the wage relation to
structure labour in increasingly atypical and precarious ways. It also
operates as a site in which private providers can, and do, accumulate profit
from care provision. On the other hand, the nursery is a crucial site for the
potential reorganisation of the nuclear family and the sexual division of
labour. Hence, it is a site that might move current gendered dynamics of
care towards future change. Rather than oversimplifying the 24-hour
nursery as either the recuperation of feminism by neoliberalism, or
alternatively, as an expression of choice and flexibility, the more complex
and more difficult task will be to maintain the nursery as a site of struggle
which should be neither celebrated nor condemned, and which is—
crucially—a space in which the work of women’s liberation continues.

References
Anderson, B. 2000. Doing the Dirty Work? The Global Politics of
Domestic Labour. London: Zed Books.
Barbagallo, C. and Federici, S. 2012. “Introduction: Care Work and the
Commons.” The Commoner 15: 1–21.
Barnes, M., Bryson, C. and Smith, R. 2006. Working Atypical Hours:
What Happens to “Family Life”? (Report). London: National Centre
for Social Research. Retrieved from:
https://natcen.ac.uk/media/24352/working-atypical-hours.pdf
18 Chapter One

Bowlby, J. 1952. Maternal Care and Mental Health (Report). Geneva:

World Health Organisation.
—. 1953. Child Care and the Growth of Love. London: Pelican Books.
Charlton, V. 1975. “The Patter of Tiny Contradictions.” Red Rag 5: 5–9.
Childrens Community Centre: Our Experiences of Collective Childcare
(Booklet). 1974. Personal Archive of Dee Hunt.
Collins, P. Hill. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness,
and the Politics of Empowerment (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge.
Comer, L. 1972. “The Motherhood Myth.” Australian Left Review March:
20–34.
Dalla Costa, M. 1995. “Capitalism and Reproduction” in Open Marxism:
Emancipating Marx, eds. Bonefeld, W., Gunn, R., Holloway, J. and
Psychopedis, K., 7–16. London: Pluto Press.
Dalla Costa, M. and James, S. 1975. The Power of Women and the
Subversion of the Community. Bristol: Falling Down Press.
Davis, A. Y. 1983. Women, Race & Class. New York: Random House.
Dex, S. 2003. Families and Work in the Twenty-First Century (Research
Study). Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Retrieved from:
http://www.jrf.org.uk/sites/files/jrf/1859350968.pdf
Federici, S. 2012. Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction
and Feminist Struggle. Oakland: PM Press.
—. 2004. Caliban and the Witch. New York: Autonomedia.
—. 1975. “Wages Against Housework” in The Politics of Housework, ed.
Malos, E., 217–225. London: Allison & Busby.
Fortunati, L. 1995. The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution,
Labor and Capital, trans. Creek, H., New York: Autonomedia.
Gershuny, J. 2000. Changing Times: Work and Leisure in Postindustrial
Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gill, R. and Scharff, C. (eds.) 2011. New Femininities: Postfeminism,
Neoliberalism and Subjectivity. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Glenn, E. N. 1992. “From Servitude to Service Work: Historical
Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor.” Signs
18(1): 1–44.
Goos, M. and Manning, A. 2003. Lousy and Lovely Jobs: the Rising
Polarization of Work in Britain (Report). CEPDP 604. Centre for
Economic Performance: London School of Economics and Political
Science. Retrieved from:
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/20002/1/Lousy_and_Lovely_Jobs_the_Rising_
Polarization_of_Work_in_Britain.pdf
Grandparents Plus. 2009. Rethinking Family Life (Report). London:
Grandparents Plus. Retrieved from:
 24-Hour Nurseries: The Never-Ending Story of Care and Work 19

http://www.grandparentsplus.org.uk/wpcontent/uploads/2011/03/Rethi
nkingFamilyLife.pdf
Harvey, D. 2006. Spaces of Global Capitalism. New York: Verso.
Hochschild, A. R., and Machung, A. 2003. The Second Shift (2nd ed.).
New York: Penguin Books.
Keyworth, F. 1973. “Women’s Role in the Labour Movement.” Red Rag
1: 3–4.
La Valle, I., Arthur, S., Millward, C., Scott, J. and Clayden, M. 2002.
Happy Families? Atypical Work and its Influence on Family Life
(Report). Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Retrieved from:
http://www.jrf.org.uk/system/files/jrf126-work-family-life.pdf
Lewis, J. 2013. “Continuity and Change in English Childcare Policy
1960–2000.” Social Politics 20(3): 358–386.
—. 2008. “Childcare Policies and the Politics of Choice.” The Political
Quarterly 79(4): 499–507.
—. 2006. “Perceptions of Risk in Intimate Relationships: The Implications
for Social Provision.” Journal of Social Policy 35(1): 39–57.
—. 1992. Women in Britain since 1945. Oxford: Blackwell.
Lyonette, C. 2011. “Atypical Working in Europe and The Impact on
Work: Family Reconciliation” in Families, Care-Giving and Paid
Work: Challenging Labour Law in the 21st Century, eds. Busby, N.
and James, G., 2–46. London: Edward Elgar Publishing.
McDowell, L. 2013. Working Lives: Gender, Migration and Employment
in Britain, 1945–2007. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Mohanty, C. 2004. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory,
Practicing Solidarity. Durham: Duke University Press.
Morton, K. 2012. “New 24-hour Nursery Opens for Shift Workers.”
Nursery World, August 9. Retrieved from:
http://www.nurseryworld.co.uk/nursery-world/news/1106203/-hour-
nursery-shift-workers?DCMP=EMC-CONNurseryWorldUpdate
Note to All Participants (Conference document).1970. Personal
Documents of Sheila Rowbotham. Women’s Library Archive, London
School of Economics.
Office of National Statistics. 2012. Families and Households 2012. ONS
website. Retrieved from:
http://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsan
dmarriages/families/bulletins/familiesandhouseholds/2012-11-01
Office of National Statistics. 2015. UK Labour Market, March 2015.
ONS website. Retrieved from:
20 Chapter One

http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160105160709/http://ww
w.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-statistics/march-
2015/statistical-bulletin.html
Out of the Pumpkin Shell (Booklet). 1974. Personal Archive of Dee Hunt.
Brisbane.
Ramelson, M. 1967. Petticoat Rebellion: A Century of Struggle for
Women’s Rights. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Riley, D. 1983a. “‘The Serious Burdens of Love?’: Some Questions on
Childcare, Feminism and Socialism” in What Is to Be Done about the
Family? Crisis in the Eighties, ed. Segal, L., 121–145. Middlesex:
Penguin
—. 1983b. War in the Nursery. London: Virago Press.
Romero, M. 2002. Maid in the U.S.A. (2nd ed.) New York and London:
Routledge.
Rowbotham, S. 1989. The Past is Before Us: Feminism in Action since the
1960s. Boston: Beacon Press.
Rutter, J., and Evans, B. 2012. Childcare for Parents with Atypical Work
Patterns: The Need for Flexibility (Report). Daycare Trust. Retrieved
from:
http://www.familyandchildcaretrust.org/sites/default/files/files/Atypica
l_Work_Patterns_%E2%80%93_the_need_for_flexibility_interactive.p
df
Sissons, P. 2011. The Hourglass and the Escalator: Labour Market
Change and Mobility (Report). The Work Foundation. Retrieved from:
http://www.theworkfoundation.com/downloadpublication/report/292_h
ourglass_escalator120711%20(2)%20(3).pdf
Statham, J., and Mooney, A. 2003. Around the Clock: Childcare Services
at Atypical Times (Report). Joseph Rowntree Foundation: The Policy
Press. Retrieved from: http://www.jrf.org.uk/sites/files/jrf/jr144-
childcare-services-times.pdf
Thane, P. 2011. Happy Families? History and Family Policy (rev. ed.)
London: British Academy.
Thane, P. and Evans, T. 2013. Sinners? Scroungers? Saints?: Unmarried
Motherhood in Twentieth-Century England. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Williams, Z. 2014. “24-hour Childcare and the Working Parents’
Conundrum.” The Guardian “Comment Is Free”, March 29. Retrieved
from: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/29/24-hour-
childcare-working-parents-brent-council.
 24-Hour Nurseries: The Never-Ending Story of Care and Work 21

Women’s Liberation: A National Movement (The “Sisterhood and After”

Online Archive). British Library website. Date of access: May 16,
2016. Retrieved from:
http://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/sisterhood/browsesubcategories.h
tml#id=143441
Wills, J., Datta, K., Evans, Y., Herbert, J., May, J. and McIlwaine, C.
2010. Global Cities: New Migrant Divisions of Labour. London: Pluto
Press.
Woodlands, S., Miller, M. & Tipping, S. 2002. Repeat Study of Parents’
Demand for Childcare (Report). London: Department for Education
and Skills.
Wortis, R. 1970. Child-Rearing and Women’s Liberation (Conference
Abstract). Personal Documents of Sheila Rowbotham. Women’s
Library Archive, London School of Economics.


CHAPTER TWO

INVISIBLE LABOUR:
CARE PROVISION FOR INFANTS
AND CHILDREN AT UK ART SCHOOLS

KIM DHILLON

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle”

(George Orwell)i

Introduction: An Invisible Problem

In 1972, when returning from maternity leave with a two-month old baby
(“D”), her first child, “A” came up with a new solution in order to carry
out her work. She did not place her baby in a nursery (none existed at her
workplace at the time, and most of the workers carrying out her job were
men who were not the primary carers of their children, if they had any).
Neither did she leave baby “D” at home with a grandparent or hired carer.
Instead, she kept a cardboard box near her workstation. The baby lay in it,
and “A” carried out her work tasks. “A” was thirty-one, so she had
completed her training, but had many seniors in the workplace. For the
most part, she could distract the baby if he fussed, with simple activities
such as jangling keys. As her supervisors and co-workers worked in other
areas of the workplace, she nursed the baby behind a closed door.
Sometimes, her juniors helped amuse the baby so “A” could carry on with
her work. For the most part, this was a successful situation: the baby was
fed and cared for, “A” was able to get back to work, no one was disturbed.
This situation is a real one. Professor Emeritus of sociology Arlie
Russell Hochschild describes it in her 1973 essay, “Inside the Clockwork
of Male Careers”. The subject of her anecdote, however, is not the
working patterns of a line worker in a factory, or a field worker in a
developing nation. Rather, it is Hochschild herself in one of the most
esteemed, and indeed radical, academic settings in America in the early


 Invisible Labour: Care Provision at UK Art Schools 23

1970s. When returning to work after having her baby, Hochschild, then an
assistant professor at UC Berkeley, devised an impromptu cot from a
cardboard box and carried out tutorials in Barrows Hall with her baby
sharing the space with her undergraduate students. One would imagine that
forty years after the Women’s Liberation Movement, the infrastructure to
support childcare in academic institutions would have caught up with the
progress of feminism’s call for real change. One would expect that,
overall, such institutions now provide workplace childcare so that such
impromptu solutions are no longer necessary.
This, however, is not the case in all higher education institutions in the
US, where Hochschild still lives and works, or in higher education
institutions in the UK—particularly publicly funded art schools, which are
the focus of this chapter. Many British higher education art institutions
have seen a downward slide, not only in care provision for children, but in
broad-sweeping negative attitudes towards infants, childcare, and parents
reflected in their policies that represent a lack of infrastructural care. UK
art colleges have seen a decline in childcare provision since the 1970s.
Among the art collegesii in the UK, only Goldsmiths (which is part of the
University of London), and Falmouth School of Art (also now a
university), offer a nursery. Lack of space and resources is often attributed
as the cause, even for administrations of art colleges that express a desire
for childcare provision for their students, such as Glasgow School of Art,
but which are “hampered by lack of suitable space and funding” according
to its past director, Dugald Cameron.
UK universities as a whole, excluding art schools, demonstrate some
progress in care provision. Among the (approximately) 100 universities in
the UK, many now have onsite, privately run childcare available to staff
and students. Some are run by independent bodies subcontracted by the
university, as in the case of Cambridge University and their nursery
provider Childbase Partnership. Others are run by the university, such as
Birkbeck College’s evening nursery (part of University of London), or by
the Students’ Union, seen in the case of Goldsmiths College (also part of
University of London). These evidence a shift of care to the private sector;
however, this chapter does not deal with the implications of privatisation
in detail. Higher education institutions saw an increase in workplace
nurseries from only twenty-eight percent having childcare provision in
1995 (TES 1996), though other reports suggest closer to fifty percent offer
“some” childcare provision, to only “a minority” lacking care provision by
2014 according to a survey carried out by the Times Higher Education
Supplement (Birchenough 1996).


24 Chapter Two

Art colleges, however, have seen a decline in care provision: private,

university-run, or otherwise. The Royal College of Art (RCA or “the
College”) owns two central London campuses, in South Kensington and
Battersea, and became a university under the Royal Charter in 1967. The
College was established far earlier, in 1837, as the Government School of
Design. As noted in Dezeen magazine on 1 May 2015, the higher
education networking organisation ranked the RCA as the “best design
college in the world”. Offering master’s degrees and doctoral research
degrees across fine arts, applied arts, humanities, design, and
communication, the College has over 1,300 enrolled students, all of who
are postgraduates and of an increasingly international population. Alumni
include film director Ridley Scott, artists Barbara Hepworth and Henry
Moore, and fashion designer Christopher Bailey. It holds an international
reputation for world-class innovation in art and design.
Despite its international reputation for progressive innovation in its
studios, the RCA displays a backward-looking attitude to care and
infrastructural support of its students, particularly those who are parents.
Until 2013, the College banned children from entering all spaces of the
College beyond the public café and public galleries, “along with pets and
bicycles […] also prohibited” (RCA Handbook 2013, 30), however,
children were only permitted in these spaces if the College was open for
an exhibition. The broader student population had come to accept this,
presuming it a requirement of insurance policies adhering to Health and
Safety legislation. Others have dissented at an individual level, to find
solutions to balance care and study. Lina Lapelyte, artist, performer,
composer, and MA student in sculpture from 2011 to 2013, arrived at a
similar arrangement in her studio as Hochschild had in her office in 1973.
The Sculpture Department is seen by the College as particularly high risk,
yet Lapelyte’s Head of Department, Professor Richard Wentworth,
covertly permitted her to bring her babies (both then under the age of two)
into her studio, where they sat on blankets while she worked, enabling
Lapelyte to continue her MA. Wentworth, who had studied furniture
design and sculpture at the RCA himself in the late 1960s and early 1970s,
saw babies as part of life and therefore, part of Lapelyte’s practice.
The College administration sees things another way. Jane Alexander,
the RCA’s Pro Rector of Operations, revealed in 2013 that (beyond the
workshops) children were banned extensively from the College. This was
due to a line the College themselves had drawn and not due to a public
liability insurance policy.iii In the College administration’s understanding
of the art school as a workplace, children were regarded as disruptive to
that workplace.iii Such an attitude by an institution globally regarded for its


 Invisible Labour: Care Provision at UK Art Schools 25

innovation presents a startlingly retrograde attitude towards what is valued

as “work” today. Specifically, consideration should be given to what kinds
of institutional structures exist (and are fostered and extended, or closed
down and reduced) to support those “workers” within them, who have
other responsibilities and obligations outside and beyond the work of the
institution itself.
At the RCA, care and mothering has become so invisible that there is
no official care provision or support for students who parent. The Student
Support Office’s website makes not a single mention of childcare.iv The
ban prior to 2014 on children entering any space of the College (even
when accompanied by their parent) made it impossible for a student to
drop off a paper, collect a library book, or spend any time in their studio,
without arranging formal childcare outside of the institution. The effect
was particularly problematic for students who are single parents. Nursery
provision in UK art schools is scarce, and yet, some of the few that exist
are at risk of closure. The nursery at London College of Communication,
which served students and staff across six UAL colleges, closed in 2010
despite a campaign, The Nursery Project, led by artist Andrea Francke.
Other art college nurseries have been threatened with closure, such as
Goldsmiths College’s nursery, which was taken over successfully by the
Students’ Union from the University in 2009. The result of a lack of
formal care provision in art colleges—whether a day nursery, a childcare
centre, a crèche, or even an informal parent-run space—is that care work,
children and, by extension, mothering, becomes invisible and increasingly
isolated from the other work that is carried out within the academic setting
or the studio. Hochschild, writing in 2013, summarised why care has
slipped to the margins of our infrastructure: “Part of what makes care work
invisible is that the people the worker cares for—children, the elderly, the
disabled—are themselves somewhat invisible. Strangers entering a room
may tend to ignore or ‘talk over’ the very young and old” (Hochschild
2013, 30).
In UK art schools and higher education institutions, however, this
invisibility has not always been the case. In the 1970s, children and art
schools were not so at odds with one another. While childcare provision in
universities in the UK in general has improved, in art schools it has
declined. What is the place of children, mothers, and families in different
kinds of workplaces and spaces? Why have the culture and visibility of
children and parents in art schools changed since the 1970s? Does the
change result from institutional ideologies within the art school
administration, as they became formalised as universities and increasingly
focused on privatisation, profit, and marketability? Throughout this


26 Chapter Two

chapter, I will address the shifts in care as a collective concern in the

second wave of feminism, and care as an individual responsibility under
neoliberalism, in order to think about where, at what points and in what
contexts childcare becomes visible and invisible. In this chapter I will
consider two reasons (which I refer to as “myths”) commonly presented by
art college administrations for not providing care for their students’
children. Firstly: cost, in that childcare provision is too expensive to offer
the students and requires too much space. Secondly: risk, i.e. claims that
the workplace is too dangerous for children, or that children are too
disruptive to ensure workplace safety. Interrogating these “reasons” as
myths propagated under neoliberalism, I will explore how care has
become a concern for the individual, rather than collective society.

Visible Care and the Second Wave

Several initiatives developed to demand childcare because of an increased
consciousness of the Women’s Movement. Journalist Katrina Wishart
reported: “the campaign to create a nursery for Cambridge University
began [in 1976] with ‘riots outside Senate House’” (Wishart 1997). Seven
students at Middlesex University were suspended from the (then)
polytechnic following a sit-in protest in support of demands for a nursery.
In 1981, John Kennedy, their fellow student, ran in the by-election in the
Merseyside town of Crosby to highlight the case. Pragmatic solutions to
enable mothers to study and work were seen as a vital political cause, as
something of benefit to educational institutions at large, and a cause for
collective concern. Historian, and prominent feminist in the Women’s
Liberation Movement, Sheila Rowbotham recalls that one of the four
demands of the Women’s Liberation Movement was 24-hour childcare
(Rowbotham, 2014). This demand, Rowbotham reflects, was commonly
misconstrued in the press as a desire to place children in around-the-clock
care, yet its intended aim was in fact to support women who worked
outside of nine-to-five hours. Second-wave feminism was successful at
mobilising women around the childcare issue, by reframing childcare as a
collective issue and care as a collective responsibility.
Jane Furst was single and a mother to a pre-school age daughter when
she enrolled in a master’s degree in printed textiles at the Royal College of
Art in 1968. Upon marrying a fellow RCA student in her second year of
study, Furst lost her nursery entitlement for single mothers. With her
fellow MA student in painting Carolyn Garnet-Lawson, Furst hired
nursery nurse Sue Haynes, who was to work in a College room (the Judo
room), use of which during the day was agreed to by the College after


 Invisible Labour: Care Provision at UK Art Schools 27

Furst and Garnet-Lawson sought permission. Furst and Garnet-Lawson

carried on their studies and visited the children in the crèche for lunch.
Beyond granting them permission for the room, the administration largely
left them to it. The space Furst and Garnet-Lawson created enabled them
to be part of life at art school, as well as maintaining a presence in the
daytime care of their children. Garnet-Lawson’s then-husband Andrew
relays that their daughter Tiffany recalls “high ceilings” and being “very
happy” at the College, though her memories of the nursery itself are
vague. Andrew Garnet-Lawson tells it that he and Carolyn “announc[d] to
the RCA […] that we had a child. This rather put the cat among the
pigeons and, together with the fact that other students were arriving with
children, forced [the College] into doing something”.v The administration
at the time was built on a socially minded view of what the College could
be. Sir Robin Darwin praised the crèche in his 1968 official address to the
College Court, the first official address since the College obtained
university status (RCA Inaugural 1968). In it, the Rector embraced
children in the crèche as “junior recruits” of the College.
As the demand for childcare in the College grew, the College expanded
Furst’s crèche into a staffed day nursery in the adjacent Jay Mews.
Advertised to new students in the prospectus through the 1970s, the
nursery provided a valuable resource for students who were parents. It
provided the necessary infrastructure so that female students who had
children would not be forced to leave their master’s programme—normal
practice before the nursery. Illustrator Catherine Brighton was one such
student. Brighton became pregnant in the first year of her MA at the RCA.
Expected by her course leaders to leave her programme and drop out once
she had the baby, Brighton refused, and instead enrolled her infant son in
the nursery. Brighton’s sister Joy Dahl, a registered nurse, obtained a job
as a nurse in the nursery and was also able to bring her own baby son to
work, enabling the cousins to play and be cared for together, while their
mothers worked and studied in the immediate space and the surrounding
College. Dahl is now a specialist in early years education, with a
consultancy practice in North London; Brighton is an acclaimed and
internationally published illustrator. The children and mothers of the
College nursery became part of the College culture equally: for example,
performing pantomimes at Christmas in the canteen. The now-grown
children recall running up and down on long printmaking tables in the
studios, and modelling on design objects for students’ graduating shows.
In an archival videovi about the College filmed in the period 1968–69, film
student David Gale comments that: “one thing in the College, one element,
which relieves the dour feelings [of College, and presumably society] to


28 Chapter Two

some extent, is the crèche”, which he said had a “very profound effect […]
on the atmosphere in the College”.
Such integration of children in art spaces also happened in art scenes
beyond the College. Artist Jo Spence and the agit-prop photography
collective, The Hackney Flashers, created a large body of work informed
by socialist-feminist politics, focusing on women and labour. In 1978, they
staged a large exhibition, “Who’s Holding the Baby?”, which fused
Dadaist montage of text and photographic image to call for nursery places
in Hackney, East London. In 1973, artist Mary Kelley began her seminal
Post-Partum Document when pregnant with her son. The six-year-long
project challenged the work of mothering through a framework of
feminism informed by Lacan. In 1983, a group of women artists, art
historians, and cultural workers in Leeds formed Pavilion, the first
women’s photography centre in the UK. Pavilion and Leeds Animation
Workshop regularly organised crèches at their art events so the members
could continue to work and attend exhibitions and events. The nursery at
the RCA was an early part of a larger context of care and activism, which
integrated mothers into the UK art discourse.

Care Recedes from View

Yet, despite the early praises and support, in 1980, the RCA closed the
crèche. The number of users that year had fallen below a level required to
maintain operations. Though the RCA Students’ Union recorded
“widespread agreement” (OTR 1983) for its re-establishment, it ceased to
be advertised by the administration in the prospectus. The childcare space
in Jay Mews was instead privately let out for two day care sessions to
users from the local area and staff at nearby embassies. The building that
housed the crèche was renovated by the mid-1980s, but the original
childcare space was never reopened. An undated issue of OTR, the
Students’ Union newsletter circa 1983, gives evidence to the Students’
Union’s attempt to reopen the crèche. The Students’ Union intended to
establish “a child-centred space with a small library, craft space and one
that can be used by children of students, tutors and ancillary staff etc., for
a fee in the holidays and at other times that it would be needed” (OTR
1983). Although the “question crop[s] up every year” since the nursery’s
closure, with a “steady stream of enquiries” (ibid.) according to the
newsletter, the existence of a nursery and knowledge of its closure was
eventually lost to the College and the student population.
The crèche was also subsequently lost to the collective memory of the
student body. By 2009, when I enrolled as a doctoral candidate, no one in


 Invisible Labour: Care Provision at UK Art Schools 29

the administration, faculty, or student body mentioned that childcare

provision had ever existed in the College. Few were even aware of it.vii
The reawakening to the existence of the crèche only occurred after a
chance meeting I had with artist Richard Wentworth, who was a colleague
of Furst in the 1960s and 1970s. After locating uncatalogued images and
video footage in the College archive of the crèche, we were able to piece
together the users and staff of the original 1970s-era nursery. The result
was an image of the College that starkly contrasted that which we see
today: an institution where children walk freely in the spaces, and are part
of the culture. While official archives of the College serve the current
marketization agenda, an often-forgotten or erased alternative collective
memory of the College suggests another reality.
In a similar fashion, childcare facilities run by the college
administration at the London College of Communication—a University of
the Arts London (UAL) college—closed in 2010. It has been five years
since the closing of the nursery that served all of the six UAL colleges,
and now, few students are aware that a nursery ever existed (Francke,
2014). The space was turned into a gallery, and named with a painfully
salient title which points to its prior use: the Nursery Gallery is the
temporary exhibition space in the former nursery site, and demonstrates
the prioritisation by the art school administration of outward-facing
presentations of students’ work and professional practice, rather than
internal infrastructure, support, and services that may enable such work to
be made by students with childcare responsibilities.
Students at the RCA have felt this clash of ideals and infrastructure in
the course of master’s and research degrees in the last ten years. In surveys
carried out by my colleague Dr Jessica Jenkins and I since 2009, students
have reported suffering logistical problems with childcare; for example,
having “quite a lot of childcare problems since starting the course (in
terms of finding someone who can pick him up from school). It can be
very stressful and I don’t feel I can talk about these issues with other
students on my course”. viii
Others perceive the logistical problems to infringe on their rights. One
reports: “I think it is wrong that children are not […] allowed into Howie
St [Sculpture Dept.], even into the canteen, computer room or loo. This
discrimination against those with children, especially single parents who
sometimes have no choice but to be carers over half term and holidays,
adds up to a big disadvantage”.viii Meanwhile, others discover a rupture
between their personal family life and their professional studio work,
resulting from College policies around the presence of children on


30 Chapter Two

campus, as well as the lack of childcare: “I would like my daughter to

have an idea of what I do, and where I work”.viii
Why is it that the momentum around childcare, and experimental
solutions to provide care, did not manifest in long-term institutional
change? Why, under neoliberalism, has the responsibility of care been
reframed once again—in ways which understand childcare as a service
that we source and pay for as individuals—and not necessarily as
something our workplace institutions feel bound to provide?

Art, Class, Care, and Work

A report by economist and social policy analyst Linda Richardson for the
Institute for Fiscal Studies asked: “Is Childcare Affordable across OECD
Countries?” (Richardson 2012). Richardson found that in the UK in 2008,
27 percent of the average wage of a two-earner household with children
was spent on childcare. This was high in comparison with the amount an
average two-earner household spends on childcare in Nordic countries—
which is 5 percent of the couple’s combined wages—but similar to the 23
percent spent by such households in the United States. Richardson’s recent
statistics from 2012 data suggest that childcare now accounts for 13
percent of a UK family’s net income, but has increased to as much as 46
percent of an American family’s income (OECD, 2014). The fall in the
UK cost is perhaps, in part, due to a subsidy paid to nurseries for fifteen
hours per week of “early education” (defined as childcare for children
aged three and over, until they begin full-time education in the first
September after their fourth birthday). However, this is not sufficient to
cover operating costs and many nurseries charge parents a top-up fee to
use the service. Even with help from subsidies, childcare for two- and
single-parent households in the UK is expensive, if one, or both, parents
choose or have to work or study outside the home.
Childcare costs in the UK for a typical family with one child in school
requiring after-school care, and one child of pre-school age, are £7,500 a
year on average (BBC, 2013). Nine of the dedicated UK art colleges are
sited in London, where these costs are higher. The cost of attending these
art colleges has also increased dramatically since 2010. Tuition has risen
from an upper threshold of £3,000 in 2004, to £3,290 for a year for
undergraduate study in 2010, to £9,000 by 2012, with future rises forecast
(Coughlan, 2010). The result is that before the basic costs of living such as
housing, food, transport, utilities, and clothing are even factored in, an art
school student in London with two children could expect to pay £16,500 a
year in tuition and childcare alone—an amount that places the possibility


 Invisible Labour: Care Provision at UK Art Schools 31

of studying art while raising young children out of the reach of most.
Students in postgraduate study in the UK (who are typically older than
undergraduates, and therefore more likely to have children) are also
restricted from childcare funding grants for students. Grants such as
Parents’ Learning Allowance and Childcare Grants are solely for
undergraduates. Postgraduates, particularly in art schools, thus find
themselves in a situation where there is no childcare provision on offer,
nor any funding to pay for private care outside of the academic institution.
Hochschild (2013) argues the relationship between the free market and
family values, following the worldwide 20 percent increase of women in
the labour force from 1993 to 2003. Proponents of the free market have
called for “lower and less progressive taxes, privatization, deregulation of
companies, and cuts to state services” (2013, 50). As Hochschild contends:
“These policies are said to free the market and, by doing so, to strengthen
the family” (ibid.). However, Hochschild argues, the countries with the
most laissez-faire of markets also fare worse in the World Health
Organization and World Bank cross-national data on child well-being,
particularly the US and the UK. Here, children were more likely to skip
breakfast, to lack schoolbooks, and to become overweight or pregnant
(ibid.).
The neoliberal free market, in Hochschild’s analysis, was not serving
the family well at all. Neither was the neoliberal agenda serving the
population who had, for sixty years, benefitted most from art school
education: the working classes. Post-war British art education was free. As
artist Grayson Perry recalls, through the 1950s and 1960s, in a burst of
social mobility, “everyone” in art school was on a grant, and
predominantly working class (Perry 2014). Reflecting on art schools in
Britain in the post-war era, musician Brian Eno observed the “really
important social mixes” that fostered an exciting culture of “incoherence”
at a point when art schools reflected the nation (ibid.). Today, with fees of
£9,000, there is narrowed participation of the classes in art school subjects.
Writing in The Guardian, Laura Barnett highlights that British art schools
have always drawn in a high number of students from working-class
backgrounds, a population who can ill afford the increase in costs and
necessity of debt to study undergraduate level art and design (Barnett
2011). Shelley Asquith, the current Student Union president at UAL,
expresses the situation as follows: “At UAL Students’ Union we have
been fighting against a bureaucratic, management-centric university to
create a more welcoming environment for students who care. Buildings
that do not grant access to children, Colleges that close nurseries and
inflexible timetables that do not accommodate the school run are


32 Chapter Two

systematically shutting out certain people from art education. Above all
this is, without a doubt, an attack on working-class women.”ix
If working-class mothers are excluded from art school education due to
both lack of infrastructure and cost, then they are also excluded from being
producers of the cultural conversation, which remains the space of those
who can afford to be there.
In an interview with the British women’s weekly magazine Woman’s
Own in 1987, Margaret Thatcher, who had just won a third term as Prime
Minister, famously stated: “Society? There is no such thing! There are
individual men and women and there are families” (Kay 1987). Cultural
theorist Angela McRobbie has argued that neoliberalism addresses the
woman in the family: “the family becomes the substitute for welfare”, and
at the same time, consumer culture has taken on a “destructive role
through intense media activity”, allowing for “the replacement of social
welfare” and public services (McRobbie 2012). Neoliberal policies since
Thatcherism have resulted in a culture that has made care work the
responsibility of the private realm and the individual. In her article, “The
Family Wage”, Nancy Fraser (2013) paints a utopian vision for a welfare
state in a post-industrial economic model. The “Family Wage” is
dysfunctional, Fraser argues, in the varied and diverse families we see
now, for we often no longer have a breadwinner outside of the home and
an unpaid caregiver inside it. Fraser proposes two new models. The first is
the Universal Breadwinner, which upholds the financial reward of work
outside the home, but promotes women’s employment by providing
“employment enabling services” (2013, 123) such as day care and
eldercare. The second, the Caregiver Parity model, rewards care work in
the home, elevating caregiving to a “parity with formal labour” (2013,
128). The Caregiver Parity reinforces the invisibility of domestic care
labour though, keeping it within the walls of the home. While both of
Fraser’s models go some way to achieving gender justice, neither does so
fully, for Fraser sees this as only being possible with the deconstruction of
gender.
The changing childcare context under neoliberalism has become more
professionalised, more formalised, and more expensive. This shift, coupled
with the increasing cost of attending an art college, and the subsequent
change in the class backgrounds of student populations, has contributed to
the decline of childcare provision in art schools. Under a neoliberal
agenda, college administrations have managed to avoid supplying care
when pushed, due to an armoury of the following reasons: cost (which
includes space and infrastructure) and safety. However, I argue that these


 Invisible Labour: Care Provision at UK Art Schools 33

reasons are myths that are only sustained because childcare has diminished
as a collective concern.

Myth One: Cost

The first myth, cost, is framed thus: childcare is too expensive, particularly
for art schools with relatively small student populations. In 1968, when
Furst began her crèche, the student population of the RCA was only 550.
Today, the number of students at the RCA is nearly treble that. Yet, the
College often states that its small student population (relative to other
universities) is a reason for not affording a nursery.x
When the nursery at Goldsmiths College was threatened with closure
in 2010 by the university (which had run it at a deficit of £100,000 per
year), the Students’ Union took over its running, after a successful
business plan bid which proposed to change the working weeks of the
nursery from fifty-two weeks a year to opening during term time only, and
to trim overspending on expensive agency staffing. Led by the SU Chief
Executive, Graham Gaskell, the situation at Goldsmiths posed the
possibility of developing a new model when the current one was
ineffective or uneconomical, rather than simply backing out of providing
care entirely. Gaskell was motivated to maintain what he saw as a resource
of support for students, and one that potentially integrated the College
within the local community. By opening the nursery spaces up to the wider
community, he ensured that the nursery was always running at maximum
capacity, but also provided a link for the institution to that community,
who may not see the university as a place for them. The Students’ Union’s
direction and strong nursery management team has been so efficient that in
2014 its budget generated a small surplus, providing important leverage in
negotiating its long-term position and facilities with the University’s
management. The model of Goldsmiths’ Students’ Union demonstrates
that childcare can be both affordable and financially beneficial to an
institution.
The model implemented by Goldsmiths College also demonstrates that
the student body population can be irrelevant to the provision of care. By
opening up places to the local community, the nursery at Goldsmiths
ensures it always runs at full capacity. The waiting list for places in the
nursery at the RCA’s neighbouring Imperial College is so long that
Imperial College was forced to close the list to local residents, thus
indicating demand for nursery places exists in the local area of the RCA.
The restriction is not the increased cost that childcare adds to an
institution, but the perception of costs, due to increased legislation. This


34 Chapter Two

provides a scapegoat for administrations lacking a willingness to embrace

the provision of care as an institutional responsibility.

Myth Two: Risk

The second myth, risk, is framed thus: art colleges are dangerous places
for children and children are distracting in a workplace. This myth, I
argue, is the result of the expansion of legislation under the umbrella term
“Health and Safety” since the Health and Safety at Work Act of 1974. An
unforeseen consequence of this necessary legislation to ensure the safety
of workers—often children, women, and manual labourers—now results in
an over-dominant perception of risk associated with children and their
care, and the reality of a heavy burden of administrative paperwork for
anyone wishing to work caring for children. As care has become
formalised in the UK, it has borne an administrative burden where
legislation places the emphasis on paperwork to establish and maintain
care, and not to carry out care work. For workplaces to keep risks “as low
as reasonably practicable” does not mean, as writer Tim Gill puts it, an
“elimination of all possible risk” (Gill, 2007, 21). For if we are to remove
children from every area of risk, what would be the cost? Children would
lose, as well as a lack of the chance to learn to be safe and confident, the
opportunity of exposure to creativity in art schools, witnessing their
parents at work and exposure to social relations with adults. The hazardous
areas of the RCA are, for the most part, already architecturally separate
from any public and low-risk spaces—on separate floors and accessible
via lifts and stairs which one needs a security card to access. Banning
children from the spaces of the RCA does not reduce risk, but creates
instead a barrier between children and workplaces, and subsequently any
benefit that comes with it, making children and care work increasingly
invisible from the workplace.
The related perception of these mythical burdens—risk and cost, in
terms of time and monetarily—enables managers of institutions to argue
care as unviable due to space, time, budgets, and safety, and to avoid
addressing the infrastructural lack that creates a barrier to parents—often
mothers of young children—from attending. These shifts in culture have
created a situation in which care work is increasingly invisible in the
workplace, despite an ever-present need for it, for its subsidy, and for the
financial support to provide it. An overemphasis on risk, health, and
safety, overrides the right to care of the parent, as well as the common
creativity shared by artists and children. The underlying message is: that a
good mother would not bring a child to a hazardous place (and that art


 Invisible Labour: Care Provision at UK Art Schools 35

schools are hazardous), that a good mother would keep her children
separate from her work, and that caring for one’s own children is not work
and should not require infrastructural support. “Health and Safety” is a
glove to cover the lack of collective responsibility for care with a false
collective responsibility for protection. If administrations make workplaces
seem so dangerous that it would be uncaring to bring a child into them,
then they can argue they are doing the right thing by removing the
provision of childcare within their institutions. 

From Invisibility to New Models for Care

The lack of childcare provided by institutions is cyclical. Women are less
likely to secure full-time tenured posts because they take time out of paid
labour to have children. There is therefore less push from above for
childcare because the posts are dominated by men, or by women who have
chosen to be “inside the clockwork of the male career” (Hochschild,
1994). When one has young children and works or studies, there is little
time or energy left for activism. By the time that mother has time available
or energy again, the need is less pressing, as their children have inevitably
grown and entered the full-time clockwork of care: school.
Lack of care provision hurts not only students who are parents, but
staff too. Higher education institutions have two major populations that
span several decades in their ages: students and faculty. The Times Higher
Education supplement reported in 2005 that a “deplorable pay gap persists
in academia” on the basis of gender, with pay gaps ranging from female
professors earning 6.3 percent less than their male counterparts across an
average of UK institutions, to a gap as large as 17 percent difference for
academic jobs classed as “other” (TeS, 2005). “Other” jobs include
temporary, untenured, contract-based work, such as visiting lecturers: the
type of jobs many academics take when first establishing their career or
when returning from having a child without having been in a full-time,
permanent post before their maternity leave.
In 2011, the Times Higher Education supplement survey of the average
salary of full-time academic staff demonstrated that the gap persists with
every UK university reporting a pay gap between male and female
professors, with the exception of two: Aston University and Sheffield
Hallam (TeS, 2011). In that survey, the RCA showed a gap across all
levels of academic staff, with no figures reported for female professors,
meaning fewer than seven female professors existed within the College at
the time. Olsen and Walby attributed the lack of change in the pay gap to
“differences in life-time working patterns” (Olsen and Walby 2004,


36 Chapter Two

Faggian and Della Giusta 2008). Such “life-time working patterns” differ
because of the need for someone to take time out of the paid workforce to
raise children.
Other countries present further models for possibility. In Quebec in the
mid-1990s, the Parti Quebecois, then in power in the provincial
government, forged an ambitious plan for universal low cost $5-a-day day
care, which was first rolled out in 1997. The universal system was
intended to positively impact parental labour outside of the home, as well
as child development. Designed to increase the school preparedness of
under-fives, the plan aimed to create a resource where any parent, male,
female, solo or in partnership, could afford a day care place and go out to
work—whether an artist, a student, or a waitress. The system was based on
the provincial government accrediting nurseries as les centres de petit
enfance (CPE). The take-up was so high that the demand far exceeded the
available CPE nursery places, resulting in long waiting lists. To meet the
demand, the government, with the Liberals in power from 2003–2012, and
again in 2014, began accrediting private nurseries which could reimburse
parents with a tax rebate that reduced their childcare cost to the $7-per-day
rate,xi but still nurseries could not keep pace with demand. This second tier
of the universal system only worked if the parents could afford to pay in
advance the full rate and receive the rebate three months later—an option
financially out of reach for many. The result was a stratification of the
system. For example, non-accredited nurseries range from good to very
poor in the basic provisions such as access to outside space, nutrition, and
care worker-to-child ratios. Many charge more than the accredited
nurseries on the universal low-cost system due to a lack of places to meet
the need in the state-subsidised nurseries. A third sector of informal care
also developed, with local, discreet advertisements placed as posters or
flyers near day-care communities in which a person, “usually female”,
advertised an informal, low-cost home day care (Heeren 2014).
The effect of the government-run CPEs on university students who
were parents was dramatic. Kristy Heeren, the Coordinator of the
Concordia University Student Parents Centre (CUSP) at Montreal’s
Concordia University from 2009 to 2011, also commented on the effect the
system had on parents’ decisions about future fertility and family size,
specifically when to have a second child. Faced with waiting lists 12–24
months long for accredited nurseries, and with priority of places given to
siblings of currently enrolled children, a couple or mother may have
decided to have a second child while the first was still very young and in
the nursery in order to secure a sibling place. A 2012 report by Catherine
Haeck, Pierre Lefebvre and Philip Merrigan concluded that the take-up of


 Invisible Labour: Care Provision at UK Art Schools 37

places had greatly facilitated the return to work of many mothers, though it
had done little to improve the children’s preparedness for school when they
entered formal education at age five (Haeck, Lefebvre and Merrigan 2012).
Fiscally, St. Cerny, Godbot and Fontin (2012) concluded, reassuringly:
“Quebec’s low-fee childcare programme is financially ‘profitable’ for both
the provincial and federal levels of government”. With a high take-up rate
at maximum occupancy, the universal system was both popular with users
and financially viable to the government, though not without its flaws.

Conclusion: Towards Visibility

Reflecting on a forty-year career in academia at Brown University, the
biologist and gender theorist Anne Fausto-Sterling (2013) authored a piece
in the Boston Review titled “My Life Confronting Sexism in Academia”.
Workplace childcare was assessed, depressingly, in her text as a continuing
problem. Fausto-Sterling muses: “I guess there is still some unfinished
business to pass on to the next [generations]”. In the article, Fausto-
Sterling asked: “How could women take a full role on campus without
a safe and affordable place for their children?”. Fausto-Sterling
summarised workplace childcare as an integral “plot” in sexism in
academia from 1971 to the present, before concluding: “Sorry to say we
failed on this one”. The separation of home and work is reinforced in
terms like “work-life balance”. Use of such “soft” terms like this and
“family-friendly” allow us to ignore the issue of childcare provision as a
deeply entrenched attitude that is hostile to carers, and a barrier to
learning, because women are still the dominant carers. Offering care
should not be seen as “friendly”, but as essential.
“Our goal”, Stephanie Coontz, a professor of family history at
Evergreen State College, wrote in The New York Times in 2013, “should
be to develop work-life policies that enable people to put their gender
values into practice […] To do that, we must stop seeing work-family
policy as a women’s issue and start seeing it as a human rights issue that
affects parents, children, partners, singles and elders”. From parent-
initiated spaces, to state-run nurseries, to financial support for care by
grandparents, one model for childcare will never fit all parents. The result
of offering new possibilities for workplace childcare solutions could be a
change to the culture of higher education and cultural institutions where
children and childcare are once again visible, embraced, and possible
inside the clockwork of a career in art, irrespective of gender.
As the director of the Liverpool Biennale Sally Tallant has put it, “Art
school teaches you to rethink the world and rebuild the world” (Tickle,


38 Chapter Two

2013). Brian Eno reflected that art schools are not places where just
painting and culture are thought about, but they “are places where culture
is thought about” (BBC 2014). In art and design, a field built on creating
solutions to problems, innovation, ideas, and creative problem solving,
does the possibility for a new model of childcare to fit the workplace of
the higher education institution of the art school, both for its students and
staff, present a new possibility for workplace childcare for us all?

References
Barnett, L. 2011. “British Art Schools: Class Dismissed.” The Guardian,
April 10.
Birchenough, A. 1996. “Nurseries Take Root.” Times Higher Education
Supplement, February 12.
Coontz, S. 2013. “Why Gender Equality Stalled.” The New York Times,
February 16.
Faggian, A. and Della Giusta, M. 2008. “An Educated Guess: Gender Pay
Gaps in Academia.” University of Reading, Henley Business School
website. Retrieved from:
http://www.henley.ac.uk/web/FILES/management/058.pdf
Fausto-Sterling, A. 2013. “My Life Confronting Sexism in Academia.”
Boston Review, June 13.
Francke, A. 2014. “How Many Times do We Have to Fight the Same
Fight?” Artslondonnews.com, January 21.
Fraser, N. 2013. “After the Family Wage: A Postindustrial Thought
Experiment” in Fortunes of Feminism. London: Verso.
Gill, T. 2007. No Fear: Growing Up in a Risk Averse Society (Report).
London: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.
Haeck, C., Lefebvre, P., and Merrigan, P. 2012. Quebec’s Universal
Childcare: The Long Term Impacts on Parental Labour Supply and
Child Development. Département des Sciences Économiques, UQÁM
website. Retrieved from:
http:/www.er.uqam/novel/r15504/pdf/ChidcareV55.pdf
Heeren, Kristy, email interview with the author, 24 September 2014.
Hochschild, A. R. 1994. “Inside the Clockwork of Male Careers with a
1990s Postscript” in Gender and the Academic Experience: Berkeley
Women 1952–1972, eds. Meadow Orlans, K. P. and Wallace, R.A.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
—. 2013. “Can Emotional Labour Be Fun?” in So, How’s the Family?
Berkeley: University of California Press.


 Invisible Labour: Care Provision at UK Art Schools 39

Kay, D. and Thatcher, M. 1987. Article in Woman’s Own magazine.

Retrieved from: http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689
McRobbie, A. 2012. “Feminism, Neoliberalism, and the Family: Human
Capital at Home.” Lecture given at McMaster University, Hamilton,
Ontario, Canada on February 7.
OECD. 2014. Benefits and Wages: Statistics, Directorate for Labour,
Employment and Social Affairs (Report). Retrieved from:
http://www.oecd.org/els/benefitsandwagesstatistics.htm
Olsen, W. and Walby, S. 2004. “Modelling Gender Pay Gaps.” EOC
Working Paper Series Winter 2004: 15.
Richardson, L. 2012. Costs of Childcare Across OECD Countries
(Report). OECD Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social
Affairs, Social Policy Division.
RCA (Royal College of Art). 2014. Children in College Policy.
—. 2013. Royal College of Art Handbook.
—. 1983. The Official Bulletin of the Students’ Union. Issue 29.
—. 1968. Inaugural Meeting (Proceedings).
Rowbotham, S. 2014. The Origin of WLM Demands (Online Presentation).
British Library website. Retrieved from:
http://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/sisterhood/view.html#id=143441
&id2=143243
St-Cerny, S., Godbout, L. and Fortin, P. 2012. “Lessons from Quebec’s
Universal Low Cost Childcare Program.” Institute of Public Policy
Research website, August 7. Retrieved from:
http://www.ippr.org/juncture/lessons-from-quebecs-universal-low-fee-
childcare-programme.
Tickle, L. 2013. “What’s the Point of Art School? Revolution, Of Course.”
The Guardian, May 17.
Wishart, K. 1997. “Creche Barriers.” Times Higher Education
Supplement, March 31.

Notes

i. Orwell, 1946, quoted in Hochschild, 2013.
ii. Dedicated Art Colleges are defined as higher education schools or colleges
which only offer art training and education, according to British Arts.
iii. Interview with the author, 9 December 2013. Also see “Children in College
Policy”, Royal College of Art, 2014.
iv. An email to Student Support requesting help will receive a response of a
standard email suggesting private and state nurseries in The Royal Borough of
Kensington and Chelsea, most of which typically have waiting lists over eighteen


40 Chapter Two


months, and are often not near the student’s home, and not sited in their place of
work and study.
v. Andrew Garnet-Lawson, email to the author, 20 November 2013.
vi. Archival footage of the Royal College of Art, 1968–9, filmmaker unknown.
vii. In my research, nobody I have encountered has been aware of the crèche’s
existence before 2013, with the exception of artist and academic Professor Richard
Wentworth, who had been a student at the RCA in the late 1960s to early 1970s,
and archivist Neil Parkinson, who had come across some of the archival material
used in the preparation of this text.
viii. Surveys with Royal College of Art MA and Research Students and Staff, Kim
Dhillon and Jessica Jenkins, 2009–2014.
ix. Shelley Asquith, email to the author, 7 November 2014.
x. Royal College of Art Pro Rector of Operations, Jane Alexander, Interview with
the author, 9 December 2013.


 CHAPTER THREE

“MOTHER WORK”,
EDUCATION AND ASPIRATION
IN BRITISH-BANGLADESHI FAMILIES

RIFAT MAHBUB

David Harvey, the author of A Brief History of Neoliberalism, rightly

termed the years between 1978 and 1980 socio-politically “revolutionary”
for world history (2005, 1). Between these years, traditional geopolitical
forces such as Britain and the United States collaborated with nations such
as China—which would go on to be a global economic giant—with high
ambitions for their own countries’ futures and for those of the rest of the
world. “Neoliberal economy” as this economic shift came to be known in
its countries of origin—the precursor of globalisation—was based on the
principle of freeing national/international economies from the grip of state
bureaucracy. The inexorable march of goods, commodities, capitals and
technologies changed the scope and meaning of individuals’ choices and
their opportunities for success. Neoliberalism, primarily a theory of
political economy, rapidly turned into a force shaping the future.
Britain, amongst the first nations to adopt neoliberal economic
policies, transformed its manufacturing industry-based economy into a
service sector-based economy, thereby creating a more invasive “market
economy” and inviting the aspiring British middle class to capitalise on
opportunities to generate personal wealth and (perhaps) to enter an elite
world of consumption (Rustin 2010). In practice, the 1990s unveiled
conflicts in this market economy. At a time when rich societies claimed
that individual meritocracy was the only route to aspiring to a life beyond
one’s raced, classed and gendered social origins, sociologists of the family
were critically examining how the discourse of meritocracy was playing
out in intimate and domestic spaces. Sharon Hays (1996) coined the term
“intensive mothering” in reference to the extending of market-based
ideology into the realm of motherhood. The historical evolution of
42 Chapter Three

intensive mothering, as Hays describes it, is that of an ideology based on

individual self-interest and competitiveness. Contrary to the liberal
feminist stance which argues that women’s large-scale participations in the
labour market, in particular working in high-status jobs, may free them
from the cultural expectation of being the “angel of the house”, Hays
argues that the Western neoliberal context promotes the fierce practice of
intensive mothering. Its dictating rules —“emotionally guided”, “labour
intensive” and “financially expensive” (Hays 1996, 8) —are embedded in
the neoliberal barometer of individual success, privatised options and an
ability to be “in the game”.
Intensive mothering became an established parenting style in the UK
partly because of its discursive alliance with the neoliberalisation of the
British education system. Katharyne Mitchell argues that in the twenty-
first century, education systems in almost all advanced, multicultural
societies transformed to produce specifically neoliberal subjects,
“individuals oriented to excel in every transforming situation of global
competition, either as workers, managers or entrepreneurs” (2003, 388).
Ironically, the de-territorialisation of nation states under neoliberal
globalisation actually serves to intensify state interventions via education
systems. Such education systems are deemed “successful” insofar as they
reproduce ideal neoliberal citizens. Critical arguments within and beyond
the sociology of education have pointed towards a problematic marketised
relationship between “home” and “school” within this nexus. Educated
mothers, families’ middle-class backgrounds, and an intergenerational
transmission of socially distinctive cultural capital proved to be the basis
of “active educational citizens” (Reay 2008, David 1998). In other words,
key elements of Bourdieu’s sociology (1973, [1990]1977)—social class,
cultural capital, and education—have turned into key resources in twenty-
first century postmodern societies (Bourdieu and Wacquant 2001). This
new system did away with Bourdieu’s rather ahistorical argument (1986)
that mothers with “free time” are the best investors in children. Under
neoliberalism, the “good mother” no longer means a mother with free time
to invest in her children. Rather, the neoliberal “good mother” or perhaps
the new “good woman” is the protective mother who turns her family into
“a key site for the exercise of neoliberal governmentality” (Cornwell,
Gideon and Wilson 2008, 5).
Unlike the traditional image of the good mother as a housewife
dedicating herself to the family, neoliberal mothers are strategic, flexible
and competent in moving between personal and professional spheres.
Christina Hughes (2002) argues that the growing individualisation of the
self means that in neoliberal times, a “good mother” needs to maintain a
 Education and Aspiration in British-Bangladeshi Families 43

distance between her own and her child’s life. She should be economically
active, but her key priority should be her children’s competitive future.
The standard of “good mothering” in neoliberal times is thus complex and
paradoxical. A good mother is a responsible mother, and good mothering
an inseparable part of how women with children in neoliberal countries are
expected to construct their identity.
British feminist sociologist Terry Lovell, writing about the usefulness
of Bourdieu’s work in the analysis of contemporary dynamics of gender,
argues that, if “women constitute a class” (2004, 52), then that class is
diverse; not only as argued to be the case in the classic, post-second-wave
feminist debates of race, socio-economic class and sexuality, but also
because of maternity, in that women are increasingly diverse as mothers
(and non-mothers). Women as mothers in the neoliberal, individualised
context are expected to perform their maternal roles in a homogenised
way, a way acceptable to social institutions—such as schools—regardless
of mothers’ varying socio-economic identities. Societal pressure (and
increasingly, state pressure) to perform in a “role model” manner is much
more demanding of contemporary mothers, requiring that they perform
roles more complex than earlier social constructions of “the housewife” or
“the working mum”. Rather, neoliberal mothers are key collaborators with
schools and other social institutions in the production of the next
generation of “perfect” citizens.
As McRobbie (2015) has argued: in the present era, when feminism is
celebrated as a widespread, lived experience as well as a political stance
for progressive change, women are nevertheless relentlessly pressured to
perform a celebrity-driven role of perfection. Certain feminist demands,
such as individual freedom of choice and aspiration (as Nancy Fraser
(2013) argued before McRobbie) have been manipulated and refashioned
as the neoliberal command of self-governance and competitiveness.
One question that has been given insufficient attention in the growing
body of critical academic literature around neoliberal education and “good
mothering” in Britain is the impact of these issues on immigrant families
with children. In other neoliberal societies with high numbers of
immigrants (such as in the United States and Canada) there is an emerging
body of research on immigrant mothers’ integration and their resistance
towards neoliberal standards (see, for example, Babu 2006 for the US and
Creese, Dyck and McLaren 2011 for Canada). My focus in this chapter is
to examine the British context of intensive mothering from an
intersectional perspective, and specifically, to explore the experiences of
transnational migration and the centrality of class and gender labour within
the neoliberalisation of immigrant families. I use the term “mother work”
44 Chapter Three

to define the systematic labour that my participants—educated Bangladeshi

women in Britain—invest in their children’s futures. I discuss the
personal, political and strategic meanings of “good mothering” for newly
immigrant women in a neoliberal society with a “human face” (Molyenx
2007, 9). By analysing the issue of intensive mothering from the
perspective of immigrant women, I do not wish to undermine the different,
often discriminated against, positions they occupy based on their race,
religion, national origins in contemporary Britain. Rather, I wish to
unravel the in/visible standardisation of a particular form of mothering that
may simultaneously symbolise the middle-class status of the new
immigrants and, at the same time, may render them “useful” as immigrant
citizens. As McRobbie argues, middle-class mothers are increasingly
turning into invested-in “capital” for the reproduction of the social order:
“Middle-class women have played a key role in the reproduction of class
society, not just through their exemplary roles as wives and mothers but
also as standard-bearers for middle-class family values, for certain norms
of citizenship and also for safeguarding the valuable cultural capital
accruing to them and their families through access to education,
refinement and other privileges” (2004, 101).

Methods for Researching Mother Work

The primary data of this current analysis came from my research (2011–
2014) in first-generation educated Bangladeshi immigrant women in the
twenty-first century. Until the turn of the twenty-first century, British
Bangladeshis were a largely homogenous group, the result of post-war
large-scale migration of unskilled labourers from the rural part of Sylhet, a
north–east district in Bangladesh. From the 1980s onwards, within the
context of large-scale family migration, Sylheti-Bangladeshi women were
of central academic interest in Britain. Over the decades, a number of
books, policy papers, and academic think-pieces have given voice to the
marginal positions of first-generation Bangladeshi women living with
multiple disadvantages, such as cultural patriarchy, low family income,
unemployment, and issues of social/racial exclusion (see, for example,
Kabeer 2000, Gardner 2002).
However, in the early years of the twenty-first century, the Bangladeshi
diaspora—like other South Asian communities—has experienced massive
changes in its population (Berkeley, Khan and Ambikaipaker 2006). From
the end of the 1990s, British immigration policies underwent neoliberal
reforms. Individuals educated outside the UK were invited to Britain to
increase the country’s human resources and at the same time to marketise
 Education and Aspiration in British-Bangladeshi Families 45

its higher education sector. Britain opened its door to international

students seeking foreign degrees and accepted highly skilled and skilled
migrants for its widening labour markets. Both these strategies caused an
enormous proliferation in the numbers of highly educated Bangladeshi
men and women, within a relatively short span of time.
From July to November 2011, I conducted in-depth, semi-structured
interviews with twenty-eight Bangladeshi women aged between twenty-
eight to forty-five-years-old (see Mahbub 2014). Since I wanted to focus
particularly on “educated women”, I used a snowball method to sample
women with at least a bachelor’s degree, either from a Bangladeshi or a
British institution. This limited sampling resulted in an interesting
diversity: eight participants fell into the category of highly skilled migrants
with professional degrees in medicine and branches of engineering, a
further eight had foreign academic qualifications (including three with
British PhDs). The rest had academic qualifications in science, social
sciences and humanities disciplines from institutions ranging from elite
universities to local colleges in Bangladesh.
All of them were married when I interviewed them. Most had migrated
as the dependants of relatives undertaking studies or working as highly
skilled professionals. With the exception for one woman, whom I call
Putul and who lived within an extended family, all were married and most
had children. Twenty-five out of twenty-eight women had children when I
interviewed them. Twelve of these women had one child between 0–12
years of age and ten of these women had two children of primary to high
school-going age. A further three of these women had three children, from
primary school age to tertiary-level-entry age. Though one-child families
outnumbered two-child families at the time of their interviews, a few of
my participants were expecting second babies. A further three, relatively
young, women without children indicated that having a baby was one of
their key priorities in the near future. It could be suggested that my “new”
Bangladeshi immigrant participants’ family structures reflected the
heterosexual, nuclear, middle-class families that form the dominant
representation of Western family life.

Mother Work, Children’s Education and the Politics

of Neoliberal Identity
Shobha was my fifth interviewee and the first I interviewed with school-
age children. She lived in an ethnic-minority concentrated borough in
Greater London, where she and her husband “could afford to buy a house”.
Always a high-achieving, meritorious student, she holds a postgraduate
46 Chapter Three

degree in biology and used to be a teacher at a private college in Dhaka,

the capital of Bangladesh. Coming to Britain in 2006 on a “highly skilled”
family visa, Shobha turned into a full-time homemaker while her husband
looked after a business. Shobha never applied for a job in Britain, though
when I interviewed her, she told me that because her younger son had
started primary school, she would now look for a part-time job. “Only,
domestic work”—she added—“is very boring”. She also had a longer-term
plan of returning to higher education in the UK, but only if the family had
enough money. Though these plans were uncertain and contingent upon
circumstances, Shobha knew one thing for sure: she wanted to see her sons
“highly—really highly—educated”. Her elder son, a student at mid-
primary level, already wanted to be a mathematician, and it would be
“wonderful”, she told me, if she, as his mother, could support him in
fulfilling his aim. She wanted her sons to do well in primary school, so
that they could go to a good secondary school.
Since it was one of my initial interviews, I took Shobha’s emphasis on
children and their education as an example of normative aspiration for
children’s better standing in a host country. I anticipated that my
Bangladeshi women participants, with their middle-class, educated
backgrounds, would be particularly ambitious for their children’s education.
Shobha wished to inculcate her children with: “This love for education
[…] within me […] perhaps I want to pass on that love through my
children. I think this is the main reason [for her preoccupation with her
children’s education]. And what can you do without education? There is
no alternative to education. If you want to do something worthwhile, you
need education”.
While Shobha stressed the absolute value of education, my other
participants detailed the contextual meaning of a British “good education”.
Nipa was my first participant from Manchester. In her interview, she
talked mainly about how she had fulfilled her own (and her father’s)
ambition, by becoming a doctor in Bangladesh. She told me how her
mother, despite being uneducated, worked hard for her children’s
education whilst her father, a businessman, provided for the family. In
2001, when Nipa finally decided to come to Britain with her engineer
husband, she had made a plan for herself. She wanted to take further
degrees in medicine, and wished to build a career of her own.
However, issues related to her immigration status and family
responsibilities took precedence over her plan. If Nipa’s own ambition
failed partly because she did not possess “insider knowledge” about
Britain and its higher education system (e.g. costs and academic and other
entry requirements), she did not want to make the same mistake with the
 Education and Aspiration in British-Bangladeshi Families 47

education of her own children. When her son started at the local primary
school, Nipa acculturated herself with the neoliberal mantra of
“information is power”. As a highly educated, ambitious but career-drifted
mother, she first wanted to learn the internal differences of education
standard in Britain: “I did a lot of research about the education system here
[in Britain], and I gradually realised that the children from state schools
generally do normal kinds of jobs. But people who are at the highest levels
in this country such as prime ministers, ministers, consultants, they have
very good backgrounds and most of them go to grammar schools. So I
realised that my target would be to send my son to a grammar school”.
Grammar schools remain a controversial issue in Britain. Such schools
are state-run and permitted to select students by entrance examination, and
places are highly sought-after since a grammar school education can often
secure a place at an elite university, and is widely considered to provide
rounded growth through offering a child significant cultural, social—and
consequently, symbolic—capital. Since a grammar school place must be
earned through an academic entrance examination, grammar schools are
conventionally seen to embody the principle of “meritocracy” and social
mobility, offering the “best and the brightest” an elite schooling,
regardless of their background. Yet critical investigations into access to
grammar schooling have documented how this system reproduces classed
advantages. In particular, the literature has discussed how “intensive
mothering” is key to whether children secure a grammar school place,
given the work that mothers do (their “mother work”) to prepare their
children for the examination. Reay (1998) argues that white, middle-class
mothers are/will be ahead in the entry competition, because they have the
cultural, academic, financial and social forms of capital to secure their
children’s advantage in the entrance examination. The mother work
involved may include, for example: researching the examination process;
helping children prepare and revise for the examination; and recruiting—
and significantly, paying for—academic tutors who support the children’s
preparation for the exam.
My participants’ responses to their children’s academic demands are
common practice in middle-class Britain. One of the ways in which
contemporary middle-class families are trying to be “ahead in the game”
for their children’s benefit is in their preference for residency in “good
neighbourhoods”, where the local children have better chances of
attending a highly regarded state school and who have parents with the
means to opt for private and/or grammar schools.
The idea that mothers are central in constructing their children’s
futures is central. Reay (1998) and many other researchers (e.g. Chee
48 Chapter Three

2003; Huang and Yeoh 2005; Walters 2005 and 2006; Smith and Griffith
2005) in various “global neoliberal” contexts establish the marginal roles
fathers play in the entire business of making their children competitive.
Fathers take a less-engaged role in their children’s academic lives. In
contrast to, and because of this more marginal paternal role, mothers need
to be overwhelmingly active in securing their children’s futures. This
imbalance is one of the micro spaces in which the gendered division of
labour persists in neoliberal countries such as Britain. This is evident in
my findings. The idea that mothers are the primary caregivers and solely
responsible for children’s academic (and other) well-being was regarded
as common sense, and none of the women mentioned their husbands (the
children’s fathers) when talking about their children’s academic goals.
Mothers gather information through various sources about the quality of
schools, prepare their children for the admission tests, hire their private
tutors, and provide emotional and intellectual support to their children. As
immigrants, the father’s role was limited to providing a steady flow of
income that would bear the family’s routine expenses and the extra costs
of the children’s educations. The traditional gender division of labour is at
the heart of how women manage their intensive caring roles.
In my study, grammar schools for their children are an option for
highly educated parents with one (the father’s) average middle-class
income. Such families are different from dual-career families and families
with low income (discussed below). Mothers worked hard and effectively
to ensure their children’s prestigious transition from primary to secondary
levels. Asma is one of the few mature women in my study with two late-
teenaged sons. She can be regarded as a “role model mother”, setting an
example for others to follow. In 1999, Asma, then a former government
schoolteacher in Dhaka, joined her husband in England. There, she had no
role model. Living within a traditional Bangladeshi community in Leeds,
where none of the women had much education, Asma felt she had to find
her own way out. She started working as a learning assistant at her sons’
primary school. Gradually, she took a postgraduate degree in education,
and started to work at a culturally diverse ethnic minority secondary
school. After making herself an “insider”, Asma told me why she did not
want to send her son to a comprehensive secondary school:

I developed this idea [of the difference between grammar and

comprehensive schools] because I work at a comprehensive school. I know
much about the environment of those schools. I am not suggesting that
there are not good schools. But there are certain features of grammar
school that you will not find in ordinary schools. Children are disciplined
there and those schools are at the top of the league table of any big
 Education and Aspiration in British-Bangladeshi Families 49

examination. I decided that my sons would go to grammar school. State

primary school is okay for children’s early education. Any child with an
inquisitive attitude can get out with a good result from a primary school.
But secondary school is completely different. The environment is different
and it depends much on the area. Results from high schools such as O- and
A-Levels are the main pathway for majority of the students to go to
universities.

When I interviewed Asma, she was anticipating that her strategic

sacrifices would bear fruit. Her elder son was preparing for an interview at
Oxford University, and her younger one had chosen to be a writer. As a
mother, she credited the school for making her sons “equal” in quality to
their white, middle-class competitors. This route to success is a commonly
trodden one. Mothers preferred to work within the school environment in
order to gain knowledge of the system. They provide both home and
externally sourced tuition for their children in essential subjects such as
English and mathematics, keeping in constant contact with school about
children’s academic performances, researching schooling options and
bursaries.
“Good” and “responsible” mothering, as my participants see it, is about
limiting their investment in themselves. They expressed the opinion that
after a certain point, mothers should be investing, primarily and
committedly, in their children. These complex positions are articulated by
my participants via the neoliberal discourse of taking personal responsibility
for successfully navigating an unendingly competitive world. Rather than
pointing towards issues such as institutional racism and/or labour market
discrimination as factors limiting their opportunities, almost all of my
participants blamed their own long-standing shortcomings, which they saw
as limiting their “fit” within a highly advanced, meritocratic job market.
Many of these shortcomings were considered to be bound up with their
identity as immigrants, in possession of extremely marginal cultural
capital, transported from a country unequal to Britain in all possible ways.
Highly educated but limited in their English language skills,
knowledgeable but short of work experience, most of my participants
expressed their doubt that another academic qualification (e.g. in the form
of a postgraduate degree) would give them the skill set required by high-
salaried professions. All saw their own compromised labour market
positions as an inevitable “cost” of migration that must not be experienced
by the second generation.
Rupu, one of my participants from Manchester, was a government
bank official in Bangladesh. In Britain, she worked as a learning assistant
at a local school, partly to earn money and partly to learn the system. She
50 Chapter Three

told me that she had almost “forgotten” her life as a career woman in
Bangladesh, and wanted to be “happy” with her current job while seeing
her daughters “shine”. Mim, another mother with two children, told me
about her instinct to prioritise, according to need and time. In 2006, when
she came to Britain on a highly skilled family visa, she had one son who
started primary school in a traditionally ethnic minority concentrated area
in Leeds. As a mother, she was not fully satisfied with the school or the
locality where she could “hardly see any white person” (indicating the
area’s ethnic make-up and economic disadvantage). Gradually things
improved: Mim got a part-time job as an accountant assistant at a local
firm and her husband found a job, though not in his original field of
expertise. Life became more complicated for her and her son when the
school repeatedly assessed the son as an “underachiever” and placed his
academic progress under close observation. Mim realised that this was the
“right” time for her to concentrate completely on her son’s academic
progress. In 2008, after her younger son was born, she did not return to
work and the family moved to Hull, where her husband opened a business.
During the time I spent with Mim as my research subject, her elder son not
only progressed from being an underachiever to a top achiever in his
school, but also began preparing for the upcoming entrance examination to
compete for a place at one of Hull’s grammar schools. Mim took full
control of her children, and in doing so, felt they had regained their self-
worth.
Clearly, the relation between highly educated immigrant women and
“intensive mothering” is complex. All of the participants, who made the
decision to devote themselves primarily to their children, previously
harboured high hopes and plans for their own lives. They had aimed to
return to higher education, or more importantly, had seen themselves as
eventually having their own careers in Britain. Individually and collectively,
they shared stories of compromises, of shifting and abandoning individual
plans in the face of the reality of a lack of opportunities and choices. In
their qualitative research on highly educated and professional immigrant
women in Canada, McLaren and Dyck (2004) examine the complexity of
being a highly skilled immigrant under neoliberalism. Their participants’
initial aim was to have a professional career, according to their
qualifications and experience—the very reason why they were given
“highly skilled” visas. Yet, unable to overcome a multitude of racial
discrimination hurdles in the labour market, many of these women came to
internalise the superiority or legitimacy of middle-class “whiteness” for
their own children. These issues strongly resonate with the intersectional
demands of motherhood in my own research. New generations of
 Education and Aspiration in British-Bangladeshi Families 51

immigrant women, even from relatively poor countries like Bangladesh,

(initially) have high expectations for their careers. Unable to fulfil these
aims and doing “mother work” within a broader context of neoliberal risk
management many such women abandon their own goals in favour of
constructing their children’s “market-mediated subject identities” (Clive,
Clarke, Cloke and Malpass 2008, 3).
My participants were specific about what “kinds” of white people they
would consider as collective role models for their children. The
intersectionality of class and race is apparent, since for them “whiteness”
is most strongly associated with middle-class culture: engagement with
high culture, cultivating education, manners, and particular forms of social
etiquette. For example Mim, who expressed her initial frustration with
living in a place “with hardly any white people”, drew attention to the
contrasts between her few white neighbours (who were largely working-
class) and the white people who constituted the managerial team in her
workplace. For her, the latter were the “noble white” that represented the
type of whiteness she admired and which was shaped by her (post)colonial
imagination. Mim, along with my other participants, wanted to imitate a
particular form of classed whiteness, which she intended to be accessed by
her children via her own performance of intensive mother work within the
nuclear family unit, her and her husband’s investment in their children’s
education, and via the acquisition by her children of an appreciation for
high culture—all of which Mim and her husband saw as the key to
securing their children’s long-term social and economic advantage.

Career-Successful Immigrant Women

Career-successful immigrant women, on the other hand, took what Hay
terms as “financially expensive” strategies to fulfil the same demand.
Working full time in their professional fields, the doctors and engineers in
my research expressed their anxieties about lacking the time and energy to
look after their children directly. Whether the children went to nurseries or
primary schools, they wanted to make sure that their children were in the
safest hands. Professional mothers, usually part of a dual-career family,
stressed the necessity of their job to ensuring their children could attend
independent schools. Joba, a GP trainee in Hull, complained about the
qualitative differences of primary schools, comparing her daughter’s
schooling in various cities. In order to ensure a quality education for her,
the family decided to send their daughter to a private school. Professional
families living in metropolitan areas such as Greater London have wider
schooling options and move accommodation accordingly. Rubi, a
52 Chapter Three

professional engineer and a mother of a secondary-school-aged son, told

me that they moved to a new residential neighbourhood—far from the
couple’s workplaces—where most neighbours were “professional middle-
class”, in order to send their son to a prestigious state school.
There is a strong indication in my study that career-successful
immigrant women have a more relaxed attitude towards their children’s
future than stay-at-home immigrant mothers. Tisa, a professional engineer
and a mother of two teenage children attending state school, told me that
she just wished to see her children “happy”, doing what they loved. Her
son, she said, wanted to be a “bio-archaeologist”, adding that she had little
knowledge about how her son initially developed an interest in studying
skeletons. She appreciated the fact that she was more relaxed than parents
in Bangladesh who decide children’s life choices for them, and that in
Britain, her children would have more choice in deciding their own
futures. Similarly, Rubi told me that as a mother, she would “expect” her
son to have a good education and a good life; however, she would let her
son decide what he wanted to be in his professional life.
This liberal attitude towards their children’s futures does not mean that
these professional mothers do not have to follow the basic rules of “good
mothering”. They still believe that they need to be available to their
children and that parenting is a much more serious business than the mere
“looking after” of children’s basic needs. In common with women in
Britain and elsewhere who have a full-time career, these women made
certain compromises with their jobs in order to have extra time available
for their children. Doctors preferred to work in general practice rather than
in hospital-based jobs, and planned to work part time in order to spend
more time at home. Bina, another professional engineer with a toddler,
told me that at the end of the day, children needed their mother. While she
was frustrated when made redundant, this turn of events made it possible
for her, for the first time, to take her daughter to nursery. In future, she did
not want to return to her “male-centric” engineering job, as she preferred
to run a stay-at-home business in order to create a better balance between
her working and mothering roles.
The practice of intensive mothering or the ability to fulfil the ambitious
neoliberal demands of individual success is conditional on a combination
of culture, capital and education. Not all educated immigrant families are
in positions to invest highly in their children. In my research, there were
mothers who, despite having knowledge of what makes a child
“extraordinary” in Britain, could not execute their mother work
accordingly. These women had several kinds of interrelated limitations.
Often, they had arrived with teenage children who missed out on a British
 Education and Aspiration in British-Bangladeshi Families 53

early foundation year education. Sita and Ratna both came to Britain on
family visas. Their children went to local schools in Leeds in areas with
large Bangladeshi communities. Sita’s eldest daughter and Ratna’s eldest
son were aiming to attend the “new” local universities, relying on student
loans to pay their fees. These women had direct social connections with
more “competent” mothers. In their eyes, women like Asma or Mim were
“extraordinary” and their children were the pride of the community.
Like other institutional ideologies, the practicality of “good” or
“intensive” mother is a site of a constant battle involving aiming for
acceptance, struggle and resistance. Almost all studies related to the
performativity of contemporary motherhood explicate the fact that, despite
awareness of societal expectations of the meanings of “good mothering”,
mothers may resist its hegemonic claims. In Britain, in particular, white
working-class mothers may resist culturally transmitted and mediated
assumptions about their “bad” or “failing” mothering by taking a “pride”
in their working-class heritage (Skeggs 1997, Baker 2009, Ramagnoli and
Wall 2012). It is difficult to determine the extent to which immigrant
women may similarly resist such hegemonic assumptions. Bangladeshi
mothers in Britain, for example, have long been associated with “failing
mothers”, unable to act beyond their Sylheti-Bangladeshi rural origins and
hampering the assimilative capacities of their children in Britain. Many
studies have established Sylheti-Bangladeshi mothers’ sense of guilt,
mixed with shame, because of their failure to act according to the demands
of their children’s schools (Crozier and Davis 2006, 2007). There is a
sense of precariousness in my participants’ narratives, arising from the
fear that they could easily “slip” into the generalised and stereotypical
image of “bad” or “failing” immigrant mothers, incapable of negotiating
the UK educational system. My participants maintained their social and
discursive distance from the traditional Sylheti-Bangladeshi mothers and
from the white working-class mothers who are routinely “shamed” and
scapegoated in the British national imaginary as inadequate mothers.
Therefore, a desire to be “useful” by supporting their children’s
advancement is perhaps of the strongest significance for my participants
and explains their strategic sacrifices. Reay (2004) applies the term
“emotional capital” to address the competencies that her participants
generated and executed in a context of competition. Women need to
manage the emotional burdens of the family, leading Reay to discuss the
emotional labour that women as mothers need to perform for their children
and the emotional cost such labour exacts. My participants saw themselves
as liberal, friendly and fun-loving in contrast to their own mother’s
parenting style. Equating “good” mothering with being engaged with one’s
54 Chapter Three

children, my participants spent a lot more time and effort with their
children than their own mothers had expended upon them. In most cases,
their emotional fulfilment was bound up in a sense of their children’s and
their own collective achievement. Lily, a mother from Somerset, told me
how her education made her “useful” to her secondary-school-aged
daughter: “Many children at secondary level take private tuition because
they have to deal with Advanced Level chemistry and physics. And I often
ask my daughter if she wants to go. But she does not want to go anywhere;
she is comfortable with the way I teach her. Since I am educated, therefore
I can help her with her homework”.
It is very common for mothers, in particular immigrant mothers, to feel
themselves lacking in skills and confidence as their children move out of
primary education. My participants could take pride in their ability to be
educationally focused mothers in a different system to that in which they
had grown up. Their direct involvement with their children and the
emotions this generates has what Skeggs (2004, 2005) calls local or “use”
value. Use value does not always possess pre-defined symbolic or
economic value as cultures and commodities with exchange value. Use
value is made meaningful through an ability or cultural sense that may be
largely unknown to the wider world, but is central to one’s subjectivity.
Subjectivity is crucial under neoliberalism. One can only claim to be a
citizen under neoliberal governmentality by demonstrating individual
subjecthood. Paul Verhenghe (2014) argues that we live in a time and a
space in which neoliberal market economies have taken control of our
belonging and relations, arguing: “the neoliberal organisation of our
society is determining how we relate to our bodies, our partners, our
colleagues, and our children—in short, to our identities” (2014, 4).
This struggle for a legitimate identity shaped my participants’
discourses about themselves. None of them wanted to portray themselves
as immigrant adults with little entitlement. Rather, all stressed their
“choice” to prioritise their children over themselves. Since the 2008
economic crash and recession, welfare and social security erosions have
altered the imaginations of those immigrants living in—and those aspiring
to move to —advanced countries. Politicians and the media openly warn
immigrants without educational achievements (that must be held by a
person to signify they are “bright”, “brilliant” and “hard-working”) that
there is no place for them in Britain. A recurrent theme in my participants’
narratives is the thin line between the “private” and the “political”
meaning of motherhood, a line that has been blurred, since mother work
for these women was the strongest of the opportunities to prove
themselves (and their families) as “good” and necessary immigrants,
 Education and Aspiration in British-Bangladeshi Families 55

capable of producing valuable, future neoliberal citizens for the host

country.
Motherhood, intensive mothering, or mother work as I have termed it,
is a strategic performance for highly educated immigrant mothers to be
seen as legitimate in British society. My participant Mim pointed towards
the intersectionality of the personal and political through her act of “good
mothering”: “I believe that children are like plants. If you look after them
well, they will grow up as big trees with green leaves and fruits. I want to
help my children grow up in a way so that even if they make any mistake
as adults, nobody [emphasis added] can blame me that as their mother I
did not do my best”.
Mim’s “nobody” refers to any individual or institution—including
family and community members, and many un/anticipated “others”—who
are in a position to pass down judgements about an immigrant woman’s
maternal capabilities. By doing their best as adults taking responsibility for
their children, my participants shared a common vocabulary of intensive
parenting. This discourse underlies a new form of parental sacrifice where
“good” parents or mothers should not expect to control children’s life, yet
should do their best for their children. In making their children’s neoliberal
identity, my participants, like many mothers in neoliberal societies, wished
to be recognised as useful and legitimate citizens in the society in which
they live.

Conclusion
Reflecting back on the rapid changes that shaped post-1980s Western as
well as non-Western global spaces, feminist critical theorist Lauren
Berlant (2011) calls the contemporary world a place of “cruel optimism”.
She argues that in this “stretched-out” (post)modern time, crisis is no
longer a random unexpected event; rather, it is very much part of our lived
experiences and an affective aspect of our earnest desires. Her critical
redefinition of what it means to have a “good life” or “life with hope”
within neoliberal temporality sheds light on the vulnerabilities of our
relationship with what we value. In this new world order, persistence and
strategic investment in one’s career, family or children is no longer a
guarantee of future stability or success. Yet, these classic goals still
dominate our collective desire. An absence of certainty crystallises the
return of a culture of intensive care by mothers in families trying to
anticipate the long-term consequences of their investments in their futures.
My participants, as strategic mothers of this paradoxical era, made
compromises that transcended their cultural borders. Educated immigrant
56 Chapter Three

mothers’ strategic and ambitious involvement with their children is neither

an individual nor a familial “choice”. Rather, it is their strategic
investment to be recognised as active, competent, and useful citizens under
neoliberalism, doing what is necessary to keep themselves and their
families ahead of the game within this ever-changing landscape.

References
Babu, S. J. 2006. “Work in Schooling Children: Perspectives from
Immigrant Asian-Indian Mothers.” Unpublished PhD diss., Pennsylvania
State University.
Baker, J. 2009. “Young Mothers in Late Modernity: Sacrifice, Respectability
and the Transformative Neoliberal Subject.” Journal Of Youth Studies
12(3): 275–288.
Berkeley, R., Khan, O. and Ambikaipaker, M. 2006. What’s New About
New Immigrants in Twenty-First Century Britain? York: Joseph
Rowntree Foundation.
Berlant, L. 2006. “Cruel Optimism.” Differences 17(3): 20–36.
Bourdieu, P. 1973. “Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction” in
Knowledge, Education, and Cultural Change, ed. Brown, R., 1–112.
London: Tavistock.
—. 1986. “The Forms of Capital” in Handbook of Theory and Research
for the Sociology of Education, ed. Richardson, J.G., 241–258. New
York: Greenwood.
Bourdieu, P. and Passeron, J-C. [1977]1990. Reproduction in Education,
Society and Culture (2nd ed.), trans. Nice, R. London: Sage.
Bourdieu, P. and Wacquant, L. 2001. “Newspeak: Notes on the New
Planetary Vulgate.” Radical Philosophy January/February: 1–5.
Retrieved from:
http://loicwacquant.net/assets/Papers/NEOLIBERALNEWSPEAK.pdf.
Chee, M. W.L. 2003. “Migrating for the Children: Taiwanese American
Women in Transnational Families” in Wife or Worker? Asian Women
and Migration, eds. Piper, N., and Roces, M., 137–157. Lanham:
Rowman and Littlefield.
Cornwall, A., Gideon, J. and Wilson, K. 2008. “Introduction: Reclaiming
Feminism: Gender and Neoliberalism.” IDS Bulletin 39(6): 1–9.
Crees, G., Dyck, I. and McLaren, A. T. 2011. “The Problem of ‘Human
Capital’: Gender, Place and Immigrant Household Strategies of Re-
skilling in Vancouver, Canada” in Gender, Generations and the
Families in International Migration, eds. Kraler, A., Kofman, E.,
 Education and Aspiration in British-Bangladeshi Families 57

Kohli, M., and Schmoll, C., 141–162. Amsterdam: Amsterdam

University Press.
Crozier, G. and Davies, J. 2007. “Hard to Reach Parents or Hard to Reach
Schools? A Discussion of Home-School Relations, with Particular
Reference to Bangladeshi and Pakistani Parents.” British Educational
Research Journal 33(3): 295–313.
Crozier, G. and Davies, J. 2006. “Family Matters: A Discussion of the
Bangladeshi and Pakistani Extended Family and Community in
Supporting the Children’s Education.” The Sociological Review 54(4):
674–695.
David, M. E. 1993. “Theories of Family Change, Motherhood and
Education” in Feminism and Social Justice in Education, eds. Arnot,
M., and Weiler, K., 9–30. London: Routledge Falmer.
David, M. E., Noden, P. and Edge, A. 1998. “Parental Involvement in
Education In and Out of School.” British Educational Research
Journal 24(4): 461–484.
Fraser, N. 2013. “How Feminism became Capitalism’s Handmaiden—and
how to reclaim it.” The Guardian, October 14.
Gardner, K. 2002. Age, Narrative and Migration: The Life Course and
Life Histories of Bengali Elders in London. Oxford: Berg.
Harvey, D. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: OUP.
Hays, S. 1996. The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. New Haven:
Yale University Press.
Hughes, C. 2002. Women’s Contemporary Lives: Within and Beyond the
Mirror. London: Routledge.
Kabeer, N. 2000. The Power to Choose: Bangladeshi Women and Labour
Market Decisions in London and Dhaka. London: Verso
Lovell, T. 2004. “Bourdieu, Class and Gender: ‘The Return of the Living
Dead?’” in Feminism After Bourdieu, eds. Adkins, L. and Skeggs, B.,
37–57. Oxford: Blackwell.
Mahbub, R. 2014. “Education As Capital: Educated Bangladeshi
Immigrant Women in 21st Century Britain.” Unpublished PhD diss.,
University of York.
McLaren, A. T and Dyck, I. 2004. “Mothering, Human Capital, and the
‘Ideal Immigrant’.” Women’s Studies International Forum 27(1): 41–
53.
McRobbie, A. 2004. “Notes on ‘What Not to Wear’ and Postfeminist
Symbolic Violence” in Feminism After Bourdieu, eds. Adkins, L. and
Skeggs, B., 100–109. Oxford: Blackwell.
—. 2015. “Notes on the Perfect: Competitive Femininity in Neoliberal
Time.” Australian Feminist Studies 30(83): 3–20.
58 Chapter Three

Mitchell, K. 2003. “Educating the National Citizen in Neoliberal Times:

From the Multicultural Self to the Strategic Cosmopolitan.”
Transactions 28(4): 387–403.
Molyneux, M. 2007. Change and Continuity in Social Protection in Latin
America: Mothers at the Service of the State? (Gender and Development
Programme Paper). Retrieved from:
http://www.unrisd.org/80256B3C005BCCF9/(httpAuxPages)/BF80E0
A84BE41896C12573240033C541/$file/Molyneux-paper.pdf.
Ramagnoli, A. and Wall, G. 2012. “‘I know I’m a Good Mom’: Young,
Low-income Mothers’ Experiences with Risk Perception, Intensive-
Parenting Ideology and Parenting Education Programmes.” Health,
Risk and Society 14(3): 273–289.
Reay, D. 2008. “Tony Blair, The Promotion of the ‘Active’ Educational
Citizen, and MiddleǦClass Hegemony.” Oxford Review of Education
34(6): 639–650.
—. 2004. “Gendering Bourdieu’s Concept of Capitals? Emotional Capital,
Women and Social Class.” The Editorial Board of the Sociological
Review 52(2): 57–74.
—. 1998. Class Work: Mothers’ Involvement in their Children’s Primary
Schooling. London: University College Press.
Rustin, M. 2010. “From the Beginning to the End of Neo-Liberalism in
Britain.” Open Democracy website, May 19. Retrieved from:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/mike-rustin/after-neo-
liberalism-in-britain.
Skeggs, B. 2005. “The Making of Class and Gender through Visualizing
Moral Subject Formation.” Sociology 39(5): 965–982.
—. 2004. Class, Self, Culture. London: Routledge.
—. 1997. Formations of Class and Gender. London: Sage.
Smith, D. and Griffith, A. 2005. Mothering for Schooling. New York:
Routledge
Verhenghe, P. 2014. What About Me? The Struggle for Identity in a
Market-Based Society, trans. Hedly-Prole, J. Victoria: Scribe
Walters, J.L. 2005. “Transnational Family Strategies and Education in the
Contemporary Chinese Diaspora.” Global Networks 5(4): 359–377.
—. 2006. “Geographies of Cultural Capital: Education, International
Migration and Family Strategies between Hong Kong and Canada.”
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 31(2): 179–192.
Yeo, B. and Willes, K. 2005. “Singaporean and British Transmigrants in
China and the Politics of ‘Cultural Zones.’” Journal of Ethnic and
Migration Studies 31(2): 269–285.
 CHAPTER FOUR

DUTIFUL SONS AND DEBT:

THE CASE OF CHINESE “MONEY BOYS”

CHIA-HUNG BENNY LU

In neoliberal globalization, enterprising selves are not just buying and

selling commodities in a marketplace, they are also put into a more direct
relationship with the commodity value of their labor power within a global
market. However, this value can vanish overnight as once-reliable jobs
migrate elsewhere or, as in the case of China, the ready availability of
migrant populations of rural workers becomes the means of displacing
state sector workers. Workers are abundantly clear as to where their jobs
have migrated (Ann Anagnost 2013, 14).

One explanation for the radical transformations in China over the last
two decades is that the country embraced neoliberalism and a market
economy after the social disorder of the Cultural Revolution and Maoism
(Harvey 2006). Deng Xiaoping, Chairman of the Communist Party of
China (1981–1987), gradually initiated a “retrograde” path towards
engagement with global capitalism, following a long decade of Maoist
dominance. Perry Anderson states that China’s domestic migration has
been the most dramatic in contemporary world history (Perry 2010).
Moreover, such migration reveals how Chinese society is shifting from a
rural-based, state-owned industrial economy towards a more urban-based,
private-ownership economic model (Pun 2006, Solinger 2009).
Contemporary China has, furthermore, become “the workshop of the
world and the leading growth engine of the global economy” (Lee 2007),
creating a new domestic consumer market amongst Chinese workers.
Rural-to-urban migrants, in particular, are now providing the labour
demanded by urban consumption, and in the new Chinese economy, work
is undertaken in factories, restaurants, hotels and in the sex industry
(Gaetano and Jacka 2004, Zheng 2009). As David Harvey (2006) explains,
China’s “selective” choice of neoliberal logic can be understood as its
60 Chapter Four

own, particular response to global capitalism. It is open to global capital

investment and the freedoms of the market, however it refuses to scale
back state control and authority, or to extend freedoms to its citizens.
Because of these recent Chinese socio-economic transformations there
is increasing researcher interest in the “Money Boys”—the male-for-male
escorts who constitute a branch of the sex work industry in Mainland
China (Rofel 2007, Kong 2011, 2012). Recent urban ethnographies have
studied Money Boys’ journeys in order to explore these sex workers’
experiences of rural-to-urban migration and the new Chinese economy.
Such research asks critical questions of how and why Money Boys from
agrarian families decide to relocate from farms to work in cities, leaving
exceptionally low-paid and arduous rural working conditions in order to
earn a “bowl of youth”—that is, to earn as much as they can while they are
still young (Kong 2012, 384). In my view, theorising Money Boys’
migrant experiences can help us critically review neoliberalism.
In their research, Travis Kong (2012) and Lisa Rofel (2008) use
Foucault to capture the Money Boys’ practice of neoliberal values such as
individualism and entrepreneurism, values that are crucial to surviving a
highly competitive urban life in contemporary China. Kong (2012), in
addition, argues that processes of “self-making”, “self-developing” and
“self-enterprising” are key aspects of how Money Boys create their
selfhood. Kong, whose work constitutes a substantial addition to the
existing literature, tracks the emergence of new neoliberal Chinese citizens
from a largely Maoist past. Anthropologist Arthur Kleinman (2011),
discussing the moral economy of contemporary China and Taiwan,
stresses that new Chinese citizens seek a “quality life”, which global
capitalism promises and the nation state promotes. For Kleinman and other
Foucauldian theorists, these are self-making practices through which
citizen learns to be a “responsible self”—taking care of, or investing, in
her or himself (Ong 1999, Rofel 2008, Hoffman 2010). The concept of
“technologies of the self” is useful for exploring how Money Boys express
a sense of maturity and success in the contemporary Chinese neoliberal
context. As a marginal migrant group in China, Money Boys are
considered substantial players in the neoliberal game, as Kong (2012)
argues: “Money Boys fully endorse economic liberalism and market
individualization, and perhaps embrace neoliberal ‘ways of doing things’
in their entrepreneurial projects for success […] If state governance is both
neoliberal and authoritarian, the outcome is not a unified enterprising self,
but differential subject positions, one of which involves a new ethics of
economic enterprise and political docility” (Kong 2012, 293).
 Dutiful Sons and Debt: The Case of Chinese “Money Boys” 61

My concern in this chapter is to complicate the “unified self” addressed

by Kong, paying particular attention to the case of Money Boys. Although
the concept of the neoliberal self is often used to describe both marginal
and/or urban middle-class Chinese citizens, I propose that such a sense of
self is not universal. In fact, there are different selves, each carrying
different capital—which can be material or symbolic—and demonstrating
different ideas and different experiences (Skeggs 2004, Jensen 2010).
More critically, under neoliberal politics resources are always unequally
allocated, across lines of class, gender, race and sexuality. Overall, I
suggest a more critical lens can be used, to examine what kind of self is
favoured and what kind of self is at risk of exclusion. To expand my
argument, I critically inspect ‘self’ through case studies of Money Boys,
and in particular I explore how family values, which require investigation,
are a key dimension to the construction of the Money Boy’s self. I argue
that the ways in which Money Boys construct a filial self in today’s China
illuminate the intricacies, challenges and contradictions within their self-
making.
There are two reasons for the consideration of family values in the
examination of Money Boys. First, in my empirical research in Shanghai,
my research subjects often told me about their great respect for their
family, as well as the ways in which they express their filial piety, which
they regarded as an obligatory duty. They interpreted filial piety and its
practice in distinctive ways. Such distinctive practices mean that Money
Boys’ selves cannot be generalised. Second, filial piety, blended with
traditional Confucian ethics, is a crucial aspect of Chinese personhood in
Chinese-speaking societies, i.e. the so-called “Sinophone communities”,
which include Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and other
diasporic Chinese communities (Shih 2007). The Chinese “self” is
legitimated by his or her success in performing filial piety. As Rey Chow
(2007) explains: “filial piety is not simply a matter of respecting one’s
biological or cultural elders but also an age-old moral apparatus for
interpellating individuals into the hierarchy-conscious conduct of
identifying with and submitting to whatever preexists them–from the
ancestral family to the ancestral land, the province, the country, and the
ethnic community in a foreign nation–as authoritative, and thus, beyond
challenge” (Chow 2007, 11).
Recent studies on Chinese families have also suggested that due to the
emergence of neoliberal market logic, the ethics of filial piety are being
challenged and have become more intricate (Ong 1999, Kong 2011). Filial
piety, as a key value facilitating Chinese morality and selfhood, requires
re-evaluation through the lens of critical economics. Individualism, or
62 Chapter Four

“self-making”, along with China’s application of neoliberal values, is

challenging older visions of authority and filial loyalty alike (Yan 2003).
In my case study, Money Boys will be seen to be negotiating an ethical
gap between traditionalism and neoliberalism. My study highlights the
intensity and intricacy of the Money Boys’ performances of filial piety in a
context of daily struggle in Shanghai.
This chapter is separated into two parts. First, I demonstrate how the
family becomes the most important cultural resource and source of value
in Chinese-speaking societies and how it has shifted to become more
“economic” under neoliberalism. Second, I present the cases of three
Money Boys (who agreed to be my research subjects) and discuss the
complex relationship between filial piety and neoliberalism, including how
my three subjects understand filial loyalty and how they use it to reflect
upon their respective lives and their social exclusion in urban Shanghai. I
will conclude this chapter by rethinking the dynamics of exchange within
the Chinese family and by suggesting a more sensitive analysis of these
marginalised experiences.

Filial Piety in Chinese Culture

This section introduces the traditional socio-cultural conceptualisation
of filial piety in Chinese culture and the degree to which it determines
Chinese selfhood through an ethos of intergenerational reciprocity. There
has been a shift in family values since China’s drastic economic
reformation since the 1980s. Recently, young people have begun to see
their lives and careers in more independent terms, with relations between
themselves and their parents being mutually respectful rather than based
on reciprocity, or filial obedience. Firstly, I will briefly discuss the
traditional Chinese idea of filial piety.
The Mandarin word Xiao (Ꮥ) is composed from two characters, lao (
⪁; old) and zi (Ꮚ; son). Xiao refers to the expectation that sons will have
to provide for their parents whenever possible (Ikels 2004). Traditionally,
the children’s “debt” to their parents was regarded as a “natural”
inheritance, because the Chinese cultural view is that the parents gave life
to the children and thus, unavoidably, children owe this great debt to their
parents until the parents die (Chan and Tan 2012). To some extent,
children in this web of kinship are considered to be the (symbolic)
property of the parents. In the text The Classic of Family Reverence
(Xiaojin B.C. 221), Confucius (551–579 BC) explains that the basic rule of
being filial is to “take care of your body”, declaring: “your physical person
with its hair and skin are received from your parents. Vigilance in not
 Dutiful Sons and Debt: The Case of Chinese “Money Boys” 63

allowing anything to do injury to your person is where family reverence

begins; distinguishing yourself and walking in the proper way (dao) in the
world; raising your name high for posterity and thereby bringing esteem to
your father and mother—it is in these things that family reverence finds its
consummation” (Rosemont and Ames 2009, 105). One can see the
emphasis on the blood connection between the generations and how this
constitutes the backbone of the Chinese kinship system. Yet the blood
connection to family is also culturally written. Chris Berry (2011) argues
that the blood relation to family is the key to capturing the meaning of
being a Chinese subject. Filial piety is the key value that dictates whether a
given individual qualifies as a good person. Confucius warned his fellow
Chinese that even animals know to give back to their parents, so a human
being should similarly value filial piety (Ikels 2004, 4).
Extending the sociological analysis of filial piety, Fei Xiaotong (1992),
in his now classic study of Chinese families, examined how the traditional
Han Chinese family is characterised by relationships between senior and
junior family members, specifically, fathers and sons. Trained by the
anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in England in the early 1900s, Fei
shows how the structure of the Chinese kinship system is quite distinct
from Western systems. In Fei’s account, Anglo-American kinship
generally works through the deployment of romantic love or sex, leading
to marriage, whereas the Chinese kinship system is based on a vertical
relationship between parent and child. For Fei, all Chinese family
members’ efforts are guided towards facilitating this relationship, and
honouring it by the practice of Xiao. Fei contends that the Chinese kinship
system works as a “relay” of reciprocity for each generation. An adult,
married man has to take care of both his children and his parents until
either his children get married or his parents pass away. Elisabeth Croll
(2006) explains why traditional filial values continue to be practiced by
Chinese people, using a contemporary example:

Regardless of the different levels of familial wealth, spending on children

in both poor and rich families is frequently rationalised as both an
expression of affection and sign of devotion and a strategic nurturing of
gratitude and interest […] One professional urban mother sets out to
purchase a piano not only in order that her five-year-old daughter might
learn to play but also to show her that they were saving money in order to
please her and that her gratitude and debt to her parents should be repaid in
late life (Croll 2006, 35).

Kwang-Kuo Hwang (2006) additionally claims that in Chinese society

being a successful or respectable “self” is not about having individuality or
64 Chapter Four

a strong personality, but rather is about the capacity to manage one’s

relationships, both domestic and social. One’s “face” (Mien Zi), that is,
one’s reputation, is inextricably linked to the family’s honour. For Hwang,
“face” symbolically “stores” one’s selfhood and the reputation of one’s
family, so to “lose face” refers to bringing shame upon oneself and the
family. The 2004 film Saving Face, directed by the American-Chinese
Alice Wu, vividly depicts the tensions between a migrant Chinese mother
and her American-born lesbian daughter, capturing the “face politics” of
Chinese culture. In this autobiographical film, the single mother’s choice
to date a younger boyfriend, and her daughter’s sexual orientation, result
in the risk that the characters will “lose face” in front of relatives and the
community, with the implied risk that they will additionally lose their
reputation and respectability. A similar narrative can be seen in the global
bestselling book, Battle Hymn of The Tiger Mother (2011) in which the
author Amy L. Chua, a Chinese-American law professor, iterates the
importance of “saving face”. For Chua, this finds expression in her aims
for her daughters to succeed in every aspect of their lives; aims she
believes can be achieved through strict training and education. These ideas
were passed down to Chua from her Chinese parents.
By considering the intimate nature of the bond between the individual
and their family in Chinese societies, I want to complicate ideas of
Chinese intergenerational relationships in critical ways, in particular
through consideration of the recent economic transformation in China.
Through the conceptualisation of “debt”, I seek to explore how filial piety
in Chinese families can be interpreted as an economic mode of exchange.
Since the contemporary Chinese self is caught between the demands of
neoliberal individualism and those of familial traditionalism, I will discuss
how the filial self has been transformed under neoliberalism, and how
neoliberal values in turn reshape filial selfhood. In particular, I examine
how Money Boys’ exchange material and symbolic capital, and in doing
so, become legitimated by their families. The Money Boys’ experiences
highlight a complex embodiment of the gendered and classed politics of
contemporary China.

Moral Economy in Chinese Families

Hence, the chaining subjectivity of Chinese, with a deepening of the sense
of self and an emphasis on the individual and his or her quality, especially
in the context of a rising middle class, can be understood not just as a
remaking of the moral world, but perhaps also a new political reality—a
reality that encourages the development of individuals and that itself
 Dutiful Sons and Debt: The Case of Chinese “Money Boys” 65

involves the reshaping of governance by this new emphasis on individuals

(Kleinman 2011, 30).

Shih Ji-ching, the pioneering Taiwanese feminist activist, has written

of her experiences growing up in a deprived family. Her mother mentally
collapsed after her military officer husband was caught and detained in
Mainland China during the civil war of the 1950s. Moving in and out of an
orphanage, Shih (1993) sees that family values in sinophone societies in
fact allow the state to avoid its responsibility for social welfare and the
poor. Shih claims that the poor have little opportunity to recognise the
value of filial piety when the state shrewdly deploys such piety as a
surrogate for social welfare benefits. Shih (1993) states:

Chinese societies do not have a real social welfare system, but we have
filial piety. Actually, filial piety is the Chinese version of social welfare. In
a country that offers fewer social welfare benefits to its citizens or the
poor, family is therefore a place that bears overloaded obligations. If a
Chinese family happens to have a long-term ill patient, handicapped or
mentally ill child—the whole family will be in the state of Ji Fei Gou Tiao!
[“Chickens Fly and Dogs Jump” a Chinese idiom that refers to a chaotic
situation]—No one can escape from this suffering and none can make a
peaceful life. Therefore, to let our state to waft the value of marriage or
romantic love to the deprived is really ridiculous (Shih 1993, 193).

Shih’s feminist criticism shows how filial piety is not merely etched
onto traditionalism, but is also exchanged in a circuit of state and capital.
Filial piety is exploited by the capitalist state as a core national value: that
is, it creates an obligation for a citizen, one that replaces welfare
investment. Indeed, much recent ethnographic study in contemporary
China has started to analyse the material politics of Chinese families,
examining how family values, and their moral and material aspects,
facilitate such domestic economic movements.
For example, looking into the education system in northeastern China,
Carolyn Hsu (2007) investigates how parents invest in their children’s
future success via higher education, preferably one obtained in the United
States. For Hsu’s informants, to get a degree at Harvard University is to
become, in the eyes of their parents, a high suzhi (high-quality) person.
More importantly here is the aim to cultivate children’s gratitude towards
their parents, who invest considerably in their children’s futures. Yan’s
(2003) research in northern China explores the reciprocal strategy at work
behind Chinese parental offerings of gifts and money when their children
marry. In his analysis, the more wedding gifts the parents give, the more
support and assistance in their old age the parents can expect from the
66 Chapter Four

bride and groom. In Yan’s (2003) account, money and gifts at the wedding
mediate the relationship between the senior family members and the
younger couples.
In a similar fashion, Susan Greenhalgh’s (1988) research into
Taiwanese society concludes parents insist on deciding their daughter’s
jobs, education and marriage in order to ensure she can look after the
family’s future material needs. Research into post-socialist China has
shown how daughters from rural areas decide to work in cities not in order
to seek a better life for themselves, but to make money to support their
parents and wider family. These social practices of filial piety are key to
the migrant worker’s personhood, as migrants understand such loyalty as
the definition of being “a good migrant worker in the city” (Jacka 1997,
Lee 1998, Murphy 2002, Yan 2009). Further, Yan (2009) explores how
individuals in younger generations yearn for an independent self,
independent of parental authority, both physical and financial. Yet, Yan
notes how some young Chinese have become money-worshippers,
irresponsible and unwilling to care for their parents, even when the parents
fall ill.
Focusing on gender in her analysis of intergenerational reciprocity,
Harriet Evans (2009) explores the identity roles of contemporary mothers
and daughters in China and uses the game of Go Tong (㹅忂) to analyse
the importance of mutual communication and how the concept of filial
piety is expressed within well-educated, professional middle-class
families. Evans (2009) argues that Chinese daughters are expected to be
the willing-to-listen, considerate female self, while mothers are
encouraged to be the one who is caring and listening. In short, Evans
shows us that “communicative intimacy” within the Chinese middle-class
family is different to the modes of communication seen in rural families,
with the latter stressing material reciprocity while the former stresses
emotional communication. Travis Kong (2011) critiques filial obligations
in the context of gay identities in Hong Kong and argues that filial piety is
a form of violence that demands “reproduction obligations”—i.e. moral
obligations—which compel sons and daughters into (heterosexual) marriage.
Kong (2011) argues that the real problem Chinese families have with
the idea of gay sons is not about their sexual orientation or sexual
activities, but rather, about how gay identity is perceived as interfering
with one’s willingness to perform traditional kinship roles, and how
homosexuality is therefore considered to be “non-filial” (Bu Xiao) within
society. Chris Berry (2011) contends that serious confrontations in Chinese
families seem to occur not so much over homosexuality as over offspring
who are not willing or able to play traditional family roles. That said, for
 Dutiful Sons and Debt: The Case of Chinese “Money Boys” 67

Kong as well as Berry, filial violence and the oppression of homosexual

family members is not simply about a moral pressure to exercise
heterosexual familial values, it is also about parental fears around their
economic security. Aihwa Ong’s (1999) ethnography of Chinese
entrepreneurship illustrates the ways in which Chinese families living in
California focus on the well-being and health of their children as the
foundation of family life. Parents are seen as taking pains to cultivate and
practice this ethical form of parenting, which they consider essential to the
family’s “economic well-being”. Ong (ibid.) considers this a form of
“Chinese family biopolitics” and views filial piety as lubricating the
relationship between individuals and the family unit.i In this vein, Kong
reads Ong’s account of Chinese family biopolitics as having the potential
to reveal how Chinese homosexuals are disciplined by the economic
demands of their families. In Kong’s (2011) account, most Chinese gay
men and lesbian women understand that to leave the family means putting
their own, as well as the family’s, economic security or future at risk,
because in Chinese societies, income, networks and career are so closely
connected to family interests.
In a more critical fashion, in her exploration of the neoliberal practices
of overseas Chinese families, Erin Khue Ninh (2011) claims that migrant
Chinese families in North American society are trapped in a neoliberal
migrant “game”. Ninh argues that for migrant families struggling for
security in neoliberal societies such as those of North America and
Canada, children are usually considered a “necessary investment”. As
such, they become critical “economic subjects” under their parent’s
disciplinarian authority, “to the extent that migrating to positions of global
advantage is about the hope for upward mobility, it is about the hope of
profiting in the Western capitalist economy. And I do mean profit, because
this project considers the Asian immigrant family a production unit—a sort
of cottage industry, for a particular brand of good, capitalist subject: ‘get
your filial child, your doctor/lawyer, your model minority here’” (Ninh,
2011, 2).
Through a detailed analysis of Chinese female writers’ autobiographies,
Ninh employs this economic framework to see the ways in which
entanglements between family and global capitalism have produced
“docile” daughters who painfully struggle between the demands of the
family and wider social fields, and notes how the emotional cost to these
daughters is seemingly “endless”—like the incessant “debt” that Chinese
children are expected to shoulder: “inside the layers of this discourse, the
parent may at once embody the vastness of ancestral munificence and act
as collector of a material debt come due. What we commonly know as
68 Chapter Four

“filial obligation,” then, hews in its deep logic to the metaphor of debt
bondage, along with the power-to-subject relation that such peonage
implies [...] It is this splicing of debt to family that brings altruism and
accounting, martyrdom and profit, into collaboration” (Ninh 2011, 32).
Following Ninh’s account of the “debt-ridden” daughters in overseas
Chinese families, I wish to restate the need to rethink the “economic”
within the domestic sphere. While the global economy obliges the
overseas family to position itself within a profit chain, the family plays the
“debt game” to ensure that the children stay in the right place—the place
in which profits can be generated. A debt-bound child is driven to “pay
back” to the family in order to secure the family a place of safety within
the global market—no matter what this costs the child. As the scholars
cited above have noted, there is an intimate, if uneasy, relationship
between contemporary Chinese selfhood and the neoliberal family unit.
This relationship is not universal or self-evident; rather, it derives from
changing economies and politics. We must therefore rethink how families
are altering their positions and strategies in their bids to negotiate with
global capitalism. Through analysis of familial economic instabilities and
intensities, we can begin to understand how a variety of individuals are
performing as “filial selves” and to reflect on the distinctiveness of
neoliberal family values. I now turn to a discussion of Money Boys, as a
case study that illuminates these intricate filial practices, as well as class
struggles in Shanghai and the significance of sexual and migrant bodily
experiences within a context of filial piety.

Money Boys and Family

Ling’s Gold Necklaces and Rings
It was early summer in Shanghai city when I went to Ling’s place, which
is located in Hongko ( 嘡 ⎋ ), a district of Shanghai still full of old
buildings and traditional markets, rather than skyscrapers and luxurious
boutiques. We began our conversation about family issues by discussing a
quarrel Ling had recently. It began when the enraged wife of one of Ling’s
clients visited Ling, furious that her husband had cheated on her. Ling told
me in an incensed tone that the angry wife had almost used physical
violence towards him, in addition to her violent language. Ling told me he
had responded with verbal aggression of his own: “Did I force your
husband to mess around with me? Was it my fault? Go look in the mirror,
if you are pretty enough to let your husband cheat on you, how dare you
come here to blame me?”
 Dutiful Sons and Debt: The Case of Chinese “Money Boys” 69

Ling was visibly angry during his account of this drama, which had
taken place the previous week. However when we started to talk about his
family, Ling’s anger curbed and he told me about the ways in which he
takes care of them. Although he came to Shanghai with nothing, a son
from a poor family in a northeastern village desperate to leave the
agricultural labour he seemed destined for, Ling made a leap towards the
“rich South” and started a new life in the city. In Shanghai Ling met a
man, also from a rural town, who became his boyfriend and then, after a
period of unstable, on-and-off dagong (part-time work) in the city, they
both decided to become Money Boys. Ling has to spend a lot of his
earnings on his parents. Alongside sending money back home, he also very
proudly told me how generously he treated his mother when she came to
Shanghai for the first time. As Ling told me: “I remember when my mom
came to Shanghai, I brought her to Nangjing Xi Road [a landmark,
prosperous district in downtown Shanghai], I bought her clothes, gold
rings and gold necklaces…[I] tell you, I spent thousands (RMB), almost
my life savings”.
Ling proudly continued: “My mother has never been to Shanghai, she
never left our town, but she was so happy. I think I really gave her a lot, as
much as I could”. Ling contended that the “donation” he made towards his
mother is not simply a sacrifice—it is “something that has to be done!”.
This claim of Ling’s is actually quite complex, relating to his filial piety
but also to his personhood. For Ling, to give money to his mother is, on
the one hand, a way to sooth the anguish that he has to deal with as a
consequence of working on the streets as an escort, which includes drama
with unpleasant clients, or their angry wives. On the other hand, it is also a
way to give material support to his family and Ling can thus proudly claim
that he does more than some other people who don’t help their families
enough.
A Money Boy’s filial performance therefore is not merely about pure
“sacrifice”. Ling’s expectation is that he will obtain the “credit” of respect
from his mother, or wider family, as a result of his generosity; therefore
mutual reciprocity is at play here. More complicatedly, Ling and his
partner are, like most young people from the countryside, moving into the
city to earn a better living. Their ambition is to improve their life by
eventually moving on from prostitution, to ownership of a small grocery
business. In other words, neoliberal values such as self-enterprise and
planning for one’s future development are considered crucial by Money
Boys. The Money Boy’s self is thus a self which is straddling
traditionalism and neoliberal politics, a self that navigates many
contradictions and struggles for survival.
70 Chapter Four

Another of my interviewees, Kai, has a similar story. Kai is from

Fujian, a province in southeastern China, an area that features one of the
highest instances of Chinese citizens legally or illegally immigrating to
other countries due to poverty (Chu 2011). He has undertaken sex work on
the streets since he came to Shanghai around 2005, when he was in his
early twenties. Kai told me that he was “alright’ with getting paid a low
amount by each client and that he aspired to have as many clients as he
could. Many Fujian people who are domestic or overseas immigrants send
money back home to help out their parents, often to enable them to
refurbish or rebuild their home, in a significant attempt to ensure their
parents will have a better quality of life.
Having a new or refurbished house also allows the senior members of
the family to feel proud in the local village, as it demonstrates their
children’s success in making money and at practicing filial piety (Chu
2011). To allow his parents to have “face” in their hometown fulfils Kai’s
ambition for his family to have respect. Kai distinguishes himself from
“those young kids” who are selling sex to buy luxury goods for
themselves. Instead, he reminds me that what he does is for his family: “I
really care about my family,” he says tersely, but firmly; “I don’t care what
other people do, but I am different. I still contribute what I have to my
parents”.
Kai and Ling’s reclaiming of filial piety is, for me, a way of reacting to
the inequality of contemporary China. They told me of the difficulties of
living in a marginal and fragile social position and in such a context a deep
claim of filial duty becomes a sort of moral defense. It illuminates how
marginalised citizens’ access to filial value through the exchange and
accumulation of social capital (using family networks to earn money for
parents, for example) is significantly restricted, in comparison to the urban
rich. Kai’s comment also reveals that he views the filial piety of others as
inadequate—particularly that of the “young kids” who he regards as
individualists resisting their obligations. Money Boys do not, therefore,
regard filial piety as a zero-sum game, in which one either accepts or
rejects the obligations of filial piety entirely. Rather, the performance of
the filial self by migrant Money Boys is more a process of back-and-forth
re/actualisations or reflections. Money Boys expect to become
independent individuals, as indeed do many young migrants, through their
“self- or life-making”. This is validated by what Anagnost calls
“investments in the self to ensure one’s forward career progression as
embodied human capital” (Anagnost 2013, 2). For Money Boys this is not
always a tale of steady, forward progress; it is often a complicated and
 Dutiful Sons and Debt: The Case of Chinese “Money Boys” 71

intense journey requiring the performance of skills and a negotiation of

opposing values, such as family loyalty and individualism.
For marginal migrants with little capital such as the Money Boys,
progressing one’s career or legitimating one’s filial selfhood is not easy.
Neoliberalism often equates a person’s worth and value with their capital
ownership (or lack thereof), underlining clear inequalities between the
classes (Skeggs 2004). For the less privileged, becoming a person of value
is a struggle, rather than a confident performance. The experience of my
last research subject, Xiaolan, will reveal how complicated it is for the
marginalised to participate in the new neoliberal family “game”.

Xiaolan’s Homesickness
Typical of young rural immigrant workers from a poor family background,
Xiaolan, a Muslim son of a mining family, decided at the age of sixteen to
move to the city and find a job in order to support his family. After years
of moving around China, Xiaolan finally settled in Shanghai. “I did
everything in my life, it is rare that people do as much as I did”, Xiaolan
told me. The “everything” Xiaolan mentions is not just a reference to the
hundreds of different kinds of part-time jobs that rural migrants take on in
Chinese cities, it also refers to a serious car accident Xiaolan was involved
in, in which his father died and Xiaolan suffered a head injury. Shortly
after recovering from the car accident, he decided to leave home to
improve the family's financial position and “to breathe the air of the big
cities”.
Xiaolan soon had to confront the difficulties of finding a proper job in
the city as well as his resentment towards his mother and his
homesickness, a situation that seems irresolvable. Xiaolan has been a
Money Boy in Shanghai for about ten years. He feels guilty about his
family. Sometimes, Xiaolan sends money back home to express his loyalty
to the family and his homesickness, but all his “bitter feelings” will
continue if he remains “outside”, i.e. if he continues in the life of a migrant
worker. In other words, his bitterness, which comes from living the
insecure life of a migrant and his inability to become an economically
successful filial son, shows the painful and complex feelings filial piety
can cause for some Money Boys.
From these three stories, we see that Money Boys use gifts and money
to signify who they are, and who they are not. As Kai explains, he is not
one of “those who don’t care about family” and Ling has decided to spend
a lot on his own family in order to help them gain respectability. The ways
in which a Money Boy deals with tensions in his selfhood is similarly
72 Chapter Four

about “social faces” (Hwang 2006). For example, being a same-sex escort
is a highly stigmatised role in Chinese society, one which seriously distorts
“social faces”. Money Boys thus use material donations to their families to
“restore” their faces—i.e. to restore their selfhood and dignity.
My research subjects long for a better life, and spend a great deal of
time reflecting on their futures in China. Family values are therefore
embraced in order to deliver neoliberal value to their families, through the
performance of filial piety. To meet the standard of culturally determined
filial piety, they undertake an evaluation of what they have, what they owe
and what they give and receive. Negotiating neoliberal individualism is
therefore not always about leaving one’s family or risking parental
opprobrium. Rather, Money Boys are attempting to carve out a state of
filial piety and independence as they undertake to prove their ability to
survive in Shanghai. Intriguingly, their processes of self-making involve a
blend of filial obligation and individualism. Overall, hanging on to their
family values in post-socialist China is quite taxing for Money Boys, who
have to endure a multitude of daily struggles such as police harassment,
abusive clients, discrimination and personal insults. Although homesick,
my respondents do not seem to have given up on chasing a better future;
rather, they find ways to endure the intensities and ambiguities that emerge
in their negotiations with neoliberalism and traditional family values.

Conclusion
Historically, African Americans believed that the construction of a
“homeplace”, however fragile and tenuous (e.g. a slave hut, a wooden
shack), had a radical political dimension. Despite the brutal reality of
racial apartheid, of domination, one’s homeplace was the one site where
one could freely contemplate one’s humanity, where one could resist (bell
hooks 1990, 42).
This chapter has aimed to examine the concept of filial piety and to
probe shifting Chinese societal values. If neoliberal logic has shaped
China and polarised the rural and the urban, the newly middle-class rich
and the migrant poor (Solinger 2009), then the filial self in my case
study—demonstrating the moral model of Chinese society—is also being
reshaped and reconfigured through unequal material distribution. Critically
rethinking issues of family (or familial values), neoliberalism and LGBTQ
identities, I aim to respond to some Western queer studies scholars’ knee-
jerk reactions to “the family” that position the family as a dated,
conservative site, which silences marginalised sexualities and voices
(Edelman 2004, Halberstam 2011).
 Dutiful Sons and Debt: The Case of Chinese “Money Boys” 73

I am aware of the ways in which traditional family values can be

mobilised by conservative and repressive politics in order to oppress the
marginal. However, I argue in the case of Money Boys that we must
comprehend the values they are grappling with, in order to understand and
evaluate why some values are considered valuable and indeed crucial to
selfhood. This is particularly relevant when we try to unpack the
complexities of neoliberalism and the marginalised citizen’s experiences
of, and negotiations with, neoliberalism. In this chapter, I have explored
how Money Boys are, to some extent, performing and defending the
family as part of their effort to negotiate their uneasy and unjust socio-
economic situation in contemporary China.

References
Anagnost, A. 2013. Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation and the
New Economy in Urban Times. California: Stanford University Press.
Anderson, P. 2010. “Sinomania.” London Review of Books 32(2): 3–6
Berry, C. 2011. “Asian Values, Family Values.” Journal of Homosexuality
40(3): 211–231.
Chan, A. and Tan, S. 2012. Filial Piety in Chinese Thought and History.
New York: Routledge.
Chow, R. 2007. Sentimental Fabulations: Contemporary Chinese Films:
Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Chu, J.Y. 2011. Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and The
Politics of Destination in China. Durham: Duke University Press.
Chua, A.L. 2011. Battle Hymn of The Tiger Mother. New York: Penguin
Books.
Croll, E. 2006. China’s New Consumers: Social Development and
Domestic Demand. New York: Routledge.
Edelman, L. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and Death Drive. Durham:
Duke University Press.
Fei, X. 1992. From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society.
California: California University Press.
Gaetano A.M. and Jacka, T. (eds.) 2004. On the Move: Women and Rural-
to-Urban Migration in Contemporary China. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Greenhalgh, S. 1988. “Families and Networks in Taiwan's Economic
Development” in Contending Approaches to the Political Economy of
Taiwan, eds. Winckler, E.A. and Greenhalgh, S, 224–245. Armonk,
NY: M.E. Sharpe.
74 Chapter Four

Halberstam, J. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University

Press.
Harvey, D. 2006. Spaces of Global Capitalism: A Theory of Uneven
Geographical Development. London: Verso.
Hoffman, L. 2010. Patriotic Professionalism in Urban China: Fostering
Talent. Temple: Temple University Press.
hooks, b. 1990. “Homeplace: A Site of Resistance” in Yearning: Race,
Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press.
Hsu, C. 2007. Creating Market Socialism: How Ordinary People Are
Shaping Class and Status In China. Durham: Duke University Press.
Hwang, K-K. 2006. “Moral Face and Social Face: Contingent SelfǦEsteem
in Confucian Society.” International Journal of Psychology 41(4):
176–281.
Jacka, T. 1997. Women’s Work in Rural China: Change and Continuity in
an Era of Reform. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jensen, T. 2010. “What Kind of Mum Are You at the Moment?:
Supernanny and the Psychologising of Classed Embodiment.”
Subjectivities 3(July): 170–192.
Kong, T. 2012. “Reinventing the Self under Socialism: The Case of
Migrant Male Sex Workers in China.” Critical Asian Studies 44(2):
283–308.
—. 2011. Chinese Male Homosexualities: Memba, Tongzhi and Golden
Boy. London: Routledge.
Kleinman, A. 2011. “Introduction” in Deep China: The Moral Life of the
Person, eds. Kleinman, A. et al. California: University of California
Press.
Lee, C.K. 2007. Introduction In Working in China: Ethnographies of
Labor and Workplace Transformation. London: Routledge.
—. 1998. Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory
Women. California: University of California Press.
Murphy, R. 2002. How Migrant Labor Is Changing Rural China.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Khue, N. E. 2011. Ingratitude: The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asia
American Literature. New York: NYU Press.
Ong, A. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of
Transnationality. Durham: Duke University Press.
Pun, N. 2006. Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global
Workplace. Durham: Duke University Press
Rofel, R. 2007. Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality,
and Public Culture. Durham: Duke University Press Books.
 Dutiful Sons and Debt: The Case of Chinese “Money Boys” 75

Rosemont, H. and Ames, R.T. 2009. The Chinese Classic of Family

Reverence: A Philosophical Translation of the Xiaojing. Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press.
Shih, C.T. 1993. ⨂⦣䳪䳸侭 [ Hun Yin Zhong Jie Zhe], trans. by this
chapter’s author. Taipei: Crown Publisher.
Shih, S-M. 2007. Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Ariticulations across
the Pacific. California: University of California Press.
Skeggs, B. 2004. Class, Self, Culture. London: Routledge.
Solinger, D. 2009. States' Gains, Labor's Losses: China, France and
Mexico Choose Global Liaisons, 1980–2000. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press.
Wolf, M. 1974. Women and the Family In Rural Taiwan. California:
Stanford University Press.
Yan, H. 2009. New Masters, New Servants: Development, Migration, and
Women Workers in China. Durham: Duke University Press.
Yan, Y. 2009. The Individualization of Chinese Society. Oxford: BERG
Publisher.
—. 2003. Private Life Under Socialism: Love, Intimacy and Family
Change in a Chinese Village: 1949–1999. California: Stanford
University Press.
Zheng, T. 2009. Red Lights: The Lives of Sex Workers in Post-Socialist
China. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press

Notes
i . Ong’s case study of overseas Chinese families who establish transnational
enterprises reveals the ways in which filial piety can be a sort of governed force
that bounds family members together for their common good, for example, for the
family’s economic benefit. In short, contemporary wealthy Chinese families are
economic units tied up with moral/filial ethics. Chinese family biopolitics dictate
that a family business is an extension of the family household, and therefore, filial
ethics are transformed into an economic value, and moral obligations converted
into capital accumulations.
 CHAPTER FIVE

AGAINST RESILIENCE

TRACEY JENSEN

The “bad parent” is an elastic category within a broader taxonomy of

neoliberal family figures. Bad parents can take many forms—from the
“feckless mother” of Britain’s post-war years (Starkey 2000) to the
“troubled family” that underpins current social and political debate
(Crossley 2015)—and the categories of bad parents are periodically
reinvented and recycled, according to the shape and texture of public and
political debate. The current neoliberal incarnations of “bad parent” are
largely predicated upon broader social and cultural anxieties around
discipline, resilience and restraint. Under neoliberalism, children must be
brought up able to conform to the requirements of competition, families
must be able to “bounce back” from insecurity and the withdrawal of
social and state support, and parents must inculcate the values of
moderation, self-possession and individualism. Parents that are “bad”—
those that are positioned as failing themselves and their children—are
invoked as the cause of stagnant social mobility, undisciplined children
and an intergenerationally transmitted lack of aspiration (Jensen,
forthcoming).
Of all the categories of “bad parent” within the taxonomy of failing
families, it is the young, welfare- dependent single mother who is possibly
the most consistently vilified and stigmatised (Tyler 2008). In a period of
UK neoliberal “post-welfare” (Peck and Theodore 2010) reform, it is
unsurprisingly the welfare entitlements for single mothers which are most
rapidly shrinking and becoming ever more conditional. The doxa of
“welfare dependency” posits that state support creates moral weakness, a
discourse that serves to obscure the impossibilities of a neoliberal labour
system for all families (Fraser 2013). In particular the anxieties that are
mobilised around the sexuality, reproduction and fertility of young single
women must be analysed within the context of broader cultural politics of
disgust and the part this disgust plays in directing public sensibilities
 Against Resilience 77

around neoliberal welfare. In the neoliberal “theatre of cruelty” (Couldry

2008), single mothers work as stigmatising figures that generate new
forms of welfare “common sense” (Jensen 2014). It is through this
neoliberal theatre that common-sense ideas circulate, take hold and bed
down. The common sense of “welfare dependency” for example has been
widely circulated as a means to legitimate arguments that the supportive
welfare state must be replaced with a punitive neoliberal state.
This chapter examines the orchestration of social policy and public
debate and the neoliberal family figures that populate this theatre of
cruelty. It explores the discourses that underpin broader policy shifts and
that legitimate the dismantling and withdrawal of state and social support
from the families who need it the most. Specifically, I explore how the
measurement of child poverty has been undermined by policymakers,
supplanted in part by discourses of “resilience” that seek to direct public
debate away from collective strategies aimed at tackling the scandals of
inequality. Such discourses seek to elevate the individualised, mobile and
self-possessed “responsible family” as the neoliberal solution to
inequality, via their capacity to bounce back from insecurity and precarity.
In the final sections of the chapter I explore the refusals and resistances to
“resilience” generated by a group of young mothers and activists known as
the Focus E15 mothers. These women found themselves at the sharp end
of neoliberal housing policy when a London borough council attempted to
displace them from the supported hostel in which they resided. Their
innovative and vibrant campaign to remain in the neighbourhood gained
momentum, attracted national media coverage and incubated an exciting
constellation of support. In so doing, the Focus E15 women highlight
potential avenues for resistance and speaking back to neoliberal statecraft.

Neoliberal Families and the “Problem” of Child Poverty

Speaking at the Clyde Children’s Centre on 15 November 2015, Secretary
of State for Work and Pensions Iain Duncan Smith announced the British
government’s intentions to initiate a public consultation on the criteria
used to measure child poverty. Child poverty, as it was measured at the
time, focused on household income and categorised children as “living in
poverty” if they lived in households where income was less than 60
percent of the UK average household income. Duncan Smith has long
contested this procedure as flawed and stated that: “It is widely understood
that the current relative income measure by itself is not providing an
accurate picture of child poverty. Having such a narrow focus can drive
perverse decisions, rather than asking whether a sustainable difference has
78 Chapter Five

been made to a family’s life. This is about transforming their outcomes so

they do not slip back below the ‘poverty line’” (Clyde Children’s Centre,
full speech at DWP 2012, my emphasis).
The “perverse decisions” are in reference to welfare policies that target
the incomes of the very poorest families and aim to increase household
income to above the poverty line. These policies can be tracked back to
1999, when one third of UK children were defined as being “in poverty”.
The then-Prime Minister Tony Blair made a commitment to halve child
poverty by 2010 and eliminate it completely by 2020, and introduced a
range of measures in order to achieve this, including increases in existing
welfare benefits as well as introducing new child-targeted assistance such
as Child Tax Credits and income top-ups for low-wage earners such as
Working Families Tax Credit. New Labour introduced the relative
measurement of child poverty—comparing the incomes of the poorest in
comparison with the incomes of the rest of the population—and this
system of child poverty measurement demonstrated an ambition to close
socio-economic inequalities. Duncan Smith has consistently critiqued this
approach, and at the Clyde Children’s Centre he stated that New Labour’s
“fixation on relative income, on moving people over an arbitrary line, does
little to identify those most in need and entrenched in disadvantage, nor to
transform their lives.” Terming this approach the “poverty plus a pound”
strategy, Duncan Smith went on to say that a few extra pounds a week in
benefits would not help families who were not only income-poor but also
afflicted by “worklessness, educational failure, family breakdown, problem
debt and poor health”. He stated that social policy must encourage
“meaningful, sustainable change in the lives of the recipients” and that
focusing on income alone creates “more dependence, not less” and “results
in poor social outcomes and deeper entrenchment” of poverty. His
comments implied powerfully that social policy which increases the
welfare benefits paid to families that are experiencing poverty should be
seen as an attempt to massage child poverty figures and to create the
illusion of social change, where there is none.
These are profoundly problematic statements around the measurement
of child poverty and the kind of welfare policy that might address the
scandal of such poverty. With any system of measurement, there are
complex issues around how we might accurately measure the experience
of poverty, and importantly track the success of welfare policies aimed at
alleviating it. The measurement of child poverty in particular has rightly
been critiqued in terms of it uncouples the poverty of children from the
poverty of their parents. Feminist scholars have highlighted how
intimately child poverty is connected to maternal poverty. Is poverty
 Against Resilience 79

particularly or especially scandalous when experienced by children?

Should anti-poverty strategies focus on children in this way? There are
also established debates in policy studies around how poverty can or
should be measured. Should we track absolute poverty, relative poverty or
some combination of the two? What should be included in the calculation
of household poverty? Some social scientists have proposed that housing
costs and/or childcare costs should be included in the measurement, since
they are inescapable dimensions of household spending and have
increased above the rate of wage inflation. Hirsch and Valadez (2015)
calculate that an additional 130,000 UK children are in poverty once
childcare costs are taken into account. The Households Below Average
Income 2010–11 Report (DWP, 2012) calculated that the number of
children living in households below the poverty line increased from 2.3
million to 3.6 million when housing costs were taken into account. These
figures highlight how the experience of poverty is shaped, not only by a
household’s income but also a household’s necessary expenditure, and in
particular, they indicate how household-income increases (delivered via
wages and welfare benefits) have not kept pace with the escalating cost of
living.
And yet, despite these ongoing debates, the introduction of child
poverty measurement under New Labour has given us a robust set of data
and useful benchmarks in evaluating UK progress in eradicating such
poverty. Large cash transfers delivered via the welfare benefit system
resulted in significant poverty reductions between 1997 and 2010. There
has been ostensible cross-party support for continuing with this child
poverty strategy. In 2007, Leader of the Conservative Party David
Cameron committed his party to this path. In a speech delivered in
Manchester on 26 March 2007 on the quality of childhood, Cameron
called UK child poverty a “disgrace” and stated: “ending child poverty is
central to improving child well-being”. The Child Poverty Act was passed
in 2010 and this Act committed future governments to take further action
to eliminate child poverty.
However, following the formation of the Coalition government in May
2010, these commitments were adjusted and a new policy direction around
the welfare state surfaced, one which radically reduced entitlements to a
social security safety net and marked a punitive sharpening of state
support conditionality. The welfare state entered a period of retrenchment
with the Welfare Reform Bill and a latticework of austerity policies has
been introduced, including: the over-occupancy penalty—also known as
the “bedroom tax”—for social housing tenants (with tighter restrictions on
private tenants), the introduction of a household benefits cap, a limit on
80 Chapter Five

increases to working-age benefits to below inflation (a cut in real terms), a

freeze on Child Benefit and Child Tax Credit (a cut in real terms), the
abolition of Child Trust Funds, the abolition of the “baby element” of
Child Tax Credit, a faster rate of Tax Credit withdrawal as income
increases, the abolition of most of the Social Fund which gave emergency
grants and loans to people on low incomes and the rapid increase of
“sanctions” (benefit withdrawal for a fixed period) imposed on
unemployed welfare claimants (often for relatively minor infractions, such
as being a few minutes late for an appointment).
The combination of these changes to the welfare state has had
significant consequences for UK poverty rates. The Department for Work
and Pensions compiles an annual Households Below Average Income
report, and these reports have documented a recent increase in the number
of children living below the line of absolute low income (DWP 2013). The
Institute for Fiscal Studies report on Child and Working Age Poverty
projects that all the progress of the previous government on child poverty
(incomplete as it was) will be wiped out by 2020 (IFS 2013). This report
documents how relative child poverty in the UK is projected to rise by six
percentage points between 2010 and 2020, from 17.5 percent to 23.5
percent, and that absolute child poverty is projected to increase by 9.6
percentage points. The IFS report goes on to state that almost all of this
increase can be accounted for by changes to the benefit system over the
next few years.
Situated in this context of rising child poverty, Duncan Smith’s
announcement to change the way that child poverty is measured is
scandalous. We urgently need to understand the politics of poverty at a
time when every measure of child poverty indicates that austerity welfare
policy is reversing earlier progress. Duncan Smith’s proposal to relax the
measurement of household income and supplement this with a more
“multidimensional” portrait of poverty reveals a deeply troubling politics
of poverty. Some social scientists have called the child poverty
consultation of 2012–2013 a “sham consultation” (Crossley and Veit-
Wilson, 2013), in that the new direction of “measurement” appeared to
have been decided at its announcement, rather than its conclusion. More
significantly, the proposed “broadening” of child poverty measurement
seems to willfully confuse the causes and conditions of poverty. As Paul
Spicker points out in his examination of the proposed changes, “the
process of selecting factors is not methodologically robust” (Spicker 2013,
5), and in fact, appears quite arbitrary. As he points out, poverty is a
shifting and multi-dimensional phenomena, which means it is crucial to
distinguish between “indicators” and “causes”, between correlates and
 Against Resilience 81

predictors. Spicker shows how the proposed dimensions that will replace
household income are in fact not useful to measuring or tracking child
poverty. The proposal to include “worklessness”, for example, ignores the
documented rise in “working poor” households who are in employment
and yet below the poverty line. The proposal to include “debt” is
problematic, since people who have previously been economically solvent
equally experience bankruptcy and unmanageable debts. As Spicker
comments, “a valid index cannot be constructed simply by picking out
whatever factors happen to spring to mind” (2013, 3).
The factors that seem to have sprung to mind in the proposed changes
to the measures of child poverty thus merit further examination. Duncan
Smith’s intention to recalibrate the measurement of child poverty reflects
his wider, ongoing, project to remake the relationship between welfare
state and citizen, and to shift welfare policy away from structural
explanations of poverty and towards behaviourist ones.
Since 2004, the Centre for Social Justice, a neoliberal think tank co-
founded by Duncan Smith, has published a steady stream of manufactured
“evidence” about the “root causes” of poverty, which has popularised the
idea that poverty and disadvantage can be explained through cultures of
irresponsibility, worklessness and entitlement. In 2007 the CSJ published
the spectacularly flimsy multi-volume report Breakthrough Britain. This
report is just one example of neoliberal myth-making around the “torn
social fabric” of the UK, but it illustrates a broader and deeper attack on
welfare and the welfare state, in which the shape of public debate is
directed away from grotesque levels of inequality and the excesses of
exploitative global neoliberalism, but towards the “most difficult and
fractured communities”, “dysfunctional homes”, “blighted by alcohol and
drug addiction, debt and criminality” (Duncan Smith 2007, 4). In this
report, poverty is seen to have little to do with household income and more
to do with the “behavioral choices” of individual families. Some “choices”
are constituted as a “pathway to poverty” and the report recommends that
policy attention should be directed at steering families away from such
pathways. The Breakthrough Britain reports repeatedly refer to five
identified pathways, which include family breakdown, economic
dependency, worklessness, educational failure, addiction and serious
personal debt.
The report is deeply stigmatising of families who do not conform to a
two-parent nuclear ideal. Readers are told that “family breakdown costs
every taxpayer up to £800 per year” and a range of statistics are presented
regarding the increased risk of educational failure, drug addiction and
alcohol problems for children raised in “broken families”. The report
82 Chapter Five

moves seamlessly between single parenting and gang violence, and

constantly references “family breakdown” and single mothers as a key
cause of “social breakdown”. The concept of a behaviourally recalcitrant
“underclass” was popularised by Charles Murray in a series of evidence-
light publications, specifically The Emerging British Underclass (1990), in
which he argued that material poverty was not the defining cause of social
disadvantage, but rather: illegitimacy, a rise in single parent households,
opting out of the labour market and opting in to violent crime.
The concept of the “underclass” has been repeatedly discredited by
social science and yet it continues to be repeated in public and political
debate, and constitutes the backbone of the Breakthrough Britain report,
raising the spectre of a class of individuals who fail to make the right
choices, who fail to be responsible and to aspire. Producing evidence-
based socially scientific policy recommendations was never the intention
of this report. As Tom Slater (2012) highlights, the entire exercise was
completed without the consultation of a single social scientist. Had any
social scientists been consulted, or commissioned to contribute to the
“debate” that the Centre for Social Justice has initiated, they would
undoubtedly have challenged the common sense of “benefit dependency”,
“cycles of despair” and an “intergenerational culture of worklessness” that
saturate each page. Indeed, a broad range of robust research has
consistently found little evidence to support such behaviorist accounts of
poverty (e.g. MacDonald, Shildrick, Webster and Garthwaite, 2012). The
quality of the “evidence” provided in Breakthrough Britain is shockingly
poor and startling in its populism—the vacuum of social scientific
expertise apparently filled with two waves of YouGov polling of 50,000
British citizens. This is indeed the replacement of social science evidence
with market research (Crossley and Veit-Wilson, 2013).
Nonetheless, in both Breakthrough Britain (2007) and the follow-up
report Breakthrough Britain II (2015) the Centre for Social Justice’s
policy recommendations are clear: the reports state unequivocally that if
we are to tackle poverty, we should not focus on how to increase the
household income of the poorest families or redistribute the wealth of the
UK more equitably; rather, we should focus on early intervention,
effecting behavioural change and on encouraging parents to get married
and stay in paid employment.
Breakthrough Britain has undoubtedly done its work in shifting the
terms of the debate on child poverty. It insists that we should relax our
attention on material and income indicators—how much money does a
household have to live on, can families afford to buy key essentials for
their children such as winter coats—and instead focus on the “pathways to
 Against Resilience 83

poverty” it has identified, such as whether parents are married (and for
how long) and for how long they have been out of paid work. In so doing,
these publications contribute to the recycling of common-sense myths
about “underclass” families. They supplant robust social scientific
knowledge about the causes of poverty with public opinion polls about
what causes poverty (Bailey and Tomlinson, 203).
In so doing, this resurgence of individualised and behaviourist
explanations for entrenched structural disadvantage contributes to a
broader anti-welfare common sense (Jensen and Tyler 205). This anti-
welfare common sense can be seen across policy documents, think tank
publications (including the CSJ catalogue), popular media, newspaper and
magazine articles, weblogs and social media, and casts the receipt of state
welfare as a “handout” which encourages welfare dependency and
discourages fiscal autonomy and self-reliance. To claim welfare benefits—
and certainly to consider increasing those benefits—is, under this common
sense, keeping people “trapped” in a “benefits culture” and generating a
cycle of deprivation passed from one generation to the next. Welfare
benefits were once considered part of an essential social security system,
which would prevent families from falling into poverty. Under anti-
welfare common sense, such benefits transmute and become the cause of
poverty, inhibiting responsibility, self-management and restraint at the
level of the family. The ideal neoliberal family, which haunts each page of
these reports, is one that makes no claims on the social security system, is
resolutely nuclear, with parents in a “stable, committed relationship” (i.e.
married) with at least one parent in constant, secure, paid work.
We can thus see in the child poverty consultation a fascinating sleight
of hand. Alongside, and as part of, an ideological shift against welfare
benefits and other forms of social support, and a literal dismantling of the
welfare entitlements for certain kinds of families (especially single-parent
families and families not in paid work) the child poverty consultation
operates to legitimate this state retrenchment. Child poverty is, under the
terms of the consultation, more complex than mere income: thus the
willful reductions in the household income of the most vulnerable and
precarious families becomes recast as taking action upon their “welfare
dependency” and moral weaknesses. The sleight of hand that is at work in
the child poverty consultation appears to magically transform the poverty-
producing realities of austerity policy into an opportunity to “better”
measure child poverty and to take positive action on “transforming lives”,
rather than adding a few pounds to household income (which, after all, can
only entrench “welfare dependency”). The structures of material
disadvantage and families’ shrinking social security support appear to
84 Chapter Five

recede into insignificance. Instead, poverty will be “tracked” through a

new, surveillant scrutiny on the “lifestyle choices” of families—
principally, whether parents are married and in paid work.

“Transforming Lives”: The Doctrine of Resilience

So far this chapter has examined how one manifestation of the new
political consensus around “transforming lives”—the announcement to
consult on how we measure child poverty—has served to legitimate
actually increasing rates of child poverty. I want now to consider how
these “post-welfare” (Peck and Theodore, 205) or “anti-welfare” (Jensen
and Tyler, 25) policy shifts are being operationalised in local strategy
documents. The turn in policy, away from state welfare, has been
accompanied by an expanded vision for organisations working within the
private, voluntary and community sectors. While welfare state support in
the form of direct cash transfers, welfare benefits and tax credits for
vulnerable and precarious groups have been reduced, there has been a
counter-flow of funding for local programmes which target those same
groups in order to “transform lives”. For example, while single parents
have seen their actual household income plummet with welfare benefit
cuts, they may be able to attend a series of workshops aimed at helping
them find paid work or be a more confident parent (see Jensen,
forthcoming).
In a broader austerity context, a central emerging plank in such local
agendas has been around resilience, specifically how to incubate and
encourage the resilience of groups that are adversely affected by changes
to their welfare entitlements. Many local government organisations—at
county, district and borough level, who have already begun, at a local
level, to see the impacts of welfare and social security reforms upon their
residents, have started to embed resilience discourse in both consultation
and vision documents that respond to the post-welfare landscape set out by
Government and popularised by think tanks like the CSJ. The Borough of
Newham in East London (that will be discussed in more detail later in this
chapter) is one example of a local council that has embraced the discourse
of resilience in its response to government cuts to welfare. In a series of
2013 reports, including: Quid Pro Quo Not Status Quo: Why We Need a
Welfare State that Builds Resilience; A Strong Community: Building
Resilience in Newham and Building Resilience: The Evidence Base,
Newham Council set out its vision for how it would respond to the needs
of its residents in an era of reduced welfare spending. Newham Mayor
Robin Wales stated: “We express our vision for a welfare state that builds
 Against Resilience 85

resilience—personal, community and economic. We believe a lack of

resilience keeps our residents poor” (Wales, Foreword to Quid Pro Quo
Not Status Quo).
Newham is the second most deprived council area in the UK and many
of its residents experience multiple disadvantages connected to poverty.
On measures of child poverty, unemployment, low-paid jobs, pay
inequality, inequalities in life expectation, overcrowding, temporary
accommodation, landlord and mortgage repossessions and a whole host of
other indices, Newham scores poorly. In the “resilience response”
documents, Newham Council itself describes the “poverty intensity” of the
borough, and notes that it is thus one of the hardest hit boroughs in terms
of austerity welfare reforms. This statement—that it is a lack of resilience
that keeps Newham residents poor—is profoundly myopic in the ways that
it recasts structures of poverty, racism, and disadvantage within an
individualising and depoliticising framework. The poor residents of
Newham are positioned as lacking the capacity to withstand the effects of
such structures. They are remade as culturally lacking the substance that
would help them “bounce back” from grinding poverty, precarious and
poorly paid work and insecure, expensive housing. They are classified as
“impoverished by more than their economic situation” (Haylett, 2001, 2).
The neoliberal underpinnings of these resilience documents are clear: mere
income will not solve the problems of people who suffer a poverty of
aspiration, of will, or of resilience. State failure to solve the scandal of
poverty can thus be deferred onto the failure of individuals to withstand
the new normalised precarity of neoliberalism.
What then is resilience? How is it defined? The concepts of resilience
merges from the natural sciences and ecological disaster, and has been
taken up within the “psy” disciplines that have extended the concept with
research into children who have undergone trauma. There is a flourishing
field of self-help literature that posits models for developing resilience in
oneself and raising children to be resilient, including: Raising Resilient
Children (2002), Mindful Parent Happy Child (2011), 21 Days To
Resilience (2016) and The Resilience Breakthrough (2014). This field of
pedagogy is certainly beguiling, and across these models resilience is
defined variously as: the capacity to adapt and rebound from adversity;
self-transformation through hardship and periods of crisis; building the
tools to cope with trauma and setback; and “bounce-back-ability”.
Appealing as this idea of resilience might be—that you can inoculate
people from the effects of entrenched poverty and focus instead on
developing their capacity to withstand such poverty—its orchestration
86 Chapter Five

serves a troubling ethopolitics in the planning and governance of new

forms of insecurity (see Lentsoz and Rose, 2009).
I want to briefly sketch a critique of resilience, informed by three
bodies of literature. First, the critique of the “psy” industries highlights
how wealth, success and well-being have been reconfigured as a
consequence of affective self-management and, in doing so, ignore the
deeply classed, raced and gendered power relations which shape such
possibilities. Nicolas Rose (1990) is widely recognised as offering one of
the most compelling accounts of how the vocabularies, explanations and
techniques of the “psy industries” repeat a fiction of the unified subject,
unencumbered by the effects and institutions of power. Rose’s critical
history of “the burdens imposed, the illusions entailed, the acts of
domination and self-mastery” untangles how such neoliberal “regimes of
the self” animate a fantasy of subjecthood that is bounded, unified and
coherent.
Second, emerging research at the intersection of critical psychology
and critical policy studies has examined how particular objects of policy
are animated in such individualised regimes of the self. John Cromby
(2011) has analysed the emergence of “happiness” as an object of policy in
the latter years of New Labour (1997–2010) and how it was subsequently
taken up by the Coalition government (2010–2015), who even acquired an
unofficial, so-called “happiness tsar” in the form of economist Richard
Layard. Layard’s Happiness: A New Science (2005) was enormously
influential and posited that economic policy should be reoriented away
from wealth equality and towards the distribution of happiness and well-
being. “Happiness”, as Cromby notes, is an “amorphous, abstract and
intangible” goal for policy—compounded by problems of measuring, and
interpretation—and we should note that these problems translate into the
goal of developing “resilience”.
Cromby is rightly critical of the ways that populist psychology is being
used to legitimate policy, and how policy might function psychologically
in relation to the neoliberal agenda of which it is an element. In more
recent work, Cromby and Willis (2014) explore the online psychometric
testing of benefit claimants by the governments Behavioural Insights
Team. Such testing, they argue, legitimates myths that there is a “culture
of dependency” amongst people living in poverty and that worklessness is
down to a problem of character that can be identified through
psychometrics. This testing regime serves broader myths that the welfare
system is too “soft” and must become tougher and more punitive. They
argue that the rapid adoption of such behavioural economics take up a
selective view of “positive” institutions, ignore power relations, amplify
 Against Resilience 87

the social relevance of individual psychological dimensions and thus

validate the neoliberal welfare consensus that social problems are a matter
of individual responsibility.
Third, and most significant for this chapter, is the critique of resilience
from researchers exploring chronic poverty. In 2007 Jo Boyden and
Elizabeth Cooper published a measured review of resilience research for
the Young Lives Childhood Poverty project at Oxford University. This
review explored how the concept of “resilience” becomes translated in
different disciplinary contexts, and how it has been used to understand the
different outcomes experienced by children. “Resilience” has become a
substitute concept to capture what is predetermined, and what is pliant, in
the child. Boyden and Cooper highlight how “narratives of children’s
resilience have from the beginning of the concept’s popular adoption by
social scientists been interwoven with narratives of childhood poverty”.
Their review of the research is very clear: resilience emerges as “an article
of ideological faith”. They stress that while the model of resilience
emphasises competencies rather than deficits and is a purposeful model, it
nonetheless suffers from a lack of conceptual and theoretical coherence.
As they note, this means that resilience has been co-opted within some
troubling agendas, notably being taken up by neuroscience and genetic
researchers as part of “the new biology of resilience”.
In their review, Boyden and Cooper state that there is no credible and
useful definition of resilience in the social sciences. Behaviour which is
interpreted as an indicator of positive resilience in one context is often
interpreted in quite different ways in other contexts. For example, where
children of depressed mothers take a “caretaker” role, this can be
interpreted either as “resilience” or as “false maturity” (which correlates
with higher incidence of depression and anxiety in later life). Resilience is
thus troubled by deeply subjective interpretations of how we cope with
adversity.
Resilience research is, as they argue, positivist and mechanistic. It has
generated a concept that has little analytical value. Across the field of
resilience research the only shared focal point is that the individual can be
a unit of analysis, and as they note, “the emphasis on individual
functioning and the harnessing of individual resources to overcome
adversity depoliticises the project of poverty reduction”. Resilience, as an
article of ideological faith, thus works as a mechanism for depoliticisation,
sidelining structural and collective efforts for social change and diverting
analytical attention away from the systems of inequality that differently
position subjects within it. The consequence of such an approach is that
states and other actors with power are able to adopt a default position with
88 Chapter Five

regards to poverty reduction. The discourse of resilience has thus become

enthusiastically co-opted by proponents of a neoconservative and
neoliberal agenda.
Perhaps then the critical task is not to try to define resilience or to
identify its indicators, but rather to think about the work that it does as an
article of ideological faith. In their book Resilient Life, Brad Evans and
Julian Reid offer a philosophical reading of the new doctrine of
“resilience” and of the subjects that are called into being through its wilful
and conscious normalisation of insecurity: “What kinds of subjects do
demands for resilience produce? To what kind of work is the resilient
subject tasked? And what forms of life does resilience authenticate and
disqualify? […] Resilience is, after all, a pedagogy of relative subjugation”.
Evans and Reid approach resilience as a pedagogy of subjugation, tied
to the end of utopian thinking. Utopian thinking allows us to suspend the
normalities of socio-economic, political and cultural inequalities and to
believe in possible futures yet to come. Evans and Reid reflect on this
suspension and argue, “the fact that we can no longer entertain the
prospect of some utopian ideal is reflective of the politics of our times”.
The call to resilience allows us to evade our collective commitments to
such utopian visions and to suspend taking the action necessary to make
progress towards them. It is no accident that resilience has become a
policy buzzword at the very moment that respected and robust measures of
child poverty (household income) are being deemed “inadequate”.
Resilience, in Evans and Reid’s analysis, is a method of containment—a
system of normative rule and governance for a new post-welfare landscape
that is insecure by design.
When responding to resilience vision documents such as those from
Newham Council, which operationalise resilience discourse and position
poverty as being caused by a lack of resilience, the temptation is to
highlight all the ways that people in crisis, in poverty, economically
marginalised, stigmatised and facing uncertain futures are already
resilient, are already finding ways to go on, to cope with adversity and to
strive forward. The temptation is to celebrate the many forms of resilience
that already exist. However, to do so would simply solidify the insecure
conditions that require resilience. This would acquiesce to the new
normative conditions of insecurity and precarity. In the final section of this
chapter I want to explore what it might mean to speak back to resilience,
to speak against resilience, to refuse it as a doctrine for living, to speak
against what Evans and Reid call “the neoliberal injunction to live
dangerously”. I turn now to the Focus E15 housing campaign, an
exhilarating and inventive example of vibrant housing activism that offers
 Against Resilience 89

an alternative to resilience, which speaks against the neoliberal injunction

to live dangerously and which demands security.

Resisting the Injunction to “Live Dangerously”

Focus E15 is a supported hostel in the London Borough of Newham, East
London for young homeless people with 90 self-contained units. Until
2013, about a third of its residents were young single mothers and their
children. In 2013 residents received letters informing them that the council
had cut funding for the hostel and they were being served notices to leave.
Disinvestment in housing support services, an inadequate house building
strategy, a ballooning private rental sector, together with a cap on
household benefits, have meant that large parts of the UK’s capital city
have become unaffordable. In the post-welfare austerity regime of the
Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government (2010–2015) and the
subsequent Conservative government (elected in 2015), many London
borough councils are opting to simply disperse low-income London
residents to cheaper parts of the UK. Upon being informed in 2013 that
Newham Council was cutting the funding they provided for the hostel,
East Thames Housing Association, who manage Focus E15, decided they
could no longer house the residents and served them with notice to leave.
A group of the resident women approached Newham Council for help and
were provided with a list of private landlords and lettings agents, yet could
not secure tenancies. Newham Council offered to facilitate private rental
accommodation for the women in Hastings (fifty-four miles away from
their support networks), Birmingham (one-hundred-and-twenty miles
away) and Manchester (two-hundred-and-seventeen miles away)—
understandably, the women refused and began a campaign to raise
awareness of the impending homelessness they faced and the growing
housing precarity experienced by residents across London (see Belgrave,
2014).
The Focus E15 campaign, at the time of writing entering its third year,
has been imaginative, resourceful and exhilarating, and has included a
weekly street stall in Stratford, East London, testimonial gathering from
residents, occupations of Newham Housing Office and a series of marches
on Newham Council and planned disruptions of council meetings. In
September 2014 the Focus E15 group held a family fun day at the part-
decanted Carpenters Estate in Stratford. This estate has been assigned for
demolition and redevelopment since 2007, with its residents gradually
displaced while the most profitable sell-off possible is negotiated. The
scandal of these empty blocks rotting away, while families languish in
90 Chapter Five

temporary housing, served as a spectacular symbol of London’s housing

crisis and the Focus E15 campaign occupied one of the empty blocks for
several weeks. They opened the block to the public and ran a lively social
centre with an evolving program of activities and workshops that drew
attention to the campaign. The occupation developed the national profile
of the Focus E15 women and the media attention this generated helped
connect this campaign with a broader network of housing struggles across
the capital.
This campaign has been remarkable for many reasons. In particular, it
illuminates new avenues of resistance for further “speaking back” to
neoliberal statecraft. I want to reflect now on the ways that this campaign
serves as a case study for refusing the neoliberal injunction to “live
dangerously”. The broader welfare reforms and cuts to social security
provision—including housing support services like the Focus E15
hostel—have been justified in terms of incentivising claimants to make
“positive choices” about their lives, to learn how to “live within their
means” and to reduce their dependency upon the welfare state. Indeed, as
we have seen earlier in this chapter, the proposal to change how child
poverty is measured was similarly cast as a move away from mechanistic
measurements of poverty via household income and a move towards
conceptualising poverty in more behavioural terms. During the passage of
the Welfare Reform Act 2012 through Parliament, Lord Freud, Minister
for Welfare Reform, stressed the intention to effect behaviour changes
through the benefit cap, stating that: “The aim of this policy is to achieve
positive effects through changed attitudes to welfare, responsible life
choices and strong work incentives. People must be encouraged to take
responsibility for their decisions in light of what they can afford” (Lord
Freud, HC Deb 21 November 2011 GC345).
What can people afford in a neoliberal policy climate that dismantles
their security entitlements and offers fewer and fewer alternatives as the
supply of affordable housing dwindles and the housing market remains
unregulated? The message here is clear: accept your perpetual
displacement, move as frequently as the housing market requires, live
dangerously. In a public statement responding to the Carpenters
occupation, Newham Council criticised the “confrontational” approach of
the “hardline political activists who have hijacked the campaign” and a
spokesman later described the Focus E15 women as “not vulnerable, but
they are needy”. Here we see the production of a subtle distinction
between “vulnerable”/deserving and “needy”/undeserving. Given the long
history of struggle that has resulted in the right to be recognised by the
welfare state as “vulnerable” and entitled to additional support, this
 Against Resilience 91

recasting of “needy” is particularly disconcerting. To be “needy” is thus

recast as a failure to embrace the injunction to live dangerously—a failure
to be mobile, flexible and to embrace insecurity and precarity, as directed
under neoliberalism.
In refusing such directives, the Focus E15 women have found
inventive ways to make public the failures of neoliberal housing and
welfare policy that are affecting all families. As the campaign has
developed, these activists have generated new forms of solidarity through
testimonial gathering and mediating an online archive of precarity on
alternative and radical websites and weblogs. They have orchestrated a
number of successful blockades for people facing bailiffs, eviction orders
and deportations by issuing appeals over social media. Their coordination
of their personal struggles (e.g. “don’t make our babies homeless: keep us
in London”) under their multiple campaign banners (both literal and
figurative) has been successfully articulated within a wider process of
displacement (“social housing not social cleansing”). They have managed
to unify the usually disparate groups who must usually struggle against
one another for a claim to social security and state support of various
kinds, in this case, for social housing. This campaign refuses the
requirements of resilience and asks others to participate in this refusal.
Focus E15 has spoken back to the ways that the housing crisis (and by
extension the broader welfare crisis) has been framed (from a set of
questions about who is “economically viable”, or desirable, in a context of
land capitalisation) with a set of demands for the rights of all to a secure
housing future. The excitement as this campaign connects with other local
resistances to displacement speaks of a new common idiom around social
housing.

Conclusion: Anti-Resilient Subjects

This chapter has reviewed some of the shifting policy directions that are
becoming apparent as austerity fetishism takes deeper hold and as an anti-
welfare common sense extends across the political and cultural landscape
of the UK, and beyond. The supplanting of economic measures of
inequality such as child poverty—in a moment when such poverty is being
willfully extended—with more behaviourist and individualist “cultural”
markers of lifestyle, welfare “dependency” and a lack of “aspiration”
should be greeted with distrust. Not only are such models of disadvantage
profoundly stigmatising in that, they hold precarious and poor populations
responsible for the effects of structural inequality, they also obscure the
92 Chapter Five

effect of austerity policies and legitimate the retrenchment of the welfare

state.
A new kind of subject is being produced and circulated as ideal and
desirable: the resilient subject, required to accept the dangerousness of the
world and the precarity of a neoliberal world order that is in a state of
permanent hostility and is insecure by design. The resilient subject, in the
words of Evans and Reid, must “permanently struggle to accommodate
itself to the world” (2014, 42). We have seen how collective entitlements
to welfare and housing security have been recast as, in themselves,
suspicious; how the very claims of vulnerability and poverty are
transformed into markers of failure, of problematic neediness and
pathological dependence. Under neoliberal governance, Evans and Reid
argue (ibid.) the discourses and practices of resilience have become so
popular as to have become hegemonic. And yet, as with any changing
cartography of biopolitical power, there has been inventive and
imaginative resistance to the doctrine of resilience. The Focus E15
campaign highlights the possibilities for speaking against the biopolitics of
neoliberalism. In demanding our collective entitlement to be securely
housed and protected from the worst excesses of the housing market, these
women have incubated and generated new forms of solidarity with others
facing the costs of neoliberalism. These campaigners have illuminated new
avenues of resistance for further “speaking back” to neoliberal statecraft,
and in doing so, have reminded those who would morally author their
displacement, that the building of resilient subjects would signal the
twilight of the social.

References
Bailey, N. and Tomlinson, M. 2013. “DWP Adds to Confusion over
Consultation on Child Poverty.” Poverty and Social Exclusion website.
Retrieved from: http://poverty.ac.uk/articles/dwp-addsconfusion-over-
consultation-child-poverty-measurement
Belgrave, K. 2014. “Focus E15: Young Mothers’ Struggle for Social
Housing.” Open Democracy website. Retrieved from:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/kate-belgrave/focus-
e15-young-mothers-struggle-for-universal-housing
Brooks, R. and Goldstein, S. 2002. Raising Resilient Children: Fostering
Strength, Hope and Optimism in Your Child. New York: McGraw-Hill
Education
Cooper, E. and Boyden, J. 2007. “Questioning the Power of Resilience:
Are Children Up to the Task of Disrupting the Transmission of
 Against Resilience 93

Poverty?” Chronic Poverty Research Centre Working Paper, No. 73.

Retrieved from: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1753009
Couldry, N. 2008. “Reality TV, or the Secret Theater of Neoliberalism.”
Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 30(3): 3–13.
Cromby, J. 2011. “The Greatest Gift? Happiness, Governance and
Psychology.” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 5(11): 840–
852.
Cromby, J. and Willis, M. 2014. “Nudging into Subjectification:
Governmentality and Psychometrics.” Critical Social Policy 34(2):
241–259.
Crossley, S. 2015. “Realising the (Troubled) Family, Crafting The
Neoliberal State.” Families, Relationships and Societies. Retrieved
online. DOI: 10.1332/204674315X14326465757666
Crossley, S. and Veit-Wilson, J. 2013. “The Measurement of Poverty: A
Sham Consultation?” Poverty and Social Exclusion website. Retrieved
from: http://www.poverty.ac.uk/articles-child-poverty-government-policy-
editors-pick/measurement-poverty-sham-consultation
Duncan Smith, I. 2007. Breakthrough Britain: Ending the Costs of Social
Breakdown. London: Centre for Social Justice.
Department of Work and Pensions. 2012. Households Below Average
Income Annual Report. London: Crown Copyright.
Evans, B. and Reid, J. 2014. Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously.
Bristol: Polity.
Fraser, N. 2013. Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism
to Neoliberal Crisis. London: Verso.
Haylett, C. 2001. “Illegitimate Subjects?: Abject Whites, Neoliberal
Modernisation, and Middle-Class Multiculturalism.” Environment and
Planning 19(3): 351–370.
Jensen, T. 2014. “Welfare Commonsense, Poverty Porn and Doxosophy.”
Sociological Research Online 19(3). Retrieved from:
http://www.socresonline.org.uk/19/3/3.html
—. (forthcoming). Parenting the Crisis. Bristol: Policy Press.
Jensen, T. and Tyler, I. 2015. “Benefits Broods: The Cultural and Political
Crafting of Anti-Welfare Common Sense.” Critical Social Policy
35(4): 470–491.
Layard, R. 2005. Happiness: A New Science. London: Penguin.
Lentzos, F. and Rose, N. 2009. “Governing Insecurity: Contingency
Planning, Protection, Resilience.” Economy and Society 38(2): 230–
254.
94 Chapter Five

McDonald, R., Shildrick, T., Webster, C. and Garthwaite, K. 2012.

Poverty and Insecurity: Life in Low-Pay, No-Pay Britain. Bristol:
Policy Press.
Montminy, Z. 2016. 21 Days to Resilience: How to Transcend the Daily
Grind, Deal with the Tough Stuff, and Discover your Strongest Self.
New York: Harper Collins
Moore, C. 2014. The Resilience Breakthrough: 27 Tools for Turning
Adversity into Action. Austin, TX: Green Leaf Book Group.
Murray, C. 1990. The Emerging British Underclass. London: Institute of
Economic Affairs (Choices in Welfare Series).
Peck, J. and Theodore, N. 2015. Fast Policy: Experimental Statecraft at
the Thresholds of Neoliberalism. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota.
Placone, P. 2011. Mindful Parent Happy Child: A Guide to Raising Joyful
and Resilient Children. Palo Alto, CA: Alaya Press.
Rose, N. 1990. Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self.
London: Routledge.
Slater, T. 2012. “The Myth of ‘Broken Britain’: Welfare Reform and the
Production of Ignorance.” Antipode 46 (4): 948–969.
Starkey, P. 2000. “The ‘Feckless Mother’: Women, Poverty and Social
Workers in Wartime and Post-War England.” Women’s History Review
9(3): 539–57.
Spicker, P. 2013. “Child Poverty: A Response to the Consultation” (Blog
post). Retrieved from: http://www.spicker.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/
2013/01/spicker-submission-re-measuring-child-poverty-2013.pdf
Tyler, I. 2008. “Chav Mum, Chav Scum: Class Disgust in Contemporary
Britain.” Feminist Media Studies 8(1): 17–34.
 CHAPTER SIX

UNDERSTANDING THE RISE

OF “NEUROPARENTING”

JAN MACVARISH, ELLIE LEE AND PAM LOWE

This chapter discusses a significant development in the way in which

family life is understood: the growth of “neuroparenting”. In its essence,
neuroparenting is a framework for understanding the obligation of parent
to child in which the primary parental role is said to be the nurturing of the
baby’s brain development. Priority is given to the idea that emotions are
neurologically determined in the earliest years of life by parent-child
interactions and that “correct” neuroemotional development is necessary
for humans to function adequately as social beings. Neuroparenting has
gained international influence since the 1990s and reflects a wider interest
in “the brain” as a prism through which human existence, both individual
and collective, can be understood. To make sense of this new way of
thinking about the care and socialisation of children, it is helpful to locate
neuroparenting within what has been conceptualised as “parenting culture”
(Lee et al. 2014), that is, the ideas and practices which constitute the
culture within which parents raise their children.
Neuroparenting has gained global prominence in part through the
marketplace of parenting products, including toys, books, online advice,
and parent-training courses (Bangerter and Heath 2004, Nadesan 2002,
Thompson and Nelson 2001, Thornton 2011, Wall 2004 and 2010). But its
key claims have also been adopted by influential institutions; disseminated
through medicine in the training of health visitors and midwives,
education in teacher and early-years staff training (Bruer 1999b and 1997,
Gillies 2013, Seghal 2015), social work (Featherstone at al. 2013, Wastell
and White 2012) and the more recent domain of state-funded parent
training programmes (Clarke 2006, Daly 2013, Edwards et al. 2013).
Neuroparenting has also entered political discourse at a local and national
level, cutting across political parties and drawing on an internationalised
body of claims-making (Bruer 1999a, Gillies 2011, Hulbert, 2004,
96 Chapter Six

Macvarish 2014). Academics, public commentators, politicians and think

tanks have thus attached themselves to the neuroparenting cause to make
the case for “earlier” intervention to tackle social mobility, inequality,
social deprivation and their associated problems. This political and
philanthropic development has been described by Thornton (2011) as the
“first-three-years movement” and is best described as: “an alliance of child
welfare advocates and politicians that draws on the authority of
neuroscience to argue that social problems such as inequality, poverty,
educational underachievement, violence and mental illness are best
addressed through ‘early intervention’ programmes to protect or enhance
emotional and cognitive aspects of children's brain development”
(Macvarish et al. 2014b).
In this respect, neuroparenting represents a reworking, and in many
ways a triumph, of naturalised, cyclical explanations of poverty. The
almost romantic hyperbole of contemporary neuroparenting seems also to
have much in common with the rhetoric of earlier “child-saving”
movements: a tendency, from the late nineteenth century in Anglo-
American societies, for political and cultural attention to focus upon young
children as the best hope for remedying the problems of the present and
making the transition to the future (Hulbert 2004, Kessen 1979, Platt 1977,
Stearns 2009). Cunningham describes the early child-saving movement as
expressing a political outlook, which seemed optimistic but was also
deeply conservative:

To say that the child alone held the key to social change was to say that the
present generation of adults did not. That, contrary to the hopes of
socialists and militant unionists, the social structure could not be
transformed within a single generation. Child-centred ideology pictured
society inching toward reform generation by generation [...] Thus the turn-
of-the-century exaltation of the child was both romantic and rationalist,
conservative and progressive. The child was ‘primitive’ but this meant it
was also malleable, hence really more ‘modern’ than anyone else
(Cunningham 2005, 207).

Implicit within neuroparenting is a problematization of how children

are currently raised. The tendency to identify a “parenting deficit” is
evident throughout parenting culture and frequently gives rise to “parent-
blaming”, where responsibility for long-standing social problems is laid at
the door of parents (Furedi 2001 and 2008, Lee et al. 2014). A central
tenet of neuroparenting is that “new” knowledge from neuroscience, if
applied to the most intimate relations of infant love and care, promises to
solve significant social and moral problems, such as violence, poverty,
 Understanding the Rise of “Neuroparenting” 97

inequality, low educational attainment, mental illness, addiction and

antisocial behaviour, and could even “fix” capitalism as a whole. Current
(deficient) parenting practices are thus brought to the fore as the
foundational cause of major social problems and reform of these practices
along neuroparenting lines is advocated in almost evangelical terms by
individuals and by para-governmental organisations (Edwards et al. 2014,
Rutter 2002). This hyperbolic claims-making is a common feature of
neuroculture more broadly: Pickersgill identifies a “flagrantly promissory”
character to neuroculture more broadly, with a tendency to extol “the
power of the new brain sciences to reveal the secrets of the mind and cast
fresh light on health, well-being and the very meaning of human nature”
(2013, 330).
As a way of understanding intergenerational responsibility,
neuroparenting relies upon the invocation of “science” as a source of
legitimacy, but it is propagated by a layer of self-styled neuroparenting
experts, who are usually not themselves scientists, and who tend to
produce a “folk” rhetoric of the brain (Bruer 1999a). Neuroscientific
vocabulary is deployed to scientise some fairly ordinary ideas about
babies—for example, that they require comforting and physical contact.
Neuroparenting entrepreneurs offer guidance to parents in communicating
with their babies; how often, and in what way, babies should be talked,
read or sung to, made faces at, tickled and touched. Parents are also urged
to minimise factors in the home environment deemed to be neurologically
negative, such as television and other screens, “stress” and conflict
between family members. Neuroparenting courses, books, advice websites
and childcare professionals advocate particular ways of interacting to
“attune” the parent to their baby, in order to secure its normal or optimal
emotional development. Such parental practices will—it is argued—
safeguard the child’s neurological development, necessary for the future
health, wealth and happiness of the adult-to-be.
Although many of the actions advocated by neuroparenting might
seem to be common sense, and indeed would appear to constitute a large
part of what parents already do (talking and singing to infants, cuddling
and tickling them, preventing upset by shielding them as much as possible
from the tougher parts of adult life), neuroparenting reinterprets these
everyday features of loving and caring for babies as neurodevelopmentally
crucial. Everyday family behaviour is thus labelled and attached to a
neurobiologised “outcome”, giving rise to the question: “how much
talking/singing/reading/tickling is enough?”. Neuroparenting discourse
sometimes talks in medicalised terms of “dose”, for example, the UK’s
“Five to Thrive” campaign uses a dose analogy, modelled on the “Five a
98 Chapterr Six

Day” publicc health campaaign which pro omotes the coonsumption off fruit and
vegetables, to recommennd that parents “Talk, Plaay, Cuddle, Relax R and
Respond”. S Similarly, thee US “Reach Out and Reaad” campaign uses the
slogan “presscribing change, one book at a time” too raise funds for f books
(which are cclaimed to “bbuild better brrains”), to be given out by y medical
professionalls (http://www w.reachoutand dread.org) annd in June 2014,
2 the
American A Academy of Pediatrics
P asssociation adoppted a policy
y of early
literacy prommotion that requires
r paediatricians to ccheck that paarents are
reading to thheir children from
f birth.

Fig. 6–1. Takken from http://w

www.fivetothrive.org.uk/

As discussed earlierr, the advocaacy of neurooparenting co ontains a

preconceiveed idea that theere is somethiing wrong witth the way chiildren are
 Understanding the Rise of “Neuroparenting” 99

currently being raised; that there is a parenting deficit. Bestselling

neuroparenting entrepreneur Sue Gerhardt thinks that many parents lack
the “ability to cope with caring for an infant”, which could “set up lifelong
handicaps in their offspring” (Gerhardt 2015, 2). Although neuroparenting
is often called for as a solution to social problems “at the bottom” of
society (such as poverty, unemployment, violence and crime), books such
as Gerhardt’s are aimed at parents who purchase “self-help” literature,
suggesting that the problem to be addressed by neuroparenting is located
in the middle classes and perhaps across contemporary parenting culture as
a whole. The presumption that modern parenting is a problem in need of a
remedy lends itself to the politicisation of parenting (Furedi 2001 and
2008, Macvarish 2014). The origins of individual and social problems are
located in the private sphere of family life and are therefore addressed
through government initiatives which require the opening up of intimate
relationships to public monitoring, assessment and intervention, albeit in
the name of offering “support” to parents.
From the late 1990s, academics from various disciplines have been
raising concerns about the validity of the neuroparenting framework and
the consequences of its adoption by policy-makers, first in the US but
subsequently further afield: New Zealand (Wilson 2002), Canada (Wall
2004 and 2010), mainland Europe (Ramaekers and Suissa 2012,
Vandenbroeck 2014) and the UK (Featherstone et al. 2013, Furedi 2008,
Lee et al. 2014, Macvarish et al. 2014, Wastell and White 2012). On the
scientific level, it has been argued that the studies cited as containing
novel breakthroughs, with ramifications for policy, are in fact rather old
and are usually based either on animal studies or on studies of children
with exceptional early life experiences, therefore possessing limited
application to normal human development (Belsky et al. 2011, Bruer
1999a, Kagan 1998, Rutter 2002).
Cultural theorists have proposed that the conceptualisation of the
child’s brain as overwhelmingly vulnerable to parental influence in the
early years serves as a metaphor for the parent-child relationship that
resonates with particular contemporary anxieties about gender relations,
social cohesion, morality and the future (Furedi 2008, Hays 1998, Nadesan
2002, Thornton 2011a and b). When considered as part of a broader
parenting culture, brain-claiming can be said to further intensify the
demands on parents, whose every action is said to have measurable and
lifelong consequences for the child’s emotional and cognitive well-being
(Furedi 2008, Hays 1998, Macvarish 2014, Wall 2004 and 2010). Most
recently, British scholars have begun to formulate a critique of the
consequences of this neurobiologised way of understanding family life for
100 Chapter Six

the rights of families relative to the state, most noticeably, its tendency to
create a “now-or-never imperative” to “rescue” children from families
judged to be neurodevelopmentally risky (Featherstone et al. 2013, Gillies
2013, Lee et al. 2014, Wastell and White 2012).
The analysis offered here follows this critical approach and attempts to
take forward an understanding of the specific features of contemporary
parenting culture developed by the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies at
the University of Kent and set out in the book Parenting Culture Studies
(Lee et al. 2014). The chapter is informed by a study tracing the adoption
of neuroparenting claims by English family policy-making. The study was
funded by the (Cambridge University) Faraday Institute’s “Uses and
Abuses of Biology” programme and involved an analysis of English
policy documents that have shaped the formation of parenting policy
across a number of domains (social exclusion, health, maternity services,
early years, crime and justice). In addition, the researchers conducted a
review of historical literature on past movements seeking to “save”
children from malign parental influence and a review of the literature
critiquing the more recent “first-three-years movement” in the Anglo-
American policy context.
There is also a growing literature critical of “brain culture” which
draws a useful distinction between neuroscience and “neuroscientism”,
that is, between the legitimate findings emerging from this research on
neurological functioning and the activities of those who appropriate the
authority of scientific objectivity to pursue moral, political or commercial
agendas in the public sphere (Beaulieu 2001, Legrenzi and Umilta 2011,
Rose 2010, Rose 2013, Satel and Lilienfeld 2013, Tallis 2011, Thompson
and Nelson 2001, Thornton 2011a). Within these, a particular theme has
arisen discussing the rhetorical effect on public discourse of brain claims,
especially those that use images of brain scans (Beck 2010, McCabe and
Castel 2008, Weisberg et al. 2008).
Our analysis draws on insights gained from the literature outlined
above to look in more detail at two key features of neuroparenting claims-
making: first, the claim that neuroscience serves as a guide to optimising
the fortunes and well-being of the next generation and as a warning of
what may occur if parents fail to pay heed to it, and second, that because
‘we now know’ what babies require from their parents there is an urgent
moral and political imperative to formulate new, earlier interventions in
family life. We will then try to account for the appeal of neuroparenting,
discuss its consequences for thinking about the family and consider
whether the concept of “neoliberalism” takes us further in this project.
 Understanding the Rise of “Neuroparenting” 101

Optimising and Warning: Parental Determinism

for Good and Bad
Neuroparenting claims tend to take two forms: they are either
“optimising” or “warning”, or sometimes a combination of the two. In an
article promoting a public lecture for parents, Canadian psychiatrist Dr
Jean Clinton exemplifies the optimising approach, in which neuroscientific
knowledge is claimed to provide new insights into how we might enhance
our child’s brain capacity by loving and stimulating them in particular
ways.

‘I'm going to be talking about, it's not the terrible twos, it's the terrific twos,
and talking about some of the behaviours that we see in the little ones, and
ways of understanding where the behaviour comes from’, Clinton said. ‘It's
their brain developing and their curiosity and their need to learn.
Sometimes parents can misinterpret the behaviour as either not doing what
they are told or doing things over and over again like dropping keys from
the high-chair, and we have to look at that and say ‘Wow! She's
experimenting’ rather than, ‘Oh! She's driving me crazy’ [...] ‘We now
know that babies are more like little scientists and are observing us all the
time’, said Clinton. ‘We now know that we are, quite literally, building the
architecture of their brains, and quite literally sculpt what areas will be
strong and what areas will be weak [...] I don’t just talk about the science’,
she said. ‘I talk about how does this science apply to me as a mom, as a
dad and what I can do’ (quoted in Roach 2013).

As we can see from her description of the baby as a “little scientist”,

Clinton sees the infant brain as a source of wonder, with the baby talked of
as naturally predisposed to forge connections with caregivers and to
experiment with the world around them. This positive-sounding approach
lends itself to the marketing of parent-training seminars and books, as well
as products such as the “Baby Mozart”, “Baby Einstein” and “Baby
Newton” toys and DVDs, which are advertised as tools to assist parents in
maximising their child’s emotional and cognitive potential. Self-styled
neuroparenting “experts”, such as Dr Clinton, position themselves as
interpreters of “the neuroscience”, educating parents in appropriate ways
of interpreting and interacting with their child.
The “warning” perspective has more pessimistic connotations,
expressing anxieties about social disorder and alienated individuals but
also constructing particular social groups (usually the poor, but sometimes
the materialistic, selfish middle classes) as neuroemotionally dysfunctional
and behaviourally problematic. The “warning” outlook tends to predominate
in the arguments of those calling for greater policy intervention in the
102 Chapter Six

“early years”. Here it is evident in an interview with Andrea Leadsom, a

Conservative member of the UK parliament, and an eager advocate of
brain-based early intervention policies:

‘The period from conception to two is about the development of a baby's

emotional capacities’, she says. ‘Mum saying: ‘Oh darling, I love you’, and
singing baby songs and pulling faces literally stimulates the synapses in the
brain’. Citing the example of neglected Romanian orphans whose brain
growth was stunted, and research into the impact on babies of the stress
hormone cortisol she argues that poor early parenting experiences and
weak attachments make it far more likely that there will be a whole range
of problems later on. ‘If you're left to scream and scream day after day,
your levels of cortisol remain high and you develop a slight immunity to
your own stress, so what you find is babies who have been neglected tend
to become risk-takers’, Leadsom says. ‘The worst thing, however, is the
parent who is inconsistent—you know: sometimes when I cry my mum
hugs me and other times she hits me. That is where the baby develops an
antisocial tendency. Kids who go and stab their best mate, or men who go
out with a woman and rape and strangle her—these are the kinds of people
who would have had very distorted early experiences’ (“Andrea Leadsom:
Lobbying for More Support for Parents and Children”, The Guardian, 27
November 2012).

In this invocation of brain science, the effects of inadequately attentive

or cruel parenting are inscribed in the infant brain, bearing consequences
not just for the child and its parents, but also for society as a whole.
Despite the apparently social orientation of the “warning” perspective, it is
ultimately what individual parents do that creates social disadvantage and
social problems from the individual upwards; with a clear imperative for
the state to act to ensure that all parents follow a path proven to be correct
by scientific evidence. Similarly, within the apparently more optimistic
“optimisation” approach articulated above by Jean Clinton, the baby is
talked of as possessing an in-built drive to develop. However, this natural
strength is cast as incredibly vulnerable to inadequate parental recognition
or misinterpretation. According to Clinton, the brains of babies are
“literally sculpted” by their parents and so the importance of getting it
right could presumably never be underestimated. Importantly, although
parents are said to be the most significant influence on their child’s
development, it is clear from Clinton’s and Leadsom’s words that they are
also assumed to be out-of-step with their baby’s true emotional and
cognitive state until they familiarise themselves with the latest scientific
explanations for their child’s behaviour. In both the “optimising” and the
“warning” strands of neuroparenting discourse then, the feature they hold
 Understanding the Rise of “Neuroparenting” 103

in common is the dual presumption of parent determinism coupled with

parental incompetence.

“We Now Know”: Scientific Authority Legitimising

Political Innovation
In cultural and political discourse, the claim that there is new
knowledge about the brain underpins the demand for an intensive focus on
existing childrearing practices. The US historian Elizabeth Hulbert
identifies “the beginnings of a deferral by policy-makers to neuroscience”
in a report by the US Carnegie Corporation in 1994. Entitled “Starting
Points: Meeting the Needs of Our Youngest Children”, the report spoke of
a “quiet crisis” caused by family change and persistent poverty. It began in
dramatic terms, “Our nation’s children under the age of three and their
families are in trouble, and their plight worsens every day” (Carnegie
Corporation 1994, 1). The report went on to claim that:

Parents and experts have long known that how individuals function from
the preschool years all the way through adolescence and even adulthood
hinges, to a significant extent, on the experiences children have in their
first three years. Babies raised by caring, attentive adults in safe,
predictable environments are better learners than those raised with less
attention in less secure settings. Recent scientific findings corroborate
these observations. With the help of powerful new research tools, including
sophisticated brain scans, scientists have studied the developing brain in
greater detail than ever before (1994, 3).

However, Bruer points out that what the first-three-years movement

claimed as “new” research had in fact been around for 20–30 years (Bruer
1999a). Deploying the rhetoric of novelty—claiming that “we now know”
what is really going on in the developing child’s brain and therefore that
“we now know” what parents need to do to adequately care for children—
allowed neuroparenting advocates to make the case for interventions in
childrearing which were innovative. Neuroparenting rhetoric was focused
primarily on “the early years”, “the first three years” or “0–3”; a much
earlier period of extensive childhood intervention than was traditionally
accepted by the norms, for example, of compulsory schooling. Since its
origins in the 1990s, the first-three-years movement has called for ever-
earlier intervention, moving from the immediate preschool period to the
years 0–2 and then to pregnancy and even preconception (Lowe et al.
2015a; Macvarish et al. 2014). The state’s purview over childrearing in
infancy has thus become expanded far beyond parents who had proved
104 Chapter Six

themselves to be dangerous to their children, to include parents judged to

be “disadvantaged” and therefore “risky” to their children’s developmental
well-being (Macvarish 2014b, Parton 2006).
The claim to dramatic leaps in scientific knowledge of the brain is often
deployed to give neuroparenting an urgent and almost revolutionary
significance but it also tends, as we can see in the “Starting Points” quote
above, to corroborate and legitimise ideas about correct parenting which
have been around for much longer. The universal message of neuroparenting
advice is that “we now know” that parents (mothers in particular) need to be
far more attentive to their babies than was previously considered to be
necessary. This is most clearly evident in the neurobiologisation of
attachment theory (Faircloth 2014), a theory of child development which
emerged in psychology, which was critiqued methodologically, ideologically
and politically (Eyer 1992) but which has now been resurrected and its
status consolidated by the claim that “the neuroscience” shows it to be
unquestionably true. The difference between Bowlby and Ainsworth’s
attachment theory of the 1950s and 1960s and its current incarnation in
neurobiologised form is the perceived scale of the problem and the
emphasis on the mother rather than the child. Whereas attachment disorder
was originally presented as a problem present in some babies, today
attachment is problematized across all babies and understood to require
conscious attention to ensure that it happens. The consequences of poor
attachment are described today in catastrophic terms (even as brain
damage) and the case is made for all mothers to be closely monitored lest
they fail in the very early days to form a sufficiently attached relationship
with their baby.
The content of the “new” knowledge from neuroscience, evident in
the way the Carnegie Corporation introduced brain claims back in the
early 1990s, and repeated (largely unchanged) since, can be outlined as
follows: the infant brain is talked of as being more impressive, yet more
vulnerable, than we ever realised; more susceptible to its “environment”
than we knew before, it is more deterministic of the future child and adult,
and it is parental emotions (such as stress or depression) which shape the
infant brain, beginning in utero.

This research points to five key findings that should inform our nation's
efforts to provide our youngest children with a healthy start:
First, the brain development that takes place during the prenatal period
and in the first year of life is more rapid and extensive than we previously
realized
Second, brain development is much more vulnerable to environmental
influence than we ever suspected
 Understanding the Rise of “Neuroparenting” 105

Third, the influence of early environment on brain development is

long-lasting
Fourth, the environment affects not only the number of brain cells and
number of connections among them, but also the way these connections are
‘wired’
And fifth, we have new scientific evidence for the negative impact of
early stress on brain function
(Carnegie Corporation 1994, 3).

According to Hulbert, the impact of the “perfectly pitched” brain

claims in “Starting Points” was to grab the attention of an American public
which had become “habituated” to “outcries about imperilled children”
(2004, 311). Even more significantly, although the talk of “environment”
might seem to connote a focus on deprived areas and poor neighbourhoods,
when it comes to very young infants, and in particular to fetuses, “the
environment” is not communities or society, but their parents, or more
particularly, their mothers. The object of political attention was therefore
shifting towards the home and even the womb.
The “we now know” rhetoric is consistently mobilised in neuroparenting
discourse and there is remarkable continuity in the brain claims made in
“Starting Points” and by early intervention advocates across the world in
the decades since. As Wall describes, they crossed the border into Canada,
with the “I Am Your Child” neuroparenting campaign (slogan “the first
years last forever”) being heavily promoted by the Canadian Institute of
Child Health (Wall 2004, 42), while Wilson reports the incorporation of
the same brain claims into family policy in New Zealand (Wilson 2002).
Their persistence suggests that the idea of a neuroscientific revolution
providing new rationales for tackling social deprivation serves an
important purpose in reinvigorating demands for resources but also in
reconceptualising poverty and inequality. Today, the leading proponent of
neuroparenting from within academia is the Center for the Developing
Child at Harvard University. In the quotation below, the Center’s website
repeats the claim to the revolutionary significance of neuroscientific
innovation and makes clear that there is a necessary trajectory from
scientific knowledge to political action:

A remarkable explosion of new knowledge about the developing brain and

human genome, linked to advances in the behavioral and social sciences,
tells us that early experiences are built into our bodies and that early
childhood is a time of both great promise and considerable risk. The
mission of the Center on the Developing Child is to leverage that rapidly
growing knowledge to drive science-based innovation that achieves
breakthrough outcomes for children facing adversity. We believe that
106 Chapter Six

unprecedented reductions in economic dependence and social disadvantage

can be produced through a new way of thinking fueled by 21st century
science, a new way of working that embraces the culture of innovation, and
a new breed of leadership across multiple fields that is driven by
constructive dissatisfaction with incremental change
(http://developingchild.harvard.edu/about/history_and_current_context/).

As we can see, the language has more in common with a political

manifesto or a commercial marketing campaign than with scientific or
academic restraint. UK politicians who advocate the adoption of
neuroparenting strategies have been similarly evangelical in their zeal for
this “revolutionary” way of tackling social problems. They argue that “we
now know” that if individuals with fully functioning brains are created
from conception, state services will not have to cope with the
consequences and costs of poverty “downstream”, in future years (Allen
2011, Allen and Duncan Smith 2008 and 2009). In the UK, the argument
that focusing on babies’ brain development is the only way to prevent a
multiplicity of social problems from unemployment, lack of social
mobility and educational underachievement, to crime, violence and
antisocial behaviour has strengthened since its emergence in the mid-
2000s. Since 2007, brain claims have become a notable feature of family
policy and, since the election of the Coalition government in 2010, brain-
based training programmes for professionals have now been rolled out
nationally in health, social care and education services. The repetition of
claims echoing the Carnegie Report is evident in Labour MP Graham
Allen’s 2011 report : “Early Intervention: The Next Steps”, which also
deploys the image of a brain scan to simplify and dramatise the message.

The early years are far and away the greatest period of growth in the
human brain. It has been estimated that the connections or synapses in a
baby’s brain grow 20-fold, from having perhaps 10 trillion at birth to 200
trillion at age 3 […] The early years are a very sensitive period […] after
which the basic architecture is formed for life […] it is not impossible for
the brain to develop later, but it becomes significantly harder, particularly
in terms of emotional capabilities, which are largely set in the first 18
months of life (Allen 2011, 6).

In reports such as those pictured above, poverty and social disorder are
attributed to individual emotional and cognitive dysfunction, “written
into” the brain in the earliest years of life by inadequate parenting. This
approach is prominent in the UK’s Nurse Family Partnership programme
(adapted from the US Family Nurse Partnership scheme) which claims to
“break the cycle” of dysfunctional behaviour presumed to be evident in,
 Understannding the Rise of “Neuroparennting” 107

and transmiitted intergennerationally by

y, those whoo have babiess in their
teens. Younng mothers annd fathers are taught aboutt babycare in terms of
brain develoopment and arre encouraged to actively w
work on “attach
hment” to
improve their baby’s life chances.

Fig. 6.2. Fronnt cover of “Earrly Intervention

n: The Next Stepps”

Politicallly and ideoloogically, the first-three-yeaars movemen nt and its

advocacy of neuroparentting can be said s to repre sent a new approach,
a
which defiees previous caategories of id deological thiinking. As su uch, those
who locate themselves on the rightt and the leeft have welccomed it
simultaneouusly. In her boook The Selfi fish Society: H How We All Forgot
F to
Love One A Another and Made
M Money Instead,
I Sue G Gerhardt (201 10) poses
neuroparentiing as a solutioon to “selfish”” capitalism, eexplicitly coun
nterposing
herself to thhe radical libeertarian thinkeer Ayn Rand.. Neuroparentting critic
John Bruerr argues thatt in the US,, his challennge to the claims c of
neuroparenting and early intervention have h led otherrs (wrongly) to
t assume
that he is a right-wing “neoliberal”,
“ opposed
o to thhe funding of maternal
and infant health provission, of child dcare and eduucational pro ogrammes
(Bruer 20144).
In the UK, the braain-based earrly interventiion agenda has h been
vigorously promoted byy politicians from all ppolitical parties; most
prominentlyy, former Connservative party leader Iaiin Duncan Smith and
Labour MP Ps Graham Allen
A and Fran nk Field. Daavi Johnson Thornton,
T
108 Chapter Six

author of “Brain Culture” (2011a) sheds some light on why these policy
initiatives can appeal across old political divides: “The policies that
emerge from the baby discourse are ‘progressive’, in the sense that they
promote family leave and childcare, typically support more generous and
less restrictive welfare policies, and fund educational initiatives. In short,
they give money to ‘help’ babies, children, and families. It is this
‘progressive’ nature of the interventions that poses serious rhetorical
challenges to opponents of the ‘myth’ of the first three years” (Thornton
2011a, 109).
The evangelical, revolutionary rhetoric of addressing poverty and
inequality by increased state funding of programmes targeting the poor,
has allowed the first-three-years movement to gain support from, or at
least produce relatively little criticism from, both the left and right. As far
as such distinctions still exist, leftists have accepted the progressive
sounding rhetoric of welfare, health and educational interventions, while
right-wingers have accepted the claims to “downstream” reductions in
state expenditure and an emphasis on individual responsibility.

Accounting for the Appetite for Brain Claims

Given the substantial and relatively longstanding critique of
neuroparenting’s scientific claims, how do we account for the persistence
of “neuro” thinking? The dual construction of the brain as both wondrous
and vulnerable, as susceptible to both optimisation and to damage, means
that brain discourse can have a potentially universal appeal. It allows
parents to voluntarily take up products and services to enhance their
parenting skills, but also provides a rationale for state agencies to persuade
or compel parents who have shown (or are predicted to show) parental
deficiencies to engage with professionals in parent-training programmes.
Taking children to baby-signing classes, playing Mozart to a fetus via
specially purchased “belly” speakers or committing to extended
breastfeeding may appeal to a particular kind of middle-class, “intensive”
mother, who approaches the parental role like a professional pedagogue,
with targets and outcomes in mind and a desire to become highly skilled as
her “child’s first teacher” and to develop a highly skilled child, well-
equipped to succeed in life (Hays 1998, Wall 2004 and 2010). It has also
been suggested that the scientific-sounding rhetoric of neuroparenting may
also provide an opening for fathers keen to assume the role of involved
caregiver and brain-developer (Bruer 1999a). But neuroparenting
exhortations can also appear less faddish, less middle-class and more
banal. While the use of a neuroscientific vocabulary of synapses, neurons
 Understanding the Rise of “Neuroparenting” 109

and cortisol appear to bring scientific advancements to bear on parenting,

the recommendations derived from it tend to chime with existing
“common-sense” ideas about what constitutes good parenting, albeit those
more fashionable ideas that validate the more attentive, emotionally
attuned parenting style. Pickersgill rightly warns that the hyberbole in
neuroculture should not be assumed to directly lead to its uncritical
absorption by the public. Research indicates that neurothinking works
with, rather than overrides, other ideas about the self (Pickersgill 2013).
There is more research to be done to understand how these interactions
work out at a subjective level.
The “Five to Thrive” campaign discussed earlier is an attempt by UK
brain advocates to make the “attached” or “attuned” parenting style
accessible to all parents and uses brain rhetoric to introduce or reinforce
particular practices. The banality of Five to Thrive’s recommendations
indicate that, despite the revolutionary language of much neuroparenting
discourse, existing practices tend to be reinforced rather than overturned
by “neuro claims”. Those who designed the campaign for policy-makers
were particularly sensitive to the need to reinforce what parents already do
rather than to alienate them from state services by being seen to preach
novel techniques from a distance. We can see here that by rooting official
parenting guidance in brain-based claims and delivering it through child
health professionals the advice gains the legitimacy of being objectively
health-based, rather than being perceived as promoting a particular moral
agenda (for example, to explicitly demand that mothers put more effort
into caring for their babies). While policies enacted by the state to ensure
“correct” childrearing might appear to have clear moral and political
underpinnings and ramifications, couching them in terms of the
neurobiological serves to obscure what should be a highly controversial
agenda of “social engineering”. As Bruer says, “the findings of the new
brain science have become accepted facts, no longer in need of
explanation or justification” (1999a, 61), but more than this, such claims
“float free” of particular experts, theories or interest groups by gaining the
authority of nature in the form of the biological organ of the brain.
What “Five to Thrive” also reflects is the lack of faith exhibited by
social entrepreneurs and the political class in the ability or commitment of
parents to spontaneously respond to and love their children. Kagan (1998)
argues that the appeal of brain claims resides in the prior cultural tendency
towards “infant determinism” in which the early years are said to
determine adult lives. Indeed, our study found that concern with parental
behaviour—with nurture—was well-established in English policy before
the adoption of neuroparenting. This anxiety does not only exist amongst
110 Chapter Six

politicians, policy-makers and neuroparenting advocates, but is a defining

feature of contemporary parenting culture (Furedi 2001, Lee et al. 2014).
Across our sample of policy literature, “parenting” was consistently
depicted as deficient or problematic from 1997 onwards, while it is not
until 2003 that the brain first starts to feature in policy discourse. It can be
argued, therefore, that neuroparenting represents the concentration of a
prior anxiety about the quality of intimate, intergenerational relationships
between parents and children into the visible, biological form of the brain.

Undermining the Individual, Redefining Family Life

The “we now know” claim borrows scientific authority through its talk of
“revolutionary” findings about “synapses”, “cortisol” and “neurotransmitters”
to break down well-established barriers to the governance of the private
sphere. Neuroparenting rhetoric appears to emphasise the individual
agency of the all-determining parent, but because it insists that infancy is
the period in which new individuals are created, for good or bad, it is too
important to be entrusted to parents by themselves. It is logically
impossible that parents raised in pre-neuroparenting times could be
spontaneously fit for the task of raising the next generation. The parent’s
potentially toxic agency must be monitored and circumscribed. In the
neurobiologised framework, the parent is therefore demoted to the position
of just another environmental “factor” impacting on their child’s brain
(Macvarish 2015, forthcoming CSP). As such, they can legitimately be
monitored, nudged, trained and treated to neutralise any potential deficit
and inculcate brain-friendly practices. In Gerhardt’s book, Why Love
Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby’s Brain (2004) we can see the
effect of neurobiologising the mother-child relationship: “starting inside
the mother’s body, brain systems designed to maintain stability start to
take shape, influenced not only by the mother’s diet but also by the
biochemicals of emotion circulating in her body” (2015, 3). Quite what the
mother is supposed to do to control the “biochemicals of emotion
circulating in her body” is unclear, although the somewhat unworldly
recommendation that mothers “avoid stress” is usually the most common
advice. This way of thinking about parents has been translated into policy,
in the form of increased monitoring of women’s susceptibility to
depression and stress before and after pregnancy, the expansion of the
category of women judged to be “at-risk” of mental health difficulties and
therefore posing a potential threat to the neurological development of their
child (Lowe et al. 2015a and b).
 Understanding the Rise of “Neuroparenting” 111

While the talk is of the “social brain” and the apparently structural
conditions that breed parental inadequacy, neuroparenting solutions focus
on the need for individual parents to better manage their inner emotional
worlds. This can be understood as a biologisation of the imperatives of
what has been termed “therapy culture” (Furedi 2004, Illouz 2007,
Macvarish 2015–forthcoming CSP). Neuroparenting therefore echoes the
apparent emphasis on individual agency of earlier self-help movements
but with a newly biologised determinism, which stands in direct
opposition to conscious human agency even at the most personal level.

Conclusion
So in conclusion, we turn to the question, is the idea of “neoliberalism”
useful in understanding neuroparenting? A strong theme in the critique of
neuroparenting is the resonance between the values it encapsulates and
what is described as the ideology of neoliberalism. It is commonly claimed
by critics of neoliberalism and neuroparenting that arguments for brain-
based early intervention are deployed to legitimise welfare spending cuts
and to “responsibilise” the raising of children solely to parents—in
particular, mothers (Gillies 2013). Wall argues: “The focus on educating
parents fits well with a model of individual responsibility and privatized
parenting. It does not require governments to reinvest in the welfare state
and design policy to alleviate poverty, provide affordable housing and
child care services, and improve employment practices” (Wall 2004, 47).
While Nadesan writes of the “neoliberal” imperative to “engineer” the
“entrepreneurial infant” (2002) and Thornton (2011b) of the
“entrepreneurilization of motherhood”, Wall describes neoliberalism as
placing greater emphasis on “the ability of individuals to adapt to change,
to engage in self-enhancing behaviour, and to manage the risk they pose to
themselves and thus reduce their potential burden on society” (Wall 2004,
46). There is undoubtedly much truth in this—parental determinism means
that individual parents are held accountable not just for the way their own
children “turn out” but for the fortunes of society as a whole. As discussed
throughout this chapter, blame for social problems from unemployment to
crime, from addiction to low educational attainment, is laid firmly at the
feet of “parenting” with the consequent demand that parents change, or do
more of what they do already. However, we need to ask whether parents
are “responsibilised” in any meaningful way. From our description of how
the parent is constructed in neuroparenting, we might conclude that
biological parents are no longer trusted with the responsibility of raising
their own children without first being reconstructed as “neuroparents”.
112 Chapter Six

Whether this reconstruction is actively embraced through the voluntary

consumption of neuroparenting products, literature and advice or
experienced more passively in less voluntaristic interactions with
“informed” state-funded professionals in health, education and social
services, the autonomy traditionally afforded to most parents is inherently
undermined by the moralised imperative to be a “good neuroparent”.
It seems clear that even in circumstances where there is a reduction in
the provision of vital services to ease the parental burden or to ensure the
care and education of all children or those with additional needs, families
are not being “responsibilised” to the extent that they are left to their own
devices in the way they choose to raise their children. Neuroparenting and
early intervention almost certainly does not lead to the provision of the
kind of services that parents want or need (evidenced by the lack of take-
up for universal parent-training programmes such as the UK’s “Can
Parent” (Lee, et al. 2015), but to characterise neuroparenting as providing
a justification for “neoliberal” withdrawal from collective responsibility
for raising children seems inaccurate. As Wall goes on to acknowledge:
“while governments may not be prepared to invest socially in families
with children, they are prepared to increase scrutiny and control in an
effort to ensure that parents fulfill their individual responsibilities” (Wall
2004, 47).
As we outlined above, the effect of neuroparenting claims is to push
policy ever deeper into what were generally held to be the private relations
of the family and indeed, into the psychic space of individual parents.
Stripped of conscious agency, parents are reduced to the role of hopeless,
potentially toxic determinates of their children’s neurologically
determined future. Their children, in turn, are constructed as possessing
agency only in the very early years of life when they are pre-conscious.
The most extreme version of this is the concern to protect the fetus from
the transmission of the maternal state of mind via hormones and the
uterine environment.
If neuroparenting is involved in the construction of the “neoliberal”
individual, then it seems to be the exact opposite of what the liberal
individual has been considered to be. Rather than understanding
neuroparenting as representative of what is often a rather overly
generalised or underdeveloped description of a “neoliberal” ideological
framework, it might therefore be more helpful to conceptualise it more
precisely as a means of forging a behavioural code in post-moral times, a
politics of state intervention for post-ideological times, and an argument
for family-type relationships when there is little faith in the spontaneous
ability of the family to socialise future generations.
 Understanding the Rise of “Neuroparenting” 113

References
Allen, G. 2011. Early Intervention The Next Steps. An Independent Report
to Her Majesty’s Government. London: Cabinet Office.
Allen, G., & Duncan Smith, I. 2008. Early Intervention: Good Parents,
Great Kids, Better Citizens (Report). London: Centre for Social Justice
and the Smith Institute.
Bangerter, A. and Heath, C. 2004. “The Mozart Effect: Tracking the
Evolution of a Scientific Legend.” British Journal of Social
Psychology 43(4): 605–623.
Beaulieu, A. 2001. “Voxels in the Brain: Neuroscience, Informatics and
Changing Notions of Objectivity.” Social Studies of Science 31(5):
635–680.
Beck, D.M. 2010. “The Appeal of the Brain in the Popular Press.”
Perspectives on Psychological Science 5(6): 762–766.
Bruer, J.T. 2014. “Growing Up in Poverty Doesn’t Damage Your Brain
Irretrievably.” The Guardian, May 6. Retrieved from:
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/may/06/john-bruer-
growing-up-poverty-not-damage-brain-irretrievably.
—. 1999a. The Myth of the First Three Years, A New Understanding of
Early Brain Development and Lifelong Learning. New York: The Free
Press.
—. 1999b. “In Search of Brain-Based Education.” Phi-Delta Kappan
80(9): 649–57.
—. 1997. “Education and the Brain: A Bridge Too Far.” Educational
Researcher 26(8): 4–16.
Clarke, K. 2006. “Childhood, Parenting and Early Intervention: A Critical
Examination of the Sure Start National Programme.” Critical Social
Policy 26(4): 699–721.
Edwards, R., Gillies, V. and Horsley, N. 2013. “Rescuing Billy Elliot’s
Brain: Neuroscience and Early Intervention.” Paper given at Brain
Science and Early Intervention: joint meeting of the BSA Childhood
Study Group and the BSA Families and Relationships Study Group,
Goldsmiths University London on June 20. Retrieved from:
https://www.academia.edu/4566784/Rescuing_Billy_Elliots_Brain_Ne
uroscience_and_Early_Intervention
Edwards, R., Gillies, V. and Horsley, N. 2013. Policy Briefing: The
Biologisation of Poverty. Policy and Practice in Early Years
Intervention. Retrieved from:
114 Chapter Six

http://www.discoversociety.org/2014/01/06/policy-briefing-the-
biologisation-of-poverty-policy-and-practice-in-early-years-
intervention/
Eyer, D. E. 1992. Mother-Infant Bonding: A Scientific Fiction. New
Haven: Yale University Press.
Faircloth, C. 2014. “The Problem of ‘Attachment’: The ‘Detached’
Parent” in Parenting Culture Studies, eds. Lee, E., Bristow, J.
Faircloth, C. and Macvarish, J.,147–165. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Featherstone, B., Morris, K. and White, S. 2013. “A Marriage Made in
Hell: Early Intervention Meets Child Protection.” British Journal of
Social Work (March): 1–15.
Furedi, F. 2008. Paranoid Parenting: Why Ignoring the Experts May Be
Best for Your Child. London: Continuum.
—. 2004. Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age.
London: Routledge.
—. 2001. Paranoid Parenting. London: Allen Lane.
Gerhardt, S. 2004. Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby’s
Brain. London: Routledge
—. 2010. The Selfish Society: How We All Forgot to Love One Another
and Made Money Instead. London: Simon & Schuster.
Gillies, V. 2013. “From Baby Brain to Conduct Disorder: The New
Determinism in the Classroom.” Paper given at the Gender and
Education Association Conference, London South Bank University on
April 25. Retrieved from:
https://www.academia.edu/3549456/From_Baby_Brain_to_Conduct_D
isorder_The_New_Determinism_in_the_Classroom
—. 2011. “From Function to Competence: Engaging with the New Politics
of Family.” Sociological Research Online 16(4). Retrieved online.
DOI: 10.5153/sro.2393
Hays, S. 1998. The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. New Haven:
Yale University Press.
Hulbert, A. 2004. Raising America: Experts, Parents and a Century of
Advice About Children. New York: Vintage Books.
Illouz, E. 2007. Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Kagan, J. 1998. “The Allure of Infant Determinism” in Three Seductive
Ideas. Harvard Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Kanieski, M.A. 2010. “Securing Attachment: The Shifting Medicalisation
of Attachment and Attachment Disorders.” Health, Risk and Society
12(4): 335–344.
 Understanding the Rise of “Neuroparenting” 115

Kessen, W. 1979. “The American Child and Other Cultural Inventions.”

American Psychologist 34(10): 815–820.
Legrenzi. P. and Umilta. C. 2011. Neuromania: On the Limits of Brain
Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lowe, P., Lee, E. & Macvarish, J. 2015a. “Growing Better Brains?
Pregnancy and Neuroscience Discourses in English Social and Welfare
Policies.” Health, Risk & Society 17(1):15–29.
Lowe, P., Lee, E., & Macvarish, J. 2015b. “Biologising Parenting:
Neuroscience Discourse, English Social and Public Health Policy and
Understandings of the Child.” Sociology of Health and Illness
37(2):198–211.
Lupton, D.A. 2011. “‘The Best Thing for the Baby’: Mothers’ Concepts
and Experiences Related to Promoting Their Infants’ Health and
Development.” Health, Risk & Society 13(7–8): 637–651.
McCabe, D. P. and Castel, A.D. 2008. “Seeing Is Believing: The Effect of
Brain Images on Judgments of Scientific Reasoning.” Cognition
107(1): 343–52.
Macvarish, J. 2015. “Neuroscience and Parenting Policy: What Becomes
of the Parent?” Critical Social Policy (Issue forthcoming).
—. 2014a. “Babies’ Brains and Parenting Policy: The ‘Insensitive’
Mother.” in Parenting Culture Studies, eds. Lee, E., Bristow, J.
Faircloth, C. and Macvarish, J., 165–184. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Macvarish, J., Lee, E., and Lowe, P. 2014. “The ‘First Three Years’
Movement and the Infant Brain: A Review of Critiques.” Sociology
Compass 8(6): 792–804.
Nadesan, M. H. 2002. “Engineering the Entrepreneurial Infant: Brain
Science, Infant Development Toys, and Governmentality.” Cultural
Studies 16(3): 401–432.
O’Connor, C., Rees, G. and Joffe, H. 2012. “Neuroscience in the Public
Sphere.” Neuron 74: 220–226.
Parton, N. 2006. Safeguarding Childhood: Early Intervention and
Surveillance in a Late Modern Society. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Pickersgill, M. 2013. “The Social Life of the Brain: Neuroscience in
Society.” Current Sociology 61(3): 322–340.
Pitts-Taylor, V. 2010. “The Plastic Brain: Neoliberalism and the Neuronal
Self.” Health 14(6): 635–652.
Platt, A.M. 1977. The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency.
Chicago: University of Chicago.
Ramaekers, S. and Suissa, J. 2012. The Claims of Parenting: Reasons,
Responsibility and Society. Dordrecht: Springer.
116 Chapter Six

Romagnoli, A. and Wall, G. 2012. “‘I Know I’m a Good Mom’: Young,
Low-Income Mothers’ Experiences with Risk Perception, Intensive
Parenting Ideology and Parenting Education Programmes.” Health,
Risk & Society 14 (3): 273–289.
Rose, N. and Abi-Rached, J.M. 2013. Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and
the Management of the Mind. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
—. 2010. “‘Screen and Intervene’: Governing Risky Brains.” History of
the Human Sciences 23(1): 79–105.
Rose, S. 2013. “Grey Matters.” Times Higher Education, 12–18 Dec.
(2)131: 36–39.
Rutter, M. 2002. “Nature, Nurture, and Development: From Evangelism
through Science toward Policy and Practice.” Child Development
73(1): 1–21.
—. 1987. “Continuities and Discontinuities from Infancy” in Handbook of
Infant Development (2nd ed.) ed. Osofsky, J.D., 1256–1296. New York:
John Wiley.
Satel, S. and Lilienfeld, S.O. 2013. Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of
Mindless Neuroscience. New York: Basic Books.
Seghal, A.C. 2015. “Neuroscience and Education: An Incompatible
Relationship.” Sociology Compass, 9(1): 49–61.
Smeyers, P. 2008. “Childrearing: On Government Intervention and the
Discourse of Experts.” Educational Philosophy and Theory 40(6):
719–738.
—. 2010. “State Intervention and the Technologization and Regulation of
Parenting.” Educational Theory 60(3): 271–284.
Stearns, P.N. 2003. Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in
America. New York: New York University Press.
Roach, C. 2013. “Neuroscientist Talk Aims to Give Parents Insight.” The
Sudbury Star website, April 10. Retrieved from:
http://www.thesudburystar.com/2013/04/10/neuroscientist-talk-aims-
to-give-parents-insight
Tallis, R. 2011. Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the
Misrepresentation of Humanity. Durham: Acumen.
Thompson, R.A. and Nelson, C.A. 2001. “Developmental Science and the
Media: Early Brain Development.” American Psychologist 56(1): 5–
15.
Thornton Johnson, D. 2011a. Brain Culture: Neuroscience and Popular
Media. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.
—. 2011b. “Neuroscience, Affect and the Entrepreneurialization of
Motherhood.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 8(4):
399–424.
 Understanding the Rise of “Neuroparenting” 117

Vandenbroeck, M. 2014. “The Brainification of Early Childhood

Education and Other Challenges to Academic Rigour.” European
Early Childhood Education Research Journal 22(1): 1–3.
Wall, G. 2004. “Is Your Child’s Brain Potential Maximized? Mothering in
an Age of New Brain Research.” Atlantis 28(2): 41–50.
—. 2010. “Mothers’ Experiences with Intensive Parenting and Brain
Development Discourse.” Women’s Studies International Forum
33(3): 253–263.
Wastell, D. and White, S. 2012. “Blinded by Neuroscience: Social Policy,
the Family and the Infant Brain.” Families, Relationships and Societies
1(3): 397–414.
Weisberg, D.S., Keil, F.C., Goodstein, J., Rawson, E. and Gray, J. R.
2008. “The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations.” Journal
of Cognitive Neuroscience 20(3): 470–477.
Wilson, H. 2002. “Brain Science, Early Intervention and ‘At Risk’
Families: Implications for Parents, Professionals and Social Policy.”
Social Policy & Society 1(3): 191–202.
 CHAPTER SEVEN

SAFE FOR LIFE:

NEOLIBERALISM AND MOTHERS’ MILK

OLIVIA GUARALDO

1.
Adrienne Rich’s famous book Of Woman Born was republished in 1986
ten years after its first appearance, in a social and political context that had
already changed radically. In the ten years since the book’s first
publication it had become apparent that many of the feminist issues that
had a decisively political character during the 70s (e.g. control of one’s
body, de-medicalisation of pregnancy and delivery, critique of intrusive
medical practices, and return to “nature”) had become colonised by a
“well-being” discourse which now regarded the dimensions of health,
comfort and safety as predominantly “personal”. It seemed that all
previous feminist battles had, by the mid-80s, ceased to be political, losing
their public and subversive character. American society, in its conservative
manifestations, is a society “increasingly obsessed with family life and
personal solutions” wrote Rich (1986, 13), providing women with great
help in becoming mothers, insofar as becoming mothers who can afford
“personal solutions”. Rich also argued that this same society was able to
“metabolize” feminist issues, weakening and transforming them into
private, individual matters of health and well-being (12). To put this
differently, according to Rich a certain type of feminist discourse became
easy prey for a conservative ideology which was, and still is, able to
absorb it while blunting its more radical edges. She states: “To the extent
that the alternative-childbirth movement has focused on birth as a single
issue, it has been a reform easily subsumed into a new idealism of the
family. Its feminist origins have been dimmed along with its potential
challenge to the economics and practices of medicalised childbirth and to
the separation of motherhood and sexuality” (12–13).
 Safe for Life: Neoliberalism and Mothers’ Milk 119

Rich’s critique is sharp and very relevant to the fate of feminist

demands in movements such as the Women’s Health Movement (US and
Europe): by fighting for more freedom from institutionalised medical
knowledge and power and for a conscious appropriation of one’s “nature”,
the Women’s Health Movement abandoned concerns regarding the nature
of power and society as a whole. This was aided by the fact that Western
societies were starting to become obsessed with an idealised vision of
perfect health (Sfez 1995) and a collective concern with a safe and risk-
free life; this was to be made possible by the great expansion in medical,
technological, and scientific discourses and in the nutritional, sports-
related and mediatised markets, where health became a hotly pursued
commodity. This general tendency—which progressively escalated in the
US and Europe—can be considered as part of a gradual transformation of
Western societies that began in the late eighteenth century as a concern
with the growth, well-being and care of the population. The French thinker
Michel Foucault (1998) describes this transformation through the notion of
“bio-power”, showing how power came to coincide with the administration
and management of life.
Below I will attempt a political analysis of current trends in both
medical and popular discourses regarding motherhood, breastfeeding and
the role of the family, drawing on the Foucauldian notion of bio-power.
The perspective from which I will analyse these discourses criticises their
supposedly “natural” character and shows that, behind such arguments, we
can observe historically specific notions of both neoliberalism and
patriarchy at work.

2.
As is probably well-known, Foucault introduced the notion of bio-power
in the study of the past in order to rethink contemporary politics. For
Foucault, one of the fundamental phenomena of the nineteenth century
was the extensive statalisation of the biological, namely, the taking charge
of the life of citizens by the State. Power, according to Foucault, is not just
a juridical structure that manifests through laws and prohibitions. It does
not coincide exclusively with the exercise of sovereignty but,
progressively from the eighteenth century onwards, takes the shape of a
detailed and thorough control of individual and collective practices and
conduct in order to regulate and render them more rational, more efficient
and more controllable. In this way, “the old power of death on which the
symbolisation of sovereign power concentrated is substituted by the
accuracy of the administration of bodies and the calculating management
120 Chapter Seven

of life” (Forti and Guaraldo 2006, 57). What matters in the era of bio-
power is not the prohibition of certain conducts, nor the punishment of
disobedient citizens—as was the case in the old paradigm of sovereign
power—but growth, prosperity, well-being, and the efficient administration
of the life of the population. Differently put, what counts in the bio-
political rearrangement of power is the human being as a member of the
population, or the species. This generalised promotion of life is, according
to Foucault, equal with a systematic control of its individual and collective
manifestations, not necessarily through an oppressive and external form of
control, but through a systematic propagation of scientific and
administrative discourses that express what life is and how it should be
managed in order to grow and prosper (Forti and Guaraldo, 2006). In this
new power arrangement, reinforced by the development of many branches
of knowledge that tend to produce “truth” about life, individuals become
agents of their own “normalisation” since they want to be included in the
average standards that define a healthy, normal, prosperous life.
Foucault’s analysis of the transformation of power and the birth of bio-
politics allow us to grasp a fundamental aspect of our societies, namely,
the obsession with health and well-being, now transformed into a social
preoccupation. Self-regulating individuals, exclusively concerned with
their own health and well-being, today form the vast majority in Western
affluent societies. In this general politics of life, health and its medical
reproducibility have become a totalising, pervasive ideology. Exceeding
simple utilitarian or economic causes, this contemporary ideology has
colonised our social imaginaries, becoming a new repository of existential
meaning, as if health were not just the necessary means to conduct a “good
life”, but the very end of life itself, “an end that directs life’s means and
orients life’s conduct” (Forti and Guaraldo, 2006, 62). What is crucial to
highlight at this point is the way in which this “health and well-being”
discourse has a gendered dimension, which has affected female bodies in
pervasive, profound and unexpected ways. It is as if, to put it in
Foucauldian terms, female bodies have undergone a strong bio-political
asujettissement (subordination, domination). From a political perspective,
we should be interested in assessing how bio-political discourses operate
on bodies of women. Such discourses often encompass family and
motherhood and, as I will discuss in detail below, breastfeeding.
Motherhood is a privileged field of intervention for bio-political
discourses, one that has been recently invaded by a wide range of medical
and social anxieties regarding the health of newborns, toddlers, children
and teenagers and also their future, their talents, their ambitions and their
success. This complex entanglement of biological and socio-economic
 Safe for Life: Neoliberalism and Mothers’ Milk 121

expectations and anxieties often take concrete form in the medical and
nursing discourses that promote breastfeeding. These discourses have not
only flourished in the medical academe, but also in women’s groups. With
a good deal of foresight, Adrienne Rich observed that the complex
entanglement of health discourse and what she called “conservative
politics” was something new, sadly unexpected, but worth investigating. In
what follows, I discuss breastfeeding discourses as they develop in
Western societies after World War II in the medical world, in women’s
groups and in pro-breastfeeding leagues. I am particularly interested in
how the pro-breastfeeding leagues, which allied themselves with de-
medicalised, alternative feminist and ecologist discourses during the 1960s
and the early 1970s, acquired a hegemonic position that influenced
medical discourse in the late 1970s. The purpose of this chapter is to
discuss how and to which extent we can today better understand
“conservative politics” by analysing breastfeeding discourses through
Foucault’s notion of bio-politics and its subsequent connection to
neoliberalism.

3.
A significant revision of previous scientific childrearing and child
nutrition practices emerged after World War II. Whereas earlier a rigid
control over the mother-child relationship had been advised, the
attachment theories that became prevalent during the 1950s considered the
mother-child dyad as indispensable for the healthy development of the
newborn. From Bowlby to Winnicott, via the famous Doctor Spock and
even Talcott Parsons, the new tendency was to attribute to the mother-
child bond—and to Parsons’ notion of “exclusive motherhood”—a
“functional necessity” in order to protect children (and men) from the
harshness of the hyper-productive adult life in a society permeated by
market logics (Blum 1999, 35). The social effects of this new theoretical
tendency were immediate. Breastfeeding became endorsed and
implemented diffusely: doctors, midwives and hospitals started to equip
themselves in order to facilitate this “return to nature” and mothers’ milk
underwent strict medical control. At the same time, along these scientific
and medicalised versions of breastfeeding, a different type of discourse
began to develop, criticising the medicalisation of birth (e.g. Caesarean
section, the use of anesthetics and forceps, prolonged hospitalisation, etc.)
and demanding a return to more natural and less intrusive birthing
practices; these critiques were not alien to a Christian rhetoric according to
which birth is the supreme spiritual realisation for a woman. Breastfeeding
122 Chapter Seven

was considered not only the natural continuation of an equally natural

event, but also a sort of aid for the cultural improvement of the population.
In the background of this “alternative” knowledge regarding motherhood
were women’s self-help groups that from the 1950s in the United States
and in the following decades in Europe started to promote breastfeeding.
Prominent among these groups, in terms of global diffusion and
organisation, was and still is La Leche League, founded in 1956 in the
suburbs of Chicago by a group of seven white, middle-class Catholic
women. La Leche League soon became an extensive self-help network
“from mother to mother”. Nowadays, La Leche League is globally “one of
the major experts on breastfeeding” (Blum 1999, 36–7), consulted by state
and private bodies, although it remains a non-government organisation.
One of the most famous mottos of the League is “We speak for the baby”
and through a network of groups coordinated by volunteers but centred on
the exchange of experience and advice from mother to mother, the League
adopts and promotes theories of attachment. Natural delivery, the primary
bond between mother and child, exclusive and prolonged breastfeeding,
and a family centred on the child and able to respect his/her developmental
rhythms are considered essential elements for the health and well-being of
the mother, the child and the wider social body (Blum 1999, 38; Lee
2007).
This maternalist philosophy encourages exclusive breastfeeding
through a flexible, adaptive approach that concentrates on the child’s
needs (breastfeeding “on demand”) and promoting physical contact
between mother and child, without worrying too much about excessive
attachment. It also advises that the weaning process should take place
gradually, flexibly and in accordance with the child’s preferences and
needs. On the surface, this new approach was very different from, and
critical of, the medical models that expected breastfeeding to be regular,
strictly controlled, and quantified. The main goal of the League was, from
its beginnings, to educate women in “The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding”
(the title of their practical handbook), an art they should be able to
discover within themselves and find pleasurable. Thus the rediscovery of
the female body, in its maternal and nutritional aspects removed from its
commodification as a sexual object, became one of the principal “goals” of
the promotion of flexible, baby-led breastfeeding, which was supposedly
also mother-led, according to “natural” rhythms that the mother-child dyad
should “naturally” fall into.
It is not accidental that during the 1970s this type of “alternative”
discourse converged with radical feminist discourses that considered
medicine one of the main fields of patriarchal control over women’s
 Safe for Life: Neoliberalism and Mothers’ Milk 123

bodies. A good deal of feminist activism, both in the US and Europe, was
engaged in promoting self-help and solidarity groups that could offer
women an alternative to traditional medicine, such as non-intrusive and
natural healing techniques.i In Italy, for example, a very strong Women’s
Health Movement in the early 70s not only helped women to gain
awareness of their bodies and sexuality, but also contributed to spreading
feminist issues to large portions of a still-patriarchal society. As Luciana
Percovich, one of the main protagonists in that movement recalls, issues
related to the body and health contributed to establish unexpected bonds
among women of different classes and cultural backgrounds. The body
played a crucial role, more important than others, in bringing together
depoliticised and militant women, housewives and workers, mothers and
daughters, trade unionists and middle-class women (Percovich 2005, 37).
It was an experience of commonality that enabled many women to
denaturalise fears and anxieties about one’s own body and sexuality,
insofar as they could recognise similarities in the stories told by other
women about their own bodily and/or sexual experiences: “Slowly, we
began to grasp the refusal of the masculine norm, we acquired self-
assurance beyond man. The anxiety of being ill, being solely responsible
for subjective and personal inabilities, for what was going wrong, vanished
when we understood, together with others, that all this was happening
because there was biological discrimination against us” (Percovich 2005,
39).
Many of these groups, both in the US and in Europe, had also learned
how to conduct pelvic examinations and routine abortions. Within the
counterculture of the time, the “return to nature” endorsed by feminists,
environmentalists and pacifists was part of a larger social agenda including
anti-racism, anti-militarism and anti-capitalism. In the specific case of
breastfeeding, the appeal to nature was part of an ultimate political
intention of boycotting multinational companies that produced powdered
milk and commercialised it in a very irresponsible way, especially in Third
World (developing) countries. As Adrienne Rich noticed, feminist
awareness went along with other political stands—stands that did not last.
It should be noted that the League never explicitly made a stand
against multinationals like Nestlé or took a stance on political issues such
as abortion and divorce. However, its growing appeal in the US in the 70s
can be explained with reference to a “generation weaned on ecology”
(Blum 1999, 45). Far from remaining antagonist and radical, the spirit that
moved the massive “return to nature” of a generation seeking new cultural
models and criticising existing ones became influential in changing
doctors’ minds and beliefs regarding feminine bodies and maternal milk.
124 Chapter Seven

As Linda Blum notes, “the medical community, meanwhile, could not help
but be influenced by this politicised consciousness, and […] they were
prodded to change by these larger social and cultural forces” (1999, 45). In
1978, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) changed its official
position, affirming: “human milk is superior to infant formulas” and
suggested that “ideally, breast milk should be the only source of nutrients
for the first four to six months” (Blum 1999, 45). Very soon after this
scientific approval of the superiority of human milk it became common to
consider formula-fed children as “immunologic orphan[s]”, devoid of the
“natural protection” that mother’s milk alone could give them. In a
complex entanglement of actors and discourses the naturalistic argument
of the alternative groups of the 70s, as well as the mystical one of the
League, were eventually appropriated by official medical discourse. Peace,
love and immunisation went hand in hand, promoting a return to nature
that involved women and their bodies in a suspect and potentially
conservative political, moral and biological set of guidelines for good
motherhood.

4.
The insistence on “natural” breastfeeding is problematic when we consider
the many difficulties breastfeeding can cause women. Many problems can
arise, both physical (e.g. insufficient production, breast pain) and
psychological. Exclusive breastfeeding requires a 24-hour present mother
with no possibility to “outsource”, even for a short time, the care of the
newborn. Today, it is in fact assumed that every woman is naturally able
to meet the “minimal standards” of exclusive breastfeeding for the first six
months, if she is simply provided with the “right” education and the
“right” advice. But if breastfeeding is something so “natural” and
“instinctual”, why is there a need for detailed training and education for it
to be successful? If it is so natural, why do nurses, obstetricians, doctors,
and self-help groups feel the need to promote it so extensively and
repeatedly? As Oakley argues, “like natural childbirth, natural infant
feeding has become fashionable in a society that is technological ‘by
nature’” (1979, 166). Breastfeeding, moreover, as a set of discourses of
power/knowledge, seizes the female body in a typically bio-political way:
women, both in self-help groups or as responsible mothers formed by
handbooks promoting breastfeeding, become themselves responsible for
their own discipline and surveillance. It might be true, as Charlotte
Faircloth (2011) has noted, that extensive breastfeeding can be a
successful and empowering practice that women undertake in order to
 Safe for Life: Neoliberalism and Mothers’ Milk 125

respond to a drive of “affect” that is crucial to their identity as mothers;

but what I think is worth considering, in order to grasp the neoliberal
imperative of our times, is not the specific or militant experience of
minority groups of mothers who define themselves as “lactivists”, but the
political “substance” of breastfeeding as a hegemonic discourse that
encompasses women’s bodies and women’s role as mothers.
The discourses I am considering in fact comprise medical arguments
mixed with moral/mystical ones, and what is interesting is the effect this
mix produces: it convinces mothers that breastfeeding is not only “safe”
and “healthy”, but also something desirable and pleasant. For those who
continue to feel pain, or experience scarce milk production or boredom in
breastfeeding, the result is moral and biological guilt tinged with a slightly
perceptible charge of frigidity. A bad mother is either one who is
physically bad, since she does not have enough milk, or one who is
morally bad, since she does not try hard enough or refuses to enjoy
breastfeeding her child. As Michelle Crossley pointed out, women are
today “increasingly being inculcated with a strong cultural pressure to
breastfeed” (2009, 75) and many women experience a strong sense of
marginalisation and desolation. Crossley quotes several studies which
likewise argue that breastfeeding has been so heavily promoted that some
women experience it as being crucial to their identity as mothers, imposing
an almost religious fervor on their breastfeeding experience (2009, 76).ii
Likewise, sociologist Ellie Lee notes: “women feel guilt and failure, since
culture validates breastfeeding through associating it with “good” and
“successful” mothering” (2007, 93).
To promote motherhood as a “natural” achievement associated with
everything that is “good” and “authentic”, or to consider motherhood a
“discourse of the obvious” (Doane 1987, 71) means to locate motherhood
dangerously outside the public sphere in a sort of extra-social and extra-
historical dimension that elevates femininity to an “exclusive” dimension
and renders it suspiciously close to animality. In this context,
breastfeeding represents a medicalised, discursive strategy that tends to
discipline the female body, and a generic appeal to nature that tends to
“normalise” femininity (thereby discrediting individual and embodied
female experiences, together with women’s freedom). What can be called
the postmodern maternity mystique (echoing Friedan’s famous feminist
text of the 1960s) is, precisely, the implementation of moralising and
biologising discourses that affect women’s bodies in new and unexpected
ways. Far from being the expression of a “self finally freed from male
control”, breastfeeding discourses shackle the female body and women’s
lives by “recommending” disciplining practices that are actually binding,
126 Chapter Seven

insofar as they are reinforced by a supposedly “feminine nature”. As Lee

has observed in a sociological study on formula-feeding mothers: in the
context of the modern family, motherhood is characterised by a
contradiction between the relegation of mothering to the private sphere
and the existence of manifold interventions that seek to define and regulate
mothering (2007, 303).
The philosophy that La Leche League endorses, which is available in
many different languages on the La Leche League website, appears on the
surface to be a simple one:

Mothering through breastfeeding is the most natural and effective way of

understanding and satisfying the needs of the baby.
Mother and baby need to be together early and often to establish a
satisfying relationship and an adequate milk supply.
In the early years the baby has an intense need to be with his mother,
which is as basic as his need for food.
Human milk is the natural food for babies, uniquely meeting their
changing needs.
Ideally the breastfeeding relationship will continue until the baby
outgrows the need.
(La Leche League website, http://www.llli.org/philosophy.html?m=1,0,1)

This set of principles is also promoted by the World Health

Organisation, which provides a series of undisputable “facts” about the
link between children’s health and breastfeeding. Health policies regarding
breastfeeding are globally similar, at least in terms of the “philosophy”
behind them (Knaack 2006, 412).
The breastfeeding discourse seems, then, to confirm what both Rich
and Foucault were discovering in the 1970s and 1980s, namely that new
types of power are at work on human bodies. Their effects are still
unforeseen and in order to study them we need to change and renew our
political vocabulary. In order to understand the changing control strategies
over women’s bodies, the notion of bio-politics is perhaps more useful
than that of oppression and/or subordination. Yet the conceptual
framework of bio-politics cannot be used as if all bodies are the same, as if
this very framework could be implemented as a gender-neutral category.
At work in this complex and multi-layered sphere of the politics of life
itself (Rose 2007) are specific gendered factors that affect women’s
bodies, women’s choices and their freedom in a new form. As stated
above, what is in fact typical of the bio-political power is that it does not
work with prohibitions and punishments, but via normalisation strategies
that engage subjects in a process of adaptation to what is expected of them
and what is considered normal. Modern individuals, in other words,
 Safe for Life: Neoliberalism and Mothers’ Milk 127

become agents of their own normalisation to the extent that they are
subjected to, and become invested in, the categories, classifications and
norms propagated by scientific and administrative discourses, which
purport to reveal the “truth” of their identities. Modern disciplinary society
can therefore dispense with direct forms of repression and constraint
because social control is achieved by means of subtler strategies of
normalisation—strategies that produce self-regulating, “normalised”
individuals (Armstrong n.d.).
Breastfeeding, in this context, has become a field in which we can
easily detect how a process of normalisation is expected from women who
wish to be good mothers. Breastfeeding touches upon bio-political issues
such as the quality and health of the population, and the quality and health
of families, children and mothers. Motherly goodness, as expressed in the
breastfeeding discourses, is therefore not as private as it appears: these
discourses’ sphere of influence is vast and encompasses biological, moral,
political and economic aspects.

5.
As Foucault noted, in his 1978–79 course at the Collège de France (2008),
the issue of managing life and health as political problems is central in
neoliberal philosophies about the growth and amelioration of the quality of
the population. A policy of human capital, for example, as Foucault was
finding in the theories of Austrian-born economists Ludwig Von Mises
and Friedrich Von Hayek, is a policy that manages life directly; one in
which the human body takes on the value of an economic and social
investment (Forti and Guaraldo 2006, 60). The concept of human capital
encompasses everything we do: how much we eat, our recreational
activities, our sexual life, our social environment, family influences, the
care and attention we receive, what happens to us, and what we inherit:
“The concept of human capital blurs the border between the productive
and reproductive sphere, the economic and the social, production and
consumption, in the sense that the cost-benefit calculus is extended and
disseminated to all social practices; the family is not immune to all these”
(Casalini 2015, 48–49).iii
As Jerome Kagan has noted, “how one raises a child is now one of the
few remaining ways in public life that we can prove our moral worth. In
other cultures and in other eras, this could be done by caring for one’s
elders, participating in social movements, providing civic leadership, and
volunteering. Now, in the United States, childrearing has largely taken
128 Chapter Seven

their place. Parenting books have become, literally, our bibles” (Kagan
1994, 43).
Just as children become the only public sign of their parents’ moral
worth, an obsessive attention to children’s health and well-being has
developed as the only remaining value adults have in common. This is
another way of saying what Adrienne Rich said in 1986: our only “public”
concerns now refer to health and nutrition; our previous political stances
have become invisible, unimportant and secondary.
In the breastfeeding protocols, promoted by both medical associations
and women’s groups, we can see all these factors at work in their complex
entanglement. While carrying out a specific bio-political task—promoting
a healthy population—they also work in the direction of a neoliberal
activation of the value of individual “human capital” by stating, for
example, that mother’s milk “boosts the IQ”. iv While doing so, these
discourses establish a precise and morally tinged notion of motherhood
that each woman can and should incarnate. They, in other words,
normalise motherhood as the “natural” sphere of nutrition, care and
devotion, and since they are not imposed on women but implemented by
self-help groups, they clearly demonstrate how female individuals
“voluntarily subject themselves to self-surveillance and self-normalisation”
(Bordo 1993, 27). Thus, women as mothers become efficient agents of a
neoliberal ideology that expects them to be “natural” in order to prepare
their children for a healthy and therefore successful life.
As Brunella Casalini has noted, the forms in which the control of
women’s body are manifested have changed dramatically in recent years,
in line with what Nicholas Rose has called “biological citizenship”: that is,
the invitation to consider our own biological life as a matter of choice,
decision and therefore individual responsibility. In other words, control
takes place through shifting responsibility from the collective to the
individual. From the pill to prenatal screenings and to breastfeeding,
women are called upon to individually manage the risks of reproduction
and, consequently, face an overload of responsibility and ethical dilemmas
(Casalini 2011, 337)
What is at stake here is a biologisation, commodification and
moralisation of women’s bodies. While these processes take place in a
private and even intimate sphere, they resonate with a public one involving
the population and even the species. It is as if—put simply—the future of
the species is reliant upon on the willingly breastfeeding mother.
At the same time, the lactation practices set out by specific medical and
well-being discourses affect not only the mother, but also the whole
family. The family becomes a training ground, solely responsible for an
 Safe for Life: Neoliberalism and Mothers’ Milk 129

infant’s future accomplishments and successes. It all starts with a good

mother, who is and must be conscious of the biological power of her
breast.
According to Bryan Turner (2008), today’s government of the body is
a substitute for ontological and existential certainties provided traditionally
by religion. To be able to shape and train one’s body can give the
individual a sense of control. Breastfeeding can be seen as a specific type
of management of the body, one that not only affects the individual but
represents a larger social investment.

6.
The “health and safety” culture of risk prevention has increasingly invaded
the family since neoliberal economies have transferred the burden of care
from the welfare state to the nuclear family, or from the welfare state to
the social-investment state, which has been critiqued as a wolf in sheep’s
clothing (McKeen 2007). In order to be competitive one needs to be
healthy and strong; this is why the background against which apparently
natural breastfeeding discourses are endorsed is dangerously tinged with
biologising and almost eugenic creeds. As a twenty-one-year-old mother
put it: “All this energy I put into him, all this, everything I give him, you
know, I want to give him everything that I know that I, you know,
nutritionally, you know, and now I’ve seen test results the longer you
nurse the higher their IQ and less chances for cancer and asthma and all of
those benefits. I mean, how can you not want to give your child those
benefits?” (Stearns 1999, 320).v
Parents today experience a lot of anxiety about their children’s safety
in many different ways. In early infancy, safety is seen as something the
mother can provide via exclusive breastfeeding, temporarily calming
anxieties over the child’s health. As children grow older, safety is linked to
the numerous perils parents feel their children could encounter if left alone
outdoors, so kids are not only less independent than previous generations
but also often bored indoors (if not permanently engaged with video
games), and parents feel responsible for their boredom. As Jennifer Senior
notes, keeping a child safe, preventing him or her from encountering social
dangers (bad influences, bad schools, bad neighbourhoods), becomes a
strain for many middle-class parents in the US especially, but also in
Europe. It becomes a job in itself, often a very frustrating one (Senior
2014, 234–35). It seems, in other words, that bio-political and neoliberal
culture (that of safety and success, risk prevention and optimisation of
energies, talents and ambition) walks hand in hand with the hyper-
130 Chapter Seven

scheduled life of today’s children and teenagers, which establishes patterns

of parental behaviour that the parents are hardly able to contest. It is
difficult to convince parents that not all children will have a happy life,
and the idea of raising children in a world devoid of suffering,
unhappiness and trauma is a dangerous delusion. As British psychiatrist
Adam Phillips notes, “sane parenting always involves a growing sense of
how little, as well as how much, one can protect one’s child from; of just
how little life can be programmed” (2005, 220). However, the wisdom
parents should have as adults is progressively erased by the obsession with
a safety and success-driven culture, where anxiety for the future is
indivisible from the indisputable need to be competitive. Safety and risk
prevention are not strategies of care and respect for human vulnerability
but the quickest way to bypass human fragility and vulnerability, as if
humans could and should be built—from infancy—as invulnerable beings.
If biology has become a “matter of choice”, why should one choose to be
weak and ill? Parenthood itself has become a way in which we can not
only prove our moral worth, but also the value of our human capital.
Needless to say, the effects of these discourses are not only psychological
but also political. The entrepreneurial model is based on the assumption
that one has to take risks in order to succeed, to “gamble” on oneself and
others, and entails the erasure or banning of relations based on
horizontality and disinterestedness. That which has been defined as the
pleasure of the company of peers (Arendt 1963, 120) and which, according
to Hannah Arendt, is at the basis of political engagement and action, seems
to be disappearing from the social imaginary in these neoliberal times. The
ethical consequences of the pervasive insistence on the normative notion
of a competitive, risk-taking, ambitious self are far from being properly
assessed; yet it seems, even at a first, superficial glance, that they will turn
out to work in the direction of a progressive de-politicisation of our life-
worlds.

7.
Motherhood, tied as it is to biological, bodily and moral aspects of being,
seems to challenge, in various ways, the rationalising functions of logos.
Since ancient times, therefore, arduous control over women’s bodies has
been exercised in order to hinder women from appropriating the
generational and biological aspects of their being. Adrienne Rich’s Of
Woman Born aimed at investigating exactly those patriarchal anxieties
surrounding motherhood, in order to uncover its different meanings;
meanings that did not comply with norms of “nature” and “sacrifice”.
 Safe for Life: Neoliberalism and Mothers’ Milk 131

According to Rich, those meanings still lie undiscovered, especially for

women, and it was time for them to explore motherhood for themselves.
Yet, as stated above, a new, unexpected “trap” was awaiting even feminist
mothers.
In this article I have dealt with the possibility of disentangling the
complex set of discourses that set up this new trap. This is why I
considered it useful to draw on Foucault’s notion of bio-power and his
subsequent interpretation of neoliberalism. Yet, alongside bio-politics and
neoliberalism, what one can detect behind the emergence of converging
discourses around motherhood is a reaction, a backlash towards women’s
freedom. Whenever women’s role in society has undergone major
changes, a stricter control over motherhood in general has been observed,
as if motherhood remained the sole stable and firm institution able to grant
society and humanity their continuation. Society can change radically—as
was the case with the French Revolution—but the “home”, the “family”
and the “mother” should remain unaltered—or, better, should be kept
under strict legal and cultural control (Pateman 1988, 18–9). According to
Sharon Hay (1996) whenever the free market threatens the home, women
feel greater pressure to engage in intensive mothering. Whenever women
gained some measure of education or independence, “the pendulum often
took a wild swing backwards, with the culture suddenly churning out the
unambiguous message that women ought to be seated back at the hearth”
(Senior, 2014, 151–2).
Despite the fact that patriarchalism has nowadays diminished its
control over women’s bodies and a great deal of legal and political
equality has been achieved, new forms of subordination have emerged,
which have at their centres imperatives of safety, success and health which
inevitably retrace disciplining borders around women’s bodies.
Patriarchalism, in other words, has not been weakened but has adjusted to
women’s new roles in society. It is no longer a repressive apparatus but an
adaptive, even seductive one (Giolo 2014; Guaraldo 2011). In its renewed
form it acts as a subtle control over women’s bodies, one that does not
express itself through prohibitions or limitations of freedom, but by
inciting women to “invest” in their biological potential, be that the
production of breast milk or the creation of an attractive, sexy body.
Control now operates through a continuous appeal for normalisation.
The ironic aspect of this new control over women’s bodies is that it is
somehow rooted in women’s struggle for bodily freedom. Patriarchalism,
one may argue, has adapted to women’s freedom, finding in the bodily
aspect of their daily struggles a space within which renewed control can
take hold. Neoliberal views on health, well-being and human capital have
132 Chapter Seven

provided the socio-economic framework necessary to this resurgent

patriarchal foothold in women’s lives.
This is evident in a country like Italy, where, as I noted above, a very
strong Women’s Health Movement contributed in the 1970s to the
promotion of important feminist issues in society. Yet during the 80s and
90s the country witnessed the emergence of a new type of patriarchalism,
one that resulted in highly sexualised representations of female bodies in
popular television programmes. Patriarchalism adapted to the post-1968
era and instead of controlling or censoring women’s sexual behavior
confined them to simply being present on the screen as sexy and available
bodies that stimulate and confirm masculine heterosexual desires and
power. The epitome of the Italian man who freely enjoys available young
women’s bodies—who are, in turn, happy to give themselves over to
him—has been embodied in the Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who
built a large portion of his political consensus on carefully mediatised
sexual politics. Television programmes on Berlusconi’s media offered
daily entertainment programmes hosted by male presenters and populated
with large numbers of young female bodies, used as “frame” or as
“ornament”. In those decades, new discourses regarding intensive
motherhood, natural delivery and extensive breastfeeding started to
circulate, with overtones and arguments much more similar to those
elaborated by La Leche League than to those of the 70s feminist health
movement. Women’s bodies became caught in new traps—the sexualised
media discourses of Berlusconi’s television programmes and arguments
regarding motherhood and the importance of breastfeeding. It was as if
two stereotypes of femininity presented themselves in a new fashion—
adapted, as it were, to neoliberal and bio-political times. In both cases,
patriarchal ideology did not prohibit conduct and free choice for women. It
simply encouraged them to “invest” in themselves, in their bodies, both as
sexual assets to be exploited in order to make money and gain success, and
as maternal bodies devoted to the health, safety and well-being of their
offspring—that is, to their future success in a competitive society.
The contemporary success and pervasiveness of health and beauty
discourses regarding women’s bodies and women’s generative functions
tell us that women are particularly sensitive to normalisation, perhaps
because they still strive for social approval. At the same time, the de-
politicisation of earlier feminism messages left women to deal individually
with the issue of social recognition. As Judith Warner has pointed out,
what today’s women lack in their efforts to cope with anxiety, is a public,
collective dimension in which to express and rationalise their personal
unease: “The current culture of motherhood […] while it inspires
 Safe for Life: Neoliberalism and Mothers’ Milk 133

widespread complaint, has not led to any kind of organized movement for
change […] our generation has turned all the energy that we might be
directing outwards—to, say, making the world a better place—inward
instead, where it has been put to the questionable purpose of our own self-
perfection” (Warner 2005, 54–55).
Warner laments the lack of political awareness and political hope, and
a lack of belief in our political culture or our institutions. This structural
lack of faith, or “learned helplessness”, as Warner calls it, has, in my
opinion, to do with neoliberal ideology but also with the re-privatisation of
women’s lives. To put it differently, the private is no longer “political” but
simply “bio-political”. Becoming “public” therefore simply means firstly,
adjusting to the well-being standards promoted by medical discourses and
secondly, becoming “normalised” (according to the dictates of the most
recent scientific discoveries, and thereby, feeling morally and socially
acceptable). The only thing we can consider “public” and able to share is,
in other words, our health. To put it in Arendtian terms, to be obsessed
with one’s own health and body implies neglecting the “world we have in
common” (Arendt 1958, 57). This is why a depoliticisation of our lives is
happening—to ensure a politics of life itself, that is, of life in its abstract,
biological and disembodied aspects.
The aim of this article has been to criticise the widespread, hegemonic
assumption that “breast is best”, an assumption promoted by both
institutional and alternative organisations devoted to pregnancy and
childbirth. The aim here has also been to investigate the—as yet—
unexplored bio-political and neoliberal implications of breastfeeding
campaigns, policies and arguments globally implemented by the World
Health Organisation and organisations like La Leche League. I have
argued that breast milk and the socio-biological obsession with it represent
the ultimate contemporary form of bio-power; current pseudo-scientific
assertions claim it is not only the best infant food but also the miraculous
substance that enables the human species to defy illness, to boost
intelligence and to produce a healthy social body. I have also highlighted
how the bio-political aims of the breastfeeding campaigns, at least in the
West, return women to the dangerous realm of “nature”. It is my
conviction that the political implications of such a phenomenon are
conservative and reveal an (as yet) underestimated aspect of bio-power.
The docility with which women—after feminism, after emancipation, after
“gender”—submit themselves to yet another controlling model should
make feminist scholars reflect not only on the theoretical implications of
this issue, but also on the political ones. In order to do so, I have tried to
explore the ambiguities and contradictions of a gendered bio-politics and
134 Chapter Seven

questioned the social and political aspects of “safe”, “exclusive”, “natural”

motherhood and its inevitable mystique. This, however, does not mean
that we must abandon motherhood as a field for feminist research. The
challenge is exactly the one posed by Adrienne Rich almost forty years
ago: namely, to fully understand the power and powerlessness of
motherhood in patriarchal cultures, both old and new.

References
Arendt, H. 1963. On Revolution. New York: Viking Press.
—. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Armstrong, A. (n.d.). “Michel Foucault: Feminism.” Internet
Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Date of access: April 20, 2016. Retrieved
from: http://www.iep.utm.edu/foucfem/
Bordo, S. 1993. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the
Body. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Blum, L. 1999. At the Breast: Ideologies of Breastfeeding and Motherhood
in the Contemporary United States. Boston: Beacon Press.
Casalini, B. 2011. “Libere di Scegliere? Patriarcato, Libertà e Autonomia
in Una Prospettiva di Genere.” Etica & Politica 13(2): 329–364.
—. 2015. “Neoliberalismo e Femminismi.” Jura Gentium 12 (1): 31–65
Crossley, M. 2009. “Breastfeeding as a Moral Imperative: An
Autoethnographic Study.” Feminism & Psychology 19(1): 71–87.
Doane, M.A. 1987. The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Faircloth, C. 2011. “‘It Feels Right in My Heart’: Affective Accountability
in Narratives of Attachment.” The Sociological Review 59(2): 283–
302.
Forti, S. and Guaraldo, O. 2006. “Rinforzare la Specie: il Corpo
Femminile Tra Biopolitica e Religione Materna.” Filosofia Politica
20(1): 57–76.
Foucault, M. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de
France (1978–79). Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
—. 1998. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge.
London: Penguin Books.
Giolo, O. 2014. “Il Patriarcato Adattivo e la Soggettività Politica Delle
Donne” in La Soggettività Politica Delle Donne. Proposte per un
Lessico Critico, eds. Giolo, O., and Re, L., 203–219. Rome: Aracne.
Guaraldo, O. 2011. “Insignificante Padrone. Media, Sesso e Potere
nell’Italia Contemporanea” in Filosofia di Berlusconi. L’Essere e il
 Safe for Life: Neoliberalism and Mothers’ Milk 135

Nulla Nell’Italia Contemporanea, ed. Chiurco, C., 97–128. Verona:

Ombre Corte.
Hay, S. 1996. The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. New Haven:
Yale University Press.
Kagan, J. 1994. “Our Babies, Our Selves.” The New Republic, September
5.
Knaak, S. 2006. “The Problem with Breastfeeding Discourse.” Canadian
Journal of Public Health 97(5): 412–414.
Lee, E. 2007. “Infant Feeding in Risk Society.” Health, Risk and Society
9(3): 295–309.
McKeen, W. 2007. “The National Children's Agenda: A Neoliberal Wolf
in Lamb's Clothing.” Studies in Political Economy 80(Autumn): 151–
173.
New York Times 1996. “Breast-Feeding is Tied to Brain Power.” The New
York Times, January 6. Retrieved from:
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/01/06/science/breast-feeding-is-tied-to-
brain-power.html
Oakley, A. 1979. From Here to Maternity: Becoming a Mother. Oxford:
Martin Robertson.
Oksala, J. 2013. “Feminism and Neoliberal Governmentality.” Foucault
Studies 16(September): 32–53.
Pateman, C. 1988. “The Disorder of Women: Women, Love and the Sense
of Justice” in The Disorder of Women, Democracy, Feminism and
Political Theory, 17–33. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Percovich, L. 2005. La Coscienza del Corpo. Donne, Salute e Medicina
Negli Anni Settanta. Milan: Franco Angeli.
Phillips, A. 2005. Going Sane. New York: Harper Collins.
Rich, A. 1986. “Ten Years Later: A New Introduction” in Of Woman
Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, 12–13. New York:
W.W. Norton and Co.
Rose, N. 2007. The Politics of Life Itself. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Sawicki, J. 1991. “Disciplining Mothers: Feminism and the New
Reproductive Technologies” in Disciplining Foucault: Feminism,
Power and the Body, 67–69. New York: Routledge, Chapman and
Hall.
Senior, J. 2014. All Joy and No Fun. The Paradox of Modern Parenthood.
New York: Ecco.
Sfez, L. 1995. La Santé Parfaite. Paris: Le Seuil.
Stearns, C. 1999. “Breastfeeding and the Good Maternal Body.” Gender
and Society 13(3): 308–25.
136 Chapter Seven

Turner, B. 2008. The Body and Society. Explorations in Social Theory.

London: Sage Press.
Wall, G. 2001. “Moral Constructions of Motherhood in Breastfeeding
Discourse.” Gender and Society 15(4): 592–610.
Warner, J. 2005. Perfect Madness, Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety. New
York: Riverhead Books.

Notes

i. For a critical assessment of the bio-political implications of the US women’s

health movement in the 70s and its legacy, see Sawicki J. 1991. “Disciplining
Mothers: Feminism and the New Reproductive Technologies” in Disciplining
Foucault: Feminism, Power and the Body, 67–69. New York: Routledge,
Chapman and Hall.
ii. The author wants to “further explore some of the psychosocial, emotional and
moral aspects associated with breastfeeding and thus to deepen the understanding
of breastfeeding as a cultural phenomenon” (2009, 74).This is done via a critical
auto-ethnographic method with the aim of “providing a deeper understanding of
the way in which the ‘personal’ relates to the ‘cultural’” (Crossley 2009, 74).
iii . See also Oksala, J. 2013. “Feminism and Neoliberal Governmentality.”
Foucault Studies, 16(September): 32–53.
iv. See “Breastfeeding is Tied to Brain Power.” New York Times, January 6, 1998.
Retrieved from: http://www.nytimes.com/1998/01/06/science/breast-feeding-is-
tied-to-brain-power.html; see also, G. Pittman 2011. “Breastfeeding Tied to Kids’
Brainpower” Reuters, September 1. Retrieved from:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/01/us-breastfeeding-brainpower-
idUSTRE7805M820110901
v. See also Wall, G. 2001. “Moral Constructions of Motherhood in Breastfeeding
Discourse.” Gender and Society 15(4): 592–610.
MEDITATING THE NEOLIBERAL FAMILY
 CHAPTER EIGHT

SELLING HEAVEN:
EVANGELICAL NATALISM
IN 19 KIDS AND COUNTING

J.A. FORBES

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the
spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that
spectrum (Noam Chomsky 1998, 43).

At first glance, a chapter on evangelical Christianity in the US might not

seem relevant to a collection dedicated to neoliberalism and the family.
However, this chapter proposes that in America, evangelical Christianity
and neoliberalism are, historically, fundamentally linked through an
eschatological philosophy that is ideologically suited to both late
capitalism and present-day evangelism. These connections are primarily in
shared belief in magical thinking, the Protestant work ethic, and a
conception of the human subject that is independent and self-determining.
In this view, the family is the elementary social unit but also an incubator
for competition, an observation Alexis de Tocqueville made as early as the
1830s (Janara 2001). Presciently, he also identifies the narrowing of the
political spectrum in Democracy in America, and this a scant fifty years
after the Revolution (Kalberg 1997).
In this sense, the process of narrowing the media spectrum that
Chomsky identifies in the above quote, taken from The Common Good
(1998) began much earlier. It will be argued here that American television
about families largely serves to reinforce a narrow range of discursive
possibility. In particular, it will be demonstrated that the American blend
of capitalist and evangelical ideologies normalises a political and social
culture largely resistant to all but hegemonic performances of subjectivity
and family. This chapter will be concerned with developing this analysis,
explicating the linkages between neoliberalism, the Protestant work ethic,
and eschatological evangelism through a critical reading of 19 Kids and
 Selling Heaven: Evangelical Natalism in 19 Kids and Counting 139

Counting, a popular American reality TV show (now cancelled) about the

evangelical Duggar family. It will also offer a feminist-inspired critique of
these representations.
This argument advances five central claims regarding evangelical
iterations of the family in pop culture. Firstly, it posits that mainstream
evangelicals employ a simplistic and literalist eschatology or theology of
“end times”. Secondly, it proposes that American pop culture currently
operates with a reduced view of the Protestant work ethic in terms of
consumption rather than production (Wisman 2013, Weber 1992). Thirdly,
it claims that representations of family on American television, whether
“real” or fictional are actually only superficially distinct despite what
appear to be huge ideological and representational differences (Adorno
1997, Bartholomaeus and Riggs 2016). Fourthly, it will demonstrate that
such representations operate discursively to limit the realm of the possible
for most families by promoting unrealistic options. Finally it argues that
these mediated narratives of family function as an ideological foil to
anything more than basic democratic participation, dovetailing perfectly
with the corporatist and largely anti-humanist policies of the neoliberal
state.
The critical methodology employed here is Foucauldian discourse
analysis; it also borrows from feminist scholars bell hooks, Patricia Hill
Collins, and from Meille Chandler’s writing on the family and motherhood
(Chandler 2013, Foucault 2008, hooks 2013, Hill Collins 2013). What
emerges is a view of the family as a series of relations, not defined in
terms of independent agents named “mother”, “father” or “child”; rather, it
is a view in which these relationships are regarded as highly communicative,
intersubjective, and fluid. In essence, these writers are advancing the idea
that a family is more than the sum of its parts. It will be argued that what is
being normalised in the American popular media ecology are near
impossible exemplars of both subjects and families (Koshy 2013). These
neoliberal and evangelical subjects are reductively constructed as self-
determining rather than interdependent (Ardalan 2014, Friedman 1962,
Hayek 1978, Smith 2002). This rigid construction of identity serves to
burden families, by narrowing discursive possibility, creating competition
within the family, and associating economic success with right moral
action.
Neoliberalism and evangelism share a common thread of faith in the
intangible, whether it is Adam Smith’s invisible hand (Smith 2002,
Ardalan 2014), Friedrich Hayek’s derivative principle spontaneous order
(Hayek 1978), or a paternalistic Christian God who guides human destiny
through direct intervention. The orientation of the neoliberal subject acting
140 Chapter Eight

rationally in their own self-interest and the Christian subject with respect
to the divine is supposed to ensure right moral action in both neoliberal
economics and evangelical theology (Smith 2002). Furthermore, the
Protestant work ethic, which is defined through the spiritual duty of the
subject to self-determine through labour, unites not only neoliberalism and
evangelism in America, but also a large portion of the population,
regardless of partisan affiliation (Perkin 1999, Uhlmann 2014, Woodbury
1998). In the United States, this has produced an ideological shift,
beginning in the early twentieth century with the mass migration from
agriculture to industry, in which free market capitalism, work and
consumption have been conflated (Wisman 2013). Essentially, work and
consumption become interchangeable. The rise of commercial advertising
as a paradigm produced the ground through which this “logic” of late
capitalism was made possible: I buy, therefore, I am.
The idea that capitalism is beneficial to the majority of people is an a
priori in most conservative and neoliberal thinking, at least in America
(Smith 2002). Eschatology, or the branch of theology concerned with
apocalypse, heaven, and the afterlife is one of the guiding philosophical
pillars of the modern evangelical movement. The associated and ongoing
reiterations of fin de siècle millennialism and the associated fundamentalism
in Christianity are not unique to the American cultural landscape, but are a
recurring feature (Woodbury, Smith 1998). Eschatological thinking
permeates American economic and political history. This is manifested
both explicitly and latently in popular texts, most particularly with respect
to television, the medium in which evangelicals have found their widest
audience (Hadden 1987, Perkin 1999). As I’ve argued above, the effects of
economic austerity and thrift in the neoliberal paradigm have historical
antecedents in eschatological thought and the Protestant work ethic. The
impoverishment of these twin ideological foundations of American culture
has produced a correlative intellectual austerity (Wisman 2013), one that
limits the possible while presenting the illusion of a comprehensive
diversity of thought and action (Wisman et al. 2013). As such, American
reality television centring on evangelical lifestyles, and in particular TLC’s
19 Kids and Counting, provides a fertile ground for an investigation into
eschatology and the family in contemporary American culture.

Eschatology in America and the Protestant Work Ethic

Eschatology is, in its simplest form, theology or philosophy of “end
times”. It has to do with the question of the afterlife and how best to
achieve it. In the evangelical Christian sense, this means “Rapture to
 Selling Heaven: Evangelical Natalism in 19 Kids and Counting 141

Heaven” for the righteous, following the second coming of Christ, and the
damnation of the sinners left behind. However, from a phenomenological
perspective, eschatology is a much more nuanced theological position. The
eschatological moment or time, according to Martin Heidegger in The
Phenomenology of Religious Life (2004), is characterised by atemporal
historicity, or a “proximity to”. There is a sense of mindfulness in
eschatological time according to Heidegger, one that counters the frenetic
urgency in current evangelism and capitalism (Heidegger 2004, Tonning
2009). Eschatological philosophy and theology is in this sense, also the
source of ideologies of end times.
The thread of literal, end times eschatology and persecution is woven
into American history and the American cultural landscape (Perkin 1999).
Christianity has played an important although problematic role in
American political life from the first moments of colonisation. From the
Puritans through to the nineteenth-century revival movement and in the
current evangelical empire which extends deep into politics, there exists a
common belief that evangelicals are righteous outcasts waiting for the
apocalypse (apokaluptein / “opening up”) and subsequent rapture that is
always “just around the corner”. Among these, Puritanism is a
foundational theological position. It is important to note, however, that the
term “Puritan” is an umbrella term which refers to a plethora of evolving
Orthodox Calvinist sects of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries—first
in the Old World, and then on both continents.
Generally, Puritanism is characterised by stricter biblical fundamentalism,
millennialism (or apocalyptic beliefs) and a strong belief in the central
importance of the patriarch of the family in political and public life (Perkin
1999). Moreover, the broad theological umbrella of Calvinism presented a
new kind of Christian subject: one that was, like the Cartesian subject,
radically self-determining and moreover chaste in terms of relationships
(even within the family) when compared to Catholic views of the self
(Kalberg 1997). The Puritans that would settle the Americas did so under
the shadow of persecution in England, so the eschatological traditions and
the symbolic place of a “new world” in early Puritan theology and practice
are doubly reinforced. The contribution of Calvinist/Puritan thinking in
current American democracy is debated, but there is little argument
regarding its foundational historical influence (Uhlmann 2014);
schoolchildren still re-enact a culturally sanitised and heavily fictionalised
arrival of the Pilgrims, annually at Thanksgiving (Perkin 1999, Uhlmann
2014).
The Protestant work ethic, part of that mythology of origin, was
formulated in part by Calvinist theologians. It forms an explicit part of the
142 Chapter Eight

neoliberal ideology that is espoused in the US by Democrats and

Republicans alike. Sociologist Max Weber articulates the successes of this
ideology in his foundational work The Protestant Work Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism (1992). Weber proposes a causal relationship between
modern Capitalism and Lutheran/Calvinist ethics and theology, an
assertion that has proved contentious during the last century (Weber
1992). Here, it is proposed that elements of neoliberal economics and
Christian theology are resonant, and that they operate discursively in a
historical and socio-cultural context in a way that is mutually self-
reinforcing. This position allows us to sidestep the question of causation
and examine how eschatology and the work ethic circulate as ideology in
popular culture.
Although eschatological beliefs inform the practice of religion the
world over, present-day evangelical eschatology is distinctly American
(Woodbury 1998). The Protestant work ethic is one of the founding myths
of American exceptionalism. America has been described as a “city on a
hill” since Puritan John Winthrop first used the description in his 1630
sermon “A Model of Christian Charity”, written before his ship even
landed in the New World. De Tocqueville also uses this metaphor to
describe the effects of Puritanism on American culture. More recently,
Ronald Reagan, who referenced this idea in both his 1984 Republican
Party nomination speech and his 1989 farewell address as President,
advanced this view of American exceptionalism. The source is Matthew
5:14: “You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be
hidden”. From this perspective, the relationship between free market
ideology and eschatological Christianity is more clearly defined, which is
not to say such marriages of politics and theology are uniquely American.
Rather, the American experiment is a unique example in modern
Western democracy, one in which evangelical and eschatological
worldviews continue to shape the political landscape and political
discourse. The broadcast media power of American evangelicals, most
particularly through radio and television, has meant that they are a coveted
and courted demographic. During the last thirty years political power in
the United States is rarely, if ever, consolidated without the support of the
evangelical-conservative base (Green 2009). It should be noted here that
this influence is neither monolithic nor homogenous; eschatology and
evangelism express themselves differently across cultural, racial and
regional spectrums (Perkin 1999, Slessarev-Jamir 2008).
 Selling Heaven: Evangelical Natalism in 19 Kids and Counting 143

Economy: Homes, Heads, Hearts and Hands

Most interpretations of classic liberal economics of the eighteenth century
require some sort of belief in the invisible hand of the market. The source
of this metaphor is philosopher Adam Smith. One of his central offerings
to economic theory is the subjugation of ethical concerns to economic
ones. In other words, he believed that rational agents operating in their
own self-interest in the marketplace can create good as a derivative of that
activity even when it is not in and of itself, good:

The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable.
They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural
selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency,
though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the
thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and
insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their
improvements. They are led by an invisible hand; to make nearly the same
distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had
the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and
thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the
society (Smith, 215).

This, and Smith’s subsequent work Wealth of Nations is the essential

source for the neoliberal free market economics of the Chicago School’s
Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, the central architects of American
neoliberalism. The invisible hand of the market is a perpetually fascinating
object of study amongst neoliberal economists, despite the critique that it
is immaterial and has only metaphorical status (Ardalan 2014). Thus, for
most neoliberal economists, marketplace rationality with respect to the
common good is an article of faith, rather than a proven tenet, and
derivative concepts like trickle-down economics are inherently linked to
just this one assumption in Smith’s work. The belief in an immaterial force
that promotes good in the world (in this case, through the selfishness of
human agents) is not so distant from evangelical iterations of the Judeo-
Christian God.
What is of significance to this argument is how this concept has come
to operate discursively in contemporary politics, somewhat divorced from
its original context. Unsurprisingly, Smith’s immaterial hand has a biblical
archetype—the hand of God as described in the Book of Daniel:

This is the inscription that was written: Mene, mene, tekel, parsin. ‘Here is
what these words mean: Mene: God has numbered the days of your reign
and brought it to an end. Tekel: You have been weighed on the scales and
144 Chapter Eight

found wanting. Peres: Your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes
and Persians.’ Then at Belshazzar’s command, Daniel was clothed in
purple, a gold chain was placed around his neck, and he was proclaimed
the third highest ruler in the kingdom. That very night Belshazzar, king of
the Babylonians was slain, and Darius the Mede took over the kingdom, at
the age of sixty-two (Dan. 5: 25–28 NIV).

The story relates that a divine invisible force judges the end of a
morally corrupt king and his kingdom through the metaphorical expression
of scales (which symbolically wed commerce to morality). The distance
between this eschatological myth from the Old Testament, and Smith’s
invisible hand of the market (which creates moral behaviour through
rational self-interest) is short. From a critical Baconian perspective, the
idols of the tribe (religion) have simply been moved to the marketplace in
Smith’s formulation (Bacon 1905, Smith 2002). It is not therefore difficult
to understand why radical evangelical Protestants embrace the magical
thinking of the invisible hand of the market: it is always already the hand
of God, and in this marriage of capital and creator, morality is frequently
subordinate to economic self-interest. From this viewpoint capitalist
boom-and-bust cycles are eschatological, or at the very least, inclined to
eschatological interpretations.
The word economics (oikonomos) shares the Greek root for home
(oikos) with the theological concept of the Christian world, or living space
(oikoumene), from which the modern word “ecumenical” derives. The
association between the home and the hearth and economic activity in
neoliberal economics is not happenstance, but rather the product of a long
history of theological and philosophical development that places the
family, particularly the father figure, as the mediator between Heaven and
earth (Osiek 1996). He is the provider figure in economic terms and the
link between prosperity in the home and in the land. De Tocqueville
argues that this iteration of family, derived in large part from
Protestantism, revolution, and the shedding of aristocratic rule, is in some
ways uniquely American (Janara 2001). Further, empirical investigation
by sociologists has led to the identification of two key dimensions of
American political thought: religious traditionalism and the ethos of
individualism (Uhlmann 2014).
The connection between Puritan thinking on the family, the Protestant
work ethic, and present-day evangelism is thus brought together (Perkin
1999, Uhlmann 2014). Evangelical theology is indelibly linked to the
work ethic of the Puritan tradition precisely because the two have been
conflated in the American context. The direct ideological link between the
present and the past is reflected in this imagined relationship between the
 Selling Heaven: Evangelical Natalism in 19 Kids and Counting 145

divine family in Heaven and the human family on earth. Economy, for
evangelicals and many other Americans, is a spiritual as well as physical
concern. Very hard work is associated with godliness in the earthy home
and ultimately, political and economic power. Thrift and self-denial form
the ideological backbone of this theological position. The modern
resurgence of evangelism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries might be explained as a reaction to the substitution of thrift by
consumption in the American conception of the work ethic, but this fails to
explain why evangelicals thoroughly embrace free market ideals.
The theological tenet that labour is its own virtue (even in absence of
need) is scattered through the Old Testament, and verses often focus on
the need to do, rather than the need to think or say (Proverbs 14:23,
Proverbs 10:4, Ecclesiastes 9:10). This expression of faith and work was
particularly significant to Protestant conceptions around work and the idea
that work is, in and of itself, inherently good. The combination of the a
priori positive moral value of work with Smith’s ideology of goodness
through competition and self-interest produces a context in which
neoliberal ideology flourishes. It is therefore no surprise that neoliberalism
has gained a strong foothold in American political and social thinking.
Americans are primed by historical circumstance and media representations
and discourse to accept neoliberal iterations of economy, politics and
identity.

Televisual Reality: Intellectual Austerity

and Neoliberal Tropes
While there is a large and growing body of scholarship on popular reality
television such as Survivor, or the Real Housewives series (Cox 2012,
Wilson 2012, Wright 2006), relatively little has been written about the
forays of evangelical Christianity into the genre (Perkin 1999). However,
the growing number of shows presenting rural or conservative Christian
lifestyles in seeming opposition to the regular fare of upper-middle-class
urbanites, (from Here Comes Honey Boo Boo to Duck Dynasty) warrant
closer examination. This analysis should allow us to better understand and
critique how these narratives function discursively in the cultural and
political context of neoliberalism, and whether or not these kinds of shows
represent a real alternative, or simply share many markers with other
shows about families on American television.
Reality television has exploded in popularity, in part due to the
relatively inexpensive cost of production, but also because so-called
“reality shows” are providing voyeuristic pleasure to a widening audience
146 Chapter Eight

of viewers. Reality TV, while presented as an alternative to the contorted

and constructed plots of situation comedies, is arguably just as scripted
and ideologically loaded (Sender 2011). Despite what might seem an
impassable gulf between them in terms of representation, highly
conservative reality shows like 19 Kids and Counting are in fact directly
related to “liberal” situation comedies centred on the family. Scholars have
frequently focused on the novelty and innovation of seemingly diverse and
successful shows like The Simpsons or Modern Family (Glynn 1996,
Neuhaus 2010, Turner 2004). Inarguably, The Simpsons (and to a lesser
extent, Modern Family) have pioneered narrative innovation, increased
representation, and diversity. However, they also simultaneously
participate in the construction of families that are largely nuclear, married,
working, generally white and wealthy, in which women are subordinate to
men, and in which family conflicts are frequently solved through direct
competition (Orbe 2008, Skill 1994).
Arguably, there is little difference between the reality genre and
regular situation comedies when it comes to the discursive construction of
characters and in particular, families. The family is a constant rhetorical
device in American political and cultural discourse. In order to understand
how neoliberal iterations of family operate discursively in 19 Kids and
Counting it will first be important to evaluate the media landscape in
which it is produced and functions. Previously, it has been argued that
American popular culture is deeply rooted in evangelical eschatology. The
common threads present in many popular television shows, e.g.
competition, self-realisation through work or consumption and the
inviolate nature of the heterosexual, white, nuclear family, suggest the
spectrum of difference assumed by viewers and critics alike may not, in
fact, be as wide as suggested by the sheer number of shows and channels
available to contemporary viewers. This dovetails with Chomsky’s
assertion that the political economy of the media-sphere operates in a
hegemonic fashion to limit debate by limiting options (Chomsky 1998).
However, demographics represented on television have been shifting,
and this seems to indicate a move away from earlier ultra-hegemonic
representation of family like those of Leave it to Beaver or The
Honeymooners (Leibman 1995). The family tropes involved in more
recent situation comedies are surprisingly similar. For shows like The
Simpsons (based in no small part on the The Honeymooners and its
cartoon mirror, The Flintstones)—though popular and inarguably ironic in
their deconstruction of many myths of American exceptionalism—there
remains a vibrant trade in conservative iterations of family (Neuhaus
2010). Even the critically acclaimed Modern Family, which is supposed to
 Selling Heaven: Evangelical Natalism in 19 Kids and Counting 147

be a bastion of liberalism, exploits tired tropes of gender, race, class, and

sexuality (Bartholomaeus and Riggs 2016). In many popular television
shows what is still being represented is a unified, usually Christian,
nuclear family. Families in the shows work together, fight together, and
struggle through the plot lines but ultimately stay together. Competition
between family members and resolution is a key aspect in many episodes.
Women are subordinate to men. Violence against women is normalised in
some of these examples, and is a tolerated subtext in others. In an
important way, 19 Kids and Counting attempts to reclaim some of this
“lost ground” by presenting a highly hegemonic and heteronormative
performance of family, although the perception of radical difference in this
case is more likely a product of the radical split between so-called
conservative and liberal world-views than any real differences. Violence
against women remains a staple of the American televisual genre, and
while “liberal” TV families fight, they tend overwhelmingly to stay
married.
TLC’s hit show 19 Kids and Counting features the Duggar Family, a
very large clan of devotees of the evangelical Christian “Quiverfull”
Movement: a far-right political movement with strong natalist beliefs
(McKeown 2010). Natalism is a political philosophy, usually wed to
theology, which advances high birth rates as the key element in a winning
political strategy. It is a doctrine that is inherited from ancient Israel,
which finds its modern reiteration in the Reformation (McKeown 2010).
The Duggars’ show is in many ways a highly constructed and allegorical
recreation of the central theological and political tenets of the Quiverfull
movement. The lack of a critical frame and the sublimation of the
production apparatus, common to the reality genre, normalise and
obfuscate the narrative construction and the very unique socio-economic
circumstances that led to a woman and her husband successfully having
nineteen children. The stated goal of the family enterprise is to proselytise
their way of life through direct political action. While the show purports to
present an alternative lifestyle to the mainstream of pop culture it is rather
arguable that this representation of an American family is aligned with a
significant number of popular television families, past and present. The
size of the Duggar family and its religiosity are in a sense, subordinate to
the common ground this family shares with others in the televisual genre.
The show is produced in a way that normalises the extreme nature of
the movement’s lifestyle using codes and cues taken from the vernacular
of traditional American popular culture. This normalisation is reproduced
on “Michelle’s Blog” and the “Duggar Family Blog”, the de facto online
outlets for the family’s politics of home and hearth. There is a conscious
148 Chapter Eight

effort to show the family as embodying model Christian virtues of

chastity, economy, charity and kindness, and while the various Duggars
may in fact express all these traits, the purely economic luxury that a
family of millionaires possesses with which to perform these identities is
lost in translation. While the Duggar family enterprise is carefully
constructed and coded to present the Quiverfull movement in the most
innocuous and traditionally wholesome manner possible, both Jim Bob
and Michelle work tirelessly to use their notoriety for political purposes,
with Jim Bob (R) serving in the Arkansas House of Representatives from
1999–2002, and Michelle campaigning in 2013–2104 to have a local
ordinance protecting trans persons overthrown on the grounds that it
protected child predators. This political activism, which includes
campaigning for the far-right Rick Santorum (R) in the last election, is
almost completely scrubbed from their sites, show, and publications.
The model of the family promoted by the Duggar clan and the
Quiverfull movement is at once theological and political. This view is also
eschatological, in that the divinely directed raison d’être of the family is
ostensibly to convert and save as many souls as possible for the coming
tribulation at the end of the world. It is also at once messianic and
apocalyptic, but it should not be simply dismissed for this reason. The
political motivation and focus of this sect is mirrored in many other
evangelical Christian sects, and their power and influence in America is
formidable (Dowland 2009, Gorski 2009, Hadden 1987). The Republican
Party is largely incapable of functioning without evangelical support and
even Southern Democrats must adapt their political philosophies along
conservative ideological lines. The result of this forced marriage between
politics and theology is that eschatological thinking blended with radical
capitalist views of the self-determining subject permeates the policy
making of the American state. With respect to the family, this increasingly
means that this ideology encourages less diversity, is averse to socially
progressive ideas, and aids in the ongoing destruction of the social safety
net for millions of poor families on ideological principle (Wisman 2013).
The nativist Quiverfull movement, one of the most radical and
conservative of all patriarchal evangelical sects, is also deeply invested in
eschatological thinking. The Duggar family, headed by Jim Bob Duggar, a
lawyer, preacher, entrepreneur and political hopeful is the quintessential
poster child for this movement, based on a few lines from a single Old
Testament Psalm: “Children are a heritage from the Lord, offspring a
reward from him. Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are children born
in one’s youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They will
 Selling Heaven: Evangelical Natalism in 19 Kids and Counting 149

not be put to shame when they contend with their opponents in court” (Ps.
127: 3–5 NIV).
The central theological tenet of the faith, expressed here, is that it is the
divine duty of the family to produce as many children as possible without
exception of any kind (and this includes abortion, birth control, family
planning, or the life of the mother being at risk) for the coming (and final)
war between good and evil. As such, the role of the woman in the family is
more restricted than what even the most rigidly patriarchal thinker from
most Christian sects would advance. She is required to remain chaste until
marriage. She is not permitted divorce. Her place is in the home. She is to
have no input into finances or important decision-making processes.
Beyond the contentious and literal interpretation of the segment from the
Psalm in question the theology of the movement, directed by a variety of
leaders, is sorely lacking in any real depth and is eschewed even by other
evangelicals as being too radical and reductive.
The relative popularity of the show is no doubt in part due to the
spectacle it presents. The sensational number of children (nineteen and
counting) that the matriarch Michelle Duggar has produced is so
uncommon in twenty-first-century America that it presents, on the face of
things, a reason to watch. This aspect of the sensationalism is a staple
ingredient in reality television and in particular reality TV that deals with
motherhood, fatherhood, and the family. However, the show does have a
historical antecedent in Little House on the Prairie, which was a project of
Christian actor Michael Landon and was also wildly popular, despite (or
perhaps because of) its anodyne Christian moralising and contrived
storylines. The pastoral Midwestern aesthetic promoted in the dress and
staging of 19 Kids and Counting is a direct appeal to this “kinder and
gentler” historical past (whether it is the 1950s or the late nineteenth
century) that in most ways never existed. It forms part of the nostalgic
backbone of conservative media texts, but the appeal of the Norman
Rockwell vision of a sanitised and moral white America is one that
transcends partisan politics.
Thus, 19 Kids and Counting devotes large chunks of time to showing
the family cooperating on meals, rearing the younger children, being
around the house and undertaking domestic craft projects. In one episode,
Michelle discusses her old kitchen bar stools, expressing the value of
frugality in such a large family (the viewer is constantly reminded of this
fact) and is then shown recovering the broken vinyl with new material,
while the children and their mother discuss their special memories
surrounding the stools. This kind of discursive treatment of ideological
principles is definitive of how the show is produced. There is very little
150 Chapter Eight

actual discussion of Quiverfull or evangelical principles. Rather, there is a

strong attempt to demonstrate the adherence to and modelling of these
characteristics. Ideology is latent to representation, and this allows the
show’s producers to normalise what is, for most, a decidedly abnormal
situation.
The restoration of cheap bar stools serves at least three discursive
purposes, in that it demonstrates: the virtuous nature of Michelle and her
commitment to Christian frugality, the importance of the home with
respect to children’s well-being (complete with nonsensical affective
dialogue about cheap bar stools), and the mother’s role in the home as that
of a kind of evangelical Martha Stewart. Of course, the subtext is that she
is performing what is traditionally a male role by repairing the stools and
this is supposed to show that, contra popular belief, wives in the
Quiverfull movement actually are not limited by strict gender roles.
However on a deeper level, this distracts us from noticing the size and
relative luxury of the Duggar home and the newness of all the other
contents. While we are busy watching Michelle save the bar stools, we fail
to notice that this is in fact the home of a very wealthy family (a great deal
is made on their website of how they saved money building the home,
although their millionaire status is never mentioned).
In 19 Kids and Counting, the family’s wealth is expressed in
theological terms as being their “bounty” of children, but the dissimulated
reality is that this is a rich family despite what might be represented by the
narrative. Raising nineteen children is exorbitantly expensive, regardless
of how many coupons are cut or barstools are refinished. The recently
cancelled TLC reality television show Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo is
another example of how a family’s wealth is dissimulated by the reality
genre. While Mama June and her family were most certainly poor at the
beginning of the series, they were not by the end. Despite this, the show
continued to play on tropes of working-class financial struggle and
hardship, even as the per episode take escalated astronomically. It is worth
noting that both shows have been cancelled due to issues surrounding
child sexual abuse, although in the case of the Duggars, they have
admitted that they were aware of the issue and chose to do, essentially,
nothing about it.
Finally, it is important to note that while 19 Kids and Counting
promotes family unity and cooperation on the surface, it also promotes the
idea of competition as a model for success in life and for moral outcomes.
The predominant difference here is that the children compete to succeed in
their application of the Quiverfull theology against one another. The
young women speak of chastity and the importance of marriage, while the
 Selling Heaven: Evangelical Natalism in 19 Kids and Counting 151

young men pride themselves on their future abilities to provide and have
children of their own. All the Duggars who have left the family nest who
appear on the show are depicted as reproducing in miniature the family
enterprise and home. The message sent to the children still at home is that
success is measured against siblings, parents and God. These narratives of
competition as a virtue which leads to a morally sound success in
economic terms, whether it be inside the home or without, play into the
larger cultural narrative of neoliberalism and leave little doubt to
interpretation: winners play by the rules and participate in the myths of
American exceptionalism.

Re-presenting Diversity: Radical Families

and Political Change
In her essay, “Emancipated Subjectivities”, feminist scholar Meille
Chandler articulates the bridge between intersubjective ontologies and the
act of mothering. For Chandler, the noun “mother” is best understood as a
verb. In other words as something one does in relation to, not something
one is. It is in the doing, Chandler argues, that the essential aspects of the
relationship to the child and to others emerge. These aspects are highly
site-specific and not in any way universal: “To be a mother is to enact
mothering. It is a multifaceted and ever-changing yet painfully repetitive
performance, which, although like ‘woman’ involves the way one walks,
talks, postures, dresses and paints one’s face, orients these activities
directly and instrumentally in relation to and with […] another who, due to
a relation of near-complete interdependence, is not separate” (Chandler
2013).
What Chandler’s intersubjective iterations of mothering (and fathering)
open up is a possible view of the family that is diametrically opposed to
the neoliberal and evangelical canons as explored here. This view of
families as interconnected and interdependent potentially takes into
account the endless multiplicity of individuals that may or may not make
up a family, and the necessary relationships that make families, and indeed
communities, flourish. It allows for multiple, flexible, and evolving views
on the family that are not primarily founded in an ideological
superstructure, but rather a phenomenal experience of “being with”.
This conceptualisation of the family exists in radical opposition to the
neoliberal nuclear family populated by Cartesian subjectivities, or the
large evangelical-eschatological families proscribed in media texts like 19
Kids and Counting. Rather, it draws on the very best phenomenal aspects
of the fundamental notion of oikoumene or “home” as elaborated in the
152 Chapter Eight

most liberal versions of Christian theology, and the inclusive vision of

post-structuralist feminist theory. What emerges is a view of family that is
broad, robust, and flexible. The lack of inclusivity in media
representations of the family is arguably mirrored by the exclusion that
many families experience in the neoliberal economic and political
landscape. Thus, issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality have been
marginalised and sidelined by the neoliberal state precisely because such
issues are seen as the responsibility of the subject, and not the state or the
community.
The myth of the radical subject in free market ideology is such that it
eclipses the phenomenological view of subjectivity as always “already in
relation to”. The attraction to, and the persistence of, this myth is directly
attributable to two intertwined social forces: it tends to favour those
already in positions of power or privilege and it gives them an excuse to
pretend that their power is merely the result of their own hard work.
Further, it explains why some people don’t succeed in purely economic or
social terms, by making the responsibility entirely theirs. It allows
ideologues and social architects to ignore systemic inequities and social
injustices. This ideology is moreover attractive to the neoliberal state,
obsessed as it currently is with austerity, because it excuses it from having
to engage in any sort of social welfare by placing the burden back onto the
individual in financial, emotional, and psychological terms. Slashing
budgets designed to help families and individuals allows politicians to
demonstrate their commitment to neoliberal and Christian principles of
thrift and makes more funds available for things like questionable military
exercises and large tax breaks for corporate entities.
Mediatised representations of families are also narrow and they
function discursively to further curtail the realm of the possible. Of course,
few families actually possess the studio-developed bucolic charm of the
Duggars or comedic imperfection of Modern Family. Many families are
excluded from these representations, which however hold all families to
difficult standards as they form the discursive limits in American popular
culture of what actual families should look like. The shadow apparatus of
wealth and production values that creates a seamless tapestry for the
Duggars is also apparent in other fictional representations of family, where
the obvious wealth is either on display or part of a latent subtext
dissimulated behind a narrative of poverty and need. Unconscious
consumption is itself eschatological, in that it becomes pathological in
capitalist cultures. These fictional families tend overwhelmingly to be
white, working or middle-class, heterosexual, and married. When family
 Selling Heaven: Evangelical Natalism in 19 Kids and Counting 153

diversity is represented, it is frequently shoehorned into the standard

hegemonic model.
This chapter presents a theoretical framework though which that union
of thought and policy may perhaps be better understood. Key to fighting
the advance of neoliberalism and the negative effects it has on the family
will be a reinvigorated lobby to maintain the constitutional separation
between Church and State, and perhaps a renewed call for Christians to
reclaim eschatology from the reductive and apocalyptic theology of the
evangelical far right. While the adherence to evangelical principles by
many politicians on both sides of the aisle may be interpreted as window
dressing, it is problematic to assume that it is only superficial. The
historical confluence of political, theological and economic power is clear,
and the specific relationship between end times theology and market
rationality is reason to take evangelical fundamentalism and its advances
into popular culture very seriously. Moreover, the view that mainstream
American pop culture is inherently liberal must be tempered against the
conservative manner in which family and subjectivity is almost always
presented, even in supposedly liberal examples. The result is a narrowed
discursive landscape that provides much spectacle but little novel content.
While social change and advances are being made, the political landscape
remains highly conservative, with power concentrating in fewer hands.
Any strategy to counteract this movement must include diversified
representations of family that empower new possibilities through
inclusivity. Increased participation in the media landscape is crucial to
creating discursive space that is welcoming to all, and which is
representative of the rich diversity of American families.

References
Adorno, T. and Horkheimer, M. 1997. The Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Brooklyn: Verso.
Ardalan, K. 2014. “Invisible Ideology of Mainstream Economics: The
‘Invisible Hand’.” World Review of Political Economy 5(4): 29–314.
Bacon, F. 1905. Novum Organum. New York: Collier & Son.
Brantley, M. 2014. “Fayetteville Council Votes 6–2 for Civil Rights
Ordinance that Protects Gay, Transgender People.” Arkansas Times
(Little Rock, AR), August 19. Retrieved from:
http://www.arktimes.com/ArkansasBlog/archives/2014/08/19/fayettevi
lle-council-votes-6-2-for-civil-rights-ordinance-that-protects-gay-
transgender-people
154 Chapter Eight

Broad, K. L. 2004. “Doing ‘Real Family Values’: The Interpretive Practice

of Families in the GLBT Movement.” The Sociological Quarterly
45(3): 509–527.
Chandler, M. 2013. “Emancipating Subjectivities and the Subjugation of
Mothering Practices” in Maternal Theory: Essential Readings, ed.
O’Reilly, A., 529–541. Toronto: Demeter Press.
Chomsky, N. 1998. The Common Good. Berkley: Odonian Press.
Cox, N. 2012. “The Housewives’ Guide to Better Living: Promoting
Consumption on Bravo’s The Real Housewives…” Communication,
Culture & Critique 5(2): 295–312.
Dowland, S. 2009. “‘Family Values’ and the Formation of a Christian
Right Agenda.” Church History 78(3): 606–631.
Foucault, M. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de
France, 1978–1979, trans. Burchell, G., ed. Senellart, M. New York:
Macmillan.
Friedman, M. 1962. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Glynn, K. 2008. “Bartmania: The Social Reception of an Unruly Image.”
Camera Obscura 38(2): 60–91.
Gorski, P. 2009. “Conservative Protestantism in the United States?:
Towards a Comparative and Historical Perspective” in Evangelicals
and Democracy in America, eds. by Brint, S. and Schroedel, J. New
York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Green, J. 2009. “Exploring the Traditionalist Alliance: Evangelical
Protestants, Religious Voters, and the Republican Presidential Vote” in
Evangelicals and Democracy in America, eds. Brint, S. and Schroedel,
J. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Hadden, J. 1987. “Religious Broadcasting and the Mobilisation of the New
Christian Right.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 26(1): 1–
24.
Hayek, F. 1978. New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics, and the
History of Ideas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Heidegger, M. 2004. A Phenomenology of Religious Life. Bloomington:
University of Indiana Press.
Hill Collins, P. 2013. “Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist
Theorizing about Motherhood” in Maternal Theory: Essential
Readings, ed. O’Reilly, A., 311–329. Toronto: Demeter Press.
hooks, b. 2013. “Revolutionary Parenting” in Maternal Theory: Essential
Readings, ed. O’Reilly, A., 96–113. Toronto: Demeter Press.
 Selling Heaven: Evangelical Natalism in 19 Kids and Counting 155

Janara, L. 2001. “Democracy’s Family Values: Alexis de Tocqueville on

Anxiety, Fear, and Desire.” Canadian Journal of Political Science
34(3): 551–578.
Johnston, C. 1992. Sexual Power, Feminism and the Family in America.
Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press.
Kalberg, S. 1997. “Tocqueville and Weber on the Sociological Origins of
Citizenship: The Political Culture of American Democracy.”
Citizenship Studies 1(2): 199–222.
Koshy, S. 2013. “Neoliberal Family Matters.” American Literary History
25(2): 344–380.
Leibman, N. C 1995. Living Room Lectures: The Fifties Family in Film
and Television. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Marx, K. and F. Engels. 1975. Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected
Works. New York: International Publishers.
McKeown, J. 2010. “Reception of Israelite Nation-Building: Modern
Protestant Natalism and Martin Luther.” Dialog: A Journal of
Theology 49(2): 133–140.
Mesaros-Winckles, C. 2010. “TLC and the Fundamentalist Family: A
Televised Quiverfull of Babies.” Journal of Religion and Popular
Culture 22(3): 1–20.
Neuhaus, J. 2010. “Marge Simpson, Blue-Haired Housewife: Defining
Domesticity on The Simpsons.” The Journal of Popular Culture 43(4):
761–781.
Orbe, M. 2008. “Representations of Race in Reality TV: Watch and
Discuss.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 25(4): 345–352.
Osiek, C. 1996. “The Family in Early Christianity: ‘Family Values’
Revisited.” The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 58 (1): 1–4.
Perkin, H. 1999. “The Tyranny of the Moral Majority: American Religion
and Politics since the Pilgrim Fathers.” Cultural Values 3(2): 182–195.
Petersen, D. 2005. “Genesis and Family Values.” Journal of Biblical
Literature 24(1): 5–23.
Scaff, L. A. 2011. Max Weber in America. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Sender, K. 2011. “Real Worlds: Migrating Genres, Travelling Participants,
Shifting Theories” in The Politics of Reality Television, eds. Kraidy,
M. and Sender, K., 1–11. London: Routledge.
Skill, T, and Robinson, J. 1994. “Four Decades of Families on Television:
A Demographic Profile, 1950–1989.” Journal of Broad & Electronic
Media 38(4): 449–464.
Slessarev-Jamir H. and Benson, B. 2008. “The Contested Church:
Multiple Others of Evangelical Multitude” in Evangelicals and
156 Chapter Eight

Empire: Christian Alternatives to the Political Status Quo, eds.

Benson, B. and Heltzel, P. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press.
Smith, A. 2002. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Hakkonssen, K.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
—. 1982. The Wealth of Nations. New York: Penguin Books.
TLC Television. 2014. Episode “Duggars Decorate and Diet.” 19 Kids and
Counting.
—. 2014. Episode “Wedding Countdown.” 19 Kids and Counting.
Tonning, J. 2009. “Hineingehalten in die Nacht: Heidegger’s Early
Appropriation of Christian Eschatology” in Phenomenology and
Eschatology, eds. DeRoo, N. and Manoussakis, J., 133–151. London:
Ashgate.
Traub, T. 2013. “Women of Influence: Michelle Duggar, Living Her
Message.” Arkansas Business (Little Rock, AR), February 25.
Retrieved from:
http://www.arkansasbusiness.com/post/90984/michelle-duggar-living-
her-message
Turner, C. 2004. Planet Simpson: How a Cartoon Masterpiece Defined a
Generation. Cambridge, MA: De Capo Books.
Uhlmann, E and Sanchez-Burks, J. 2014. “The Implicit Legacy of
American Protestantism.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 45(6):
992–1006.
Weber, M. 1992. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. Parsons,
T., foreword by Giddens, A. New York: Routledge.
Wilson, A. 2012. “Surviving Survivor: A Content Analysis of Antisocial
Behavior and Its Context in a Popular Reality Television Show.” Mass
Communication and Society 15(2): 261–283.
Wisman, J, and Davis, M. 2013. “Degraded Work, Declining Community;
Rising Inequality, and the Transformation of the Protestant Ethic in
America, 1870–1930.” American Journal of Economics and Sociology
72 (5): 1075–1105.
Woodbury, R. and Smith, C. 1998. “Fundamentalism et al: Conservative
Protestants in America.” Annual Review of Sociology 24(1): 25–56.
Wright, C. 2006. Tribal Warfare: Survivor and the Political Unconscious
of Reality Television. Toronto: Lexington Books.
 CHAPTER NINE

HOMONORMATIVITY IN REPRESENTATIONS
OF GAY FATHERS ON TELEVISION:
REPRODUCTIVE CITIZENSHIP,
GENDER AND INTIMACY

CLARE BARTHOLOMAEUS
AND DAMIEN W. RIGGS

Introduction
The past decade has seen an increasing proliferation of images of gay
fathers across a range of outlets, perhaps most notably on television and in
films. While the inclusion of such images on mainstream television has
contributed to the diversification of families appearing in the media,
families and characters are often sanitised and depoliticised in attempts to
make them palatable to mainstream audiences. Such sanitisation and
depoliticisation continues a much wider history of representations of non-
heterosexual people in the media. For example, Soap, originally aired in
1977, is considered the first television programme to portray an openly
gay character who was a father (Jodie Dallas). Importantly, however, the
ABC specified that in portraying Jodie’s relationship with a man, “explicit
or intimate aspects of homosexuality are avoided entirely” and that the gay
characters could not touch (ABC memo quoted in Capsuto 2000, 141).
Whilst the ruling applied to Soap might seem a residual of past
homophobic attitudes, its legacy continues in contemporary representations
of gay fathers in the media (Riggs 2009). Although much has changed in
the political and legislative landscape in terms of gay men and non-
heterosexual parenting more broadly, there nonetheless remains an
injunction upon these groups to warrant their inclusion on very particular
terms. The terms on which inclusion is offered may be described by
Duggan’s (2002) term “homonormativity”, which refers to everyday
158 Chapter Nine

representational politics—about, and engaged by, non-heterosexual

people—that renders acceptable their inclusion through an approximation
of broader societal norms that centre a particular moral code, which is
neoliberal (as evidenced in statements such as “love is all the same”).
As such, whilst since Jodie Dallas on Soap representations of gay
fathers have appeared in scripted television programmes such as The Tracy
Ullman Show (Fox), It’s All Relative (ABC), Six Feet Under (HBO),
Brothers and Sisters (ABC), and Glee (Fox), these representations to a
large degree remain mired in a homonormative politics that seeks a place
for gay characters within an established heteronormative order, where
heterosexuality is both privileged and the norm. In order to demonstrate
this claim, in this chapter we examine four recent prime-time television
programmes on commercial networks in which gay fathers are central
characters. Three of these are US-based (Modern Family, The New
Normal, and Sean Saves the World), and one is Australia-based (House
Husbands). In order to provide some context for these representations of
gay fathers and to frame our analysis, in the following section we
overview the four programmes and provide information about their
content and uptake by both their audiences and reviewers.

Overview of the Programmes

The four television programmes analysed in this chapter were chosen
because they represent a diverse range of ways in which gay men can
become fathers (transnational adoption, fostering, raising a niece,
surrogacy, and reproductive heterosex), they cover different genres
(mockumentary, drama, and comedy), and the fathers in each show have
children of different ages (pre-conception/from birth, primary school-aged,
and teenage). All four programmes analysed in this chapter are/were
shown during prime time on mainstream commercial networks—Modern
Family on ABC, The New Normal and Sean Saves the World on NBC, and
House Husbands on Channel 9 (one of the three main commercial
networks in Australia). We chose to focus on the first ten episodes of the
first season of each programme because one of the programmes only
contains ten episodes in its first season and two of the programmes only
ran for one season. Notably these were the two programmes that centred
on gay fathers rather than the programmes that included them as part of an
ensemble cast of three or four families (though of course cancellations
occur for numerous reasons, and are indicative of the neoliberal age of
television). Whilst we are aware that focusing on the first ten episodes will
have limited the analytic material available to us, in our viewing of the
 Homonormativity in Representations of Gay Fathers on Television 159

additional seasons and episodes the representations of gay fathers have

changed very little. Arguably, the development of the characters that
occurs in the first ten episodes of each programme clearly sets the scene
for how the characters will be depicted into the future.
The longest running of the programmes—Modern Family—was
renewed for a seventh season in 2015. Presented in a mockumentary style,
the programme follows the lives of the Pritchett family: Jay and his second
wife Gloria and her son Manny (from a previous marriage) and Jay and
Gloria’s son Joe (born in the fourth season), Jay’s adult daughter Claire
from his first marriage, her husband Phil and their three children Haley,
Alex and Luke, and Jay’s adult son Mitchell and his partner Cameron and
their daughter Lily (who is adopted from Vietnam as a baby in the first
episode). The creators of this programme, Steven Levitan and Christopher
Lloyd, are both married to women and have children (Pfefferman 2010,
Whipp 2014). Modern Family is the highest rating programme of the four
discussed in this chapter, and had an average US viewer rating of 9.35
million across the first ten episodes of season one screened in 2009
(Seidman 2009–2010). Modern Family has largely been praised for the
way it portrays a gay couple raising a child, although this is often framed
by reference to them being like a heterosexual family. For example, one
reviewer suggests that “[t]hey’re making a fundamentally conventional
home, and no one around them suggests they’re not every bit as entitled to
it as anyone else” (Bruni 2012). The programme has, however, been
critiqued for the lack of physical affection shown between Mitchell and
Cameron (e.g. Bruni 2012, Rosenberg 2010).
House Husbands, the second longest running of the programmes, is a
family drama filmed in Australia, focusing on the lives of four families
(three heterosexual, one gay). The show has been renewed for a fourth
season, to air in 2015 (Knox 2014). House Husbands was co-created by
Drew Proffitt, a gay man (Greagen 2013), and Ellie Beaumont, who is
married to a man and has four children (The Australian, 2012). Kane and
Tom, the gay fathers represented in this programme parent Stella (who
starts primary school in the first episode) in the first series. Stella is Tom’s
niece, and was orphaned when Tom’s sister passed away. In season two
Kane and Tom foster a child named Finn. House Husbands is the first
prime-time Australian television series to portray a gay couple raising
children (Duck 2012), although notably the character of Tom was written
out after the second season. In the third season Kane explains that Tom has
taken a two-year job in Dubai and will not be returning (episode 2, original
Australian airdate June 16, 2014). In Australia, House Husbands had an
average viewer rating of 1.29 million across all ten episodes of season one,
160 Chapter Nine

first broadcast in 2012 (OzTAM 2012, website: http://www.oztam.com

.au). This audience constituted over 5.5 percent of the total Australian
population in 2012 (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2013).
The inclusion of gay fathers in the programme has been largely
endorsed within the Australian media, seemingly owing at least in part to
the popularity of the actor (Gyton Grantley) who plays Kane (Duck 2012,
Vickery 2012). While the programme has received some criticism for
reinforcing gender stereotypes, the representation of a gay couple in a
domestic setting who are not depicted as ‘camp’ or stereotypical has been
celebrated by some media sources (Vickery 2012). The representation of
Kane and Tom’s relationship has been praised for not focusing on their
sexuality (Hunter 2012), while others have questioned the avoidance of
intimacy between the couple (Knox 2012).
The New Normal is a comedy programme depicting the journey of two
men—Bryan and David—who decide to have a child through a
commercial surrogacy arrangement. The show was loosely based on co-
creator Ryan Murphy’s own experiences of having a child with his
husband via surrogacy (Van Meter 2012). The other creator, Ali Adler, is a
lesbian and a mother (Bendix 2012). The one season that aired before the
cancellation of the series follows the men from the conception through to
birth of their son across twenty-two episodes. The New Normal had an
average US viewer rating of 5.17 million across the first ten episodes of
season one, which was first broadcast in 2012 (Bibel 2012, Kondolojy
2012). The programme has been praised for its positive social message,
but also critiqued for the way it tries to get this message across,
specifically with regard to the fact that one of the fathers (Bryan) is
portrayed as stereotypically gay (complete with camp fashion, theatrics,
and witty remarks) and for trivialising gay people’s lives (Hunter 2012,
Maciak 2012, Sepinwall 2012).
Finally, the comedy programme Sean Saves the World depicts the life
of Sean, a gay man who became a father in the context of a previous
heterosexual relationship. His ex-wife moves away from the city in which
he lives, and his teenage daughter Ellie decides to live full time with her
father. Victor Fresco, who created the show, is heterosexual and has
children (Lacher 2013). This programme was cancelled before the entire
eighteen episode first season was filmed, with a total of fifteen episodes
filmed and aired. Sean Saves the World had an average US viewer rating
of 3.51 million across the first ten episodes of season one, broadcast in
2013–2014 (Bibel 2013, Kondolojy 2013–2014). Overall, the programme
was not positively received. Aside from some critiques of the over-the-top
(“wacky”) portrayal of a gay character (and other characters) (Gray 2013),
 Homonormativity in Representations of Gay Fathers on Television 161

the show was largely critiqued for numerous other reasons such as the
storylines and dialogue (Goodman 2013).

Theoretical Background
Whilst the gay fathers in the four programmes represent family forms that
are outside the normative heterosexual nuclear family, in many ways they
reinforce and endorse neoliberal discourses about the family. For example,
the domestic settings in which the gay characters are portrayed function to
“normalise” the characters, especially when their sexuality is downplayed
and when gay father families are viewed as being “just like” any other
(read: “heterosexual-coupled”) family. As such, whilst the increased
representation of gay fathers in television programmes such as these may
be viewed as a positive step in the acknowledgment of gay men’s
experiences of parenting, we argue in this chapter that in most instances the
representations currently available are homonormative. Duggan defines
homonormativity as: “a politics that does not contest dominant
heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains
them while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and
a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and
consumption” (2002, 179).
Obviously the domestic sphere is likely to be salient in any
representation of gay fathers and, as is the case with most parents,
consumption will likely shape their experiences. Furthermore, as Doran
(2013) notes, for many gay men the domestic sphere has historically not
been a place of safety (nor parenting a viable option), and thus being able
to lay claim to the domestic sphere may be important for many men. At
the same time, however, the critique that Duggan makes is significant in
terms of the questions it raises about both the particular representations
that become possible within a homonormative framework, and how are
they rendered intelligible to gay and non-gay audiences.
Yep and Conkle (2013), writing about the programme Brothers and
Sisters, argue that upon becoming fathers the gay men in these shows
become depoliticised through a focus on acquisition and consumption,
echoing Duggan’s (2002) definition of homonormativity. Richardson
argues that in viewing “citizenship as consumerism […] ‘non-
heterosexuals’ seem to be most acceptable as citizens, as consumers with
identities and lifestyles which are expressed through purchasing goods,
communities and services” (1998, 95; emphasis in the original).
The neoliberal family as a site of consumption is particularly evident in
the three US shows, where the fathers are depicted in typical pursuits of
162 Chapter Nine

consumer purchase in many stories. House Husbands, as a drama, is an

exception to this rule and is less focused on consumption. The fathers from
all of the programmes discussed in this chapter, however, are white and
middle-class, with access to social capital accrued via purchasing power,
enabling them to buy their way into creating socially recognised and
validated families. As Doran writes in relation to Modern Family,
Cameron and Mitchell “partake in both the cultural and economic axes of
domestic ideology, configuring their lives according to established
heteronormative standards and enthusiastically participating as consumers
in the free market” (2013, 102). Bryan, in The New Normal, raises the idea
of having a child by exclaiming “I want us to have baby clothes—and a
baby to wear them”, positioning parenthood as a route to consumption.
Such a framing is reminiscent of shows such as Queer Eye for the Straight
Guy (NBC), where gay men are frequently positioned in relation to
consumption (see, e.g. Sender 2006).
With these points about homonormativity and media representation in
mind, in the analysis that follows we seek to interrogate issues of
possibility and intelligibility through an examination of the four television
programmes outlined above. Our interest in examining these programmes
is not to simply state that they are homonormative. Instead, we map out
instances of homonormativity in terms of how the gay fathers in these
television programmes are represented as making a legitimate claim to
what Turner (2001) refers to as “reproductive citizenship”, which he
defines as the treatment of reproductivity as a hallmark of citizenship in
contemporary Western societies. Such claims, we argue, are premised on
the occlusion of certain groups, and on the representation of gay men as
conforming to certain normative expectations about what it means to be a
(gay) parent. We thus take up Doran’s suggestion that examining gay
characters on family-based television programmes must involve
examining “the ways in which the domestic is used as a cultural template
to configure ‘good’ gay and lesbian subjects” (2013, 96). In doing so, we
examine these television programmes as examples of neoliberal
constitutions of new familial subjects and markets.
Examining how certain gay fathers are accorded a place within the
domestic sphere is important as it provides one answer to Agathangelou,
Bassichis and Spira’s (2008, 124) question: “what bodies, desires, and
longings must be criminalised and annihilated to produce the good queer
subjects, politics, and desires that are being solidified with the emergence
of homonormativity?” In our analysis we first demonstrate that the bodies
that are depicted as deviant in comparison to those of gay men are
primarily (nominally, heterosexual,) women. Whilst most gay fathers are
 Homonormativity in Representations of Gay Fathers on Television 163

reliant upon the bodies of women to become parents, in the television

programmes gay fathers are represented as intelligent, reproductive
citizens in comparison with particular female characters who are
represented as inadequate or failed reproductive citizens. Second, we
examine how the programmes present a narrative about gay parenting that
is sanitised and normative, and which reinforces a number of injunctions
placed upon gay parents in general, specifically the expectation that they
provide appropriate gendered “role models” to their children. Finally, we
analyse how in the four television programmes gay men’s intimacies are
routinely rendered invisible, replaced instead by a normative desire for
children raised in adherence to assumptions about how gay parents should
act and which key issues should concern them.

Good versus Bad Reproductive Citizens

Over a decade ago Turner (2001) coined the term “reproductive
citizenship” to refer to the fact that “Western societies in demographic
terms enjoy only modest rates of successful reproduction, [and thus] the
state promotes the desirability of fertility and reproductivity as a
foundation of social participation” (2001, 196). Turner went on to suggest:
“the state’s interest in sexuality and sexual identity is secondary and
subordinate to its demographic objective of securing and sustaining the
connection between reproduction and citizenship” (2001, 197). Combining
this account of reproductive citizenship with Duggan’s (2002) account of
homonormativity, however, would suggest less that the state is
disinterested in any citizen’s sexuality or sexual identity, and more that a
focus on reproductive citizenship functions to domesticate non-normative
sexualities so that they are rendered acceptable in the service of nations
motivated by a desire to produce docile citizens who reinforce agendas of
privatisation and consumption.
Of course hand in hand with the domestication of certain non-
normative (reproductive) sexualities comes the ongoing marginalisation of
those groups who are deemed inadequate or failed reproductive citizens. In
the context of the television programmes examined for this chapter, the
gay fathers are frequently depicted as agentic reproductive citizens
through contrast with individuals who are represented as failed or
inadequate reproductive citizens. Indeed, in the case of The New Normal,
the show is premised on the fact that Goldie—the woman who agrees to
act as a paid surrogate for the two men—is to a degree an inadequate
reproductive citizen. She is depicted as having been a teenage mother, as
was her mother, and her grandmother. This narrative of inadequacy is
164 Chapter Nine

repeated throughout the first ten episodes of the programme, with Goldie’s
capacity as a parent frequently called into question. This, of course, leaves
the show with a dilemma—if Goldie is an inadequate parent, how can she
be a good surrogate? The answer to this is clearly provided in a
conversation between the two men and a representative of the surrogacy
clinic:

Bryan: I would like a skinny blond child who doesn’t cry. Is this extra?
David: It’s not possible.
Gary (Expanding Families representative): It is for our Platinum Members.
Here’s how it works. You click through our egg donor files, find your
match, create a perfect embryo and then implant it in a surrogate. She’s just
like an easy-bake oven except with no legal rights to the cupcake. Now
who’s going to be the bio dad?

(Episode 1, original US broadcast date: September 10, 2012).

In this narrative, a surrogate does not need to be a good parent. Rather,

she needs to be a good “easy-bake oven”, involved in a transaction in a
similar way to online shopping. In this sense, and as previous research on
surrogacy (e.g. Riggs and Due 2013) has suggested, women who act as
surrogates are fulfilling their reproductive destiny (as women who are
normatively expected to bear children), but such reproduction does not
constitute them as reproductive citizens per se. Rather, it constitutes them
as producers in a neoliberal field where the intended (or “commissioning”)
parent(s) take up a role as reproductive citizens. Where this becomes
particularly problematic for women such as Goldie is in the opposing
presumptions that women who carry a child are fulfilling a reproductive
destiny, whilst at the same time women who “give away” a child they have
given birth to are depicted as failed women/mothers. Thus as David asks
in the first episode of The New Normal: “So why then does a beautiful,
smart, seemingly sane person want to gestate someone else’s child?”. The
answer to this, for Goldie, is framed in terms of both “wanting to help” a
gay couple, whilst also needing the financial compensation of undertaking
a commercial surrogacy. Ultimately such compensation is depicted as
necessary in order for Goldie to provide for her daughter, yet this need is
implicitly framed as always already a failure, due to the fact that Goldie
was a teenage mother. As such, Goldie approximates a “good” neoliberal
citizen both by helping other people engage in practices of consumption,
and by the fact that in so doing she then increases her own capacity to
consume.
 Homonormativity in Representations of Gay Fathers on Television 165

Whilst taken up more extensively in episodes in later seasons, in the

first season of Modern Family this trope of the inadequate or failed mother
is utilised to explain the journey to parenthood for Cameron and Mitchell.
On the plane journey back home, after undertaking the adoption of their
daughter in Vietnam, Mitchell perceives that other people on the plane are
being homophobic towards him. This leads him to stand up and make a
speech to the other passengers, which includes the statement: “Excuse me,
but this baby would have grown up in a crowded orphanage if it wasn’t for
us cream puffs” (episode one, original US broadcast date: September 23,
2009). This type of narrative is prevalent in white gay men’s accounts of
intercountry adoption (e.g., see Riggs 2009), where the birth parents of
children placed for adoption are depicted as inadequate. Whilst in later
episodes Mitchell and Cameron make mention of “honouring” Lily’s birth
culture (albeit in highly normalising and touristic ways framed through
consumption), her birth parents are either not referred to or are variously
referred to as “incapable” or “unable” to parent her, throughout the series.
Such an account of birth parents as inadequate reproductive citizens
ignores the realities that may lead some parents to place their children for
adoption. The programme glosses over uncomfortable issues about
intercountry adoption through humour, ignoring the global context in
which adoption occurs, such as the involvement of countries like the
United States taking part in actions (such as wars) that produce situations
that lead to some parents having no option but to place their children for
adoption.
In the four television programmes gay fathers are also at times
compared with groups of people who are depicted as failed reproductive
citizens because they do not have children. Most notably this occurs in
regards to representations of characters who are depicted as single
heterosexual females. In Sean Saves the World, for example, Sean’s best
friend Liz is characterised as a party girl who privileges appearance and
wooing (often married) men over having children. Whilst no explicit
statement is made about her “failure” to reproduce, the depiction of her
life as relatively empty (and thus as an object of derision, particularly by
Sean’s mother) is a repeated theme throughout the programme. A similar
character appears in Modern Family. In episode eight viewers are
introduced to Mitchell and Cameron’s best friend Sal. The following
scenes clearly highlight the contrast, positioning Mitchell and Cameron as
successful reproductive citizens and Sal as a failed party girl who is, if
anything, a threat to their domestic situation:

Cameron: Sal is our very best friend in the whole wide world. The reason
we love her so much is she has absolutely no inhibitions. And that’s before
166 Chapter Nine

she starts drinking. Hanging out with her is like an Amsterdam Saturday
night every day of the week…
Cameron [Whilst out to dinner with Sal]: I’m just going to check on Lily
real quick.
Sal: Right now?
Cameron: It’ll just take a second.
Sal: But you’re going to miss me slutting it up with Driving Miss Daisy.
Cameron: It’ll just take a second.
Sal: (under her breath) You should kill that baby.
Mitchell: What?
Sal: You should call the baby. I love you guys so much!
Cameron: Did she just?
Mitchell: I’m scared….
Sal: So you guys are going to have to bring Lily to Cabo now that you’re
the guys who always bring Lily?
Cameron: Yeah probably.
Sal: I will throw her in the ocean.
Mitchell: What?
Sal: I said I gotta go pee.
Cameron: Okay that wasn’t even close… What do we even do? I mean
how do we even bring it up?
Mitchell: She threatened our child and that’s your concern? A segue?

(Episode 8, original US broadcast date: November 18, 2009).

In comparison to Mitchell and Cameron, Sal is characterised as overly

sexualised and undisciplined, and represented as a potential baby killer.
The scene is reconciled when Mitchell and Cameron realise that what they
are experiencing with Sal is like “first-child syndrome”—in that Sal is
jealous, because Lily has replaced her. Such an account infantilises Sal,
and in so doing depicts her as a failed reproductive citizen because, as a
woman of child-bearing age, she is depicted as being interested only in
hedonistic ventures and as lacking an interest in children, both in general
terms and in terms of having any of her own.
House Husbands is, on the whole, less reliant upon the depiction of
certain groups as failed reproductive citizens in comparison to gay fathers.
However, an episode involving a storyline in which Kane and Tom’s child
has a tumour on her spine highlights how gay men are depicted as having a
tenuous relationship to reproductive citizenship; in this case, arising from
the ways in which they come to be parents:

Tom: I’m gonna call Mum. She needs to be here. I can’t do this kind of
thing on my own.
Kane: You’re not on your own.
 Homonormativity in Representations of Gay Fathers on Television 167

Tom: You know what I mean.

Kane: No I don’t
Tom: I’m not cut out for this. I’m not a parent. I don’t know what I’m
doing. You know I leave everything up to you and you’re not even related.
It’s about time I faced fact that Stella is better off with my Mum and Dad
looking after her

(Episode 5, original Australian broadcast date: September 30, 2012).

In the context of the four television programmes analysed here, this

type of account is non-normative. Certainly in the case of Modern Family,
the adoptive status of Mitchell and Cameron’s daughter Lily is frequently
commented on, and as noted in the extract above from The New Normal
(“who’s going to be the bio dad?”), questions of genetic-relatedness are
salient at key junctures in the series. In Sean Saves the World, the topic of
relatedness is not a central concern, though primarily because his identity
as a gay father fathering a child via reproductive heterosex is “explained
away” as a “momentary lapse” in an early episode. By contrast, the above
extract from House Husbands signals the tenuous relationship that some gay
fathers may experience, in a context where genetic-relatedness is privileged.
For Kane in particular, who is not genetically (nor legally) related to the
child he is raising, the question of “being related” becomes a salient point
between the two men when the child is in hospital. Whilst this does not
ultimately undermine his role as a parent by the resolution of the episode, it
nonetheless highlights the hierarchical nature of relatedness, thus adding
further complexity to Turner’s (2001) account of reproductive citizenship
(see also Riggs and Due 2013), and suggesting that reproductivity as a form
of neoliberal consumption is not uniform in its outcomes nor recognition.

Gender Role Models

Prevalent across much of the literature on gay (and lesbian) parents is a
concern with whether or not same-sex families can (and should) provide
mixed gender role models to children (for overviews, see Clarke 2006,
Clarke and Kitzinger 2005). This follows a presumption that the absence
of a female or male parent means children miss out on particular gender
displays, without considering the different ways in which gay (and
lesbian) parents express gender. Connected to this, however, has been the
question of whether or not gay men can be appropriate male role models to
male children. Premised on the assumption of gay men’s femininity, this
type of concern mirrors broader social stereotypes about gay men. Authors
such as Clarke (2006) Clarke and Kitzinger (2005) and Hicks (2008) have
168 Chapter Nine

critiqued such concerns, both within academic research on the topic and
within media representations. Despite this, the view that gender role
models should be of concern to gay (and lesbian) parents remains, and is
often a salient topic discussed in relation to gay (and lesbian) parenting.
Considering these broader discourses, it is thus not surprising that gender
role modelling appears as a relatively frequent topic of conversation across
the four television programmes examined here. For example, in episode
ten of The New Normal Bryan and David accidentally learn of the
“gender” of their child. Upon learning that they are having a boy, David,
who is depicted as a sporty jock type, has the following response in
conversation with his heterosexual male friends:
David: It’s a boy! Oh my god just last week I was on the Internet looking
at jungle gym forts and I totally booked like ten of them right, and now we
can get one!
David’s heterosexual male friend: Oh dude you could totally sign him up
for peewee football. My boys do it and it’s great! In fact you could come to
our league game this weekend and coach it!
David: Oh I could coach, they’d let me coach? Oh course they’d let me
coach cos I’m having a boy!
(Episode 10, original US broadcast date: November 27, 2012).

In this example (certain) gay men are depicted as appropriate role

models for male children, premised on the assumption that a child
assigned male at birth will conform to normative expectations of
masculinity (and indeed will identify as male). Such a representation is
also reliant upon the assumption that an effeminate gay man (Bryan)
would prefer a girl (to presumably do “feminine” things with), and that a
gay parent can only connect with a male child if they both share an interest
in traditionally masculine activities. As such, this particular storyline is
something of a backhanded compliment to a gay couple who will soon
become parents. In other words, they are represented as being capable of
normatively raising a (presumed to be gender-normative) male child, yet
this capacity comes at the expense of the derision of femininity and the
perpetuation of gender stereotypes.
By contrast, in episode four of House Husbands Kane questions
whether or not the female child he is raising needs a female role model:

Kane: Do you ever worry we’re not enough for her?

Tom: Why would you think that?
Kane: I don’t know. Maybe she needs a role model. A female one
(Episode 4, original Australian broadcast date: September 23, 2012).
 Homonormativity in Representations of Gay Fathers on Television 169

Whilst Tom challenges this assumption by asking why Kane he

worries that they are not enough for their child, the assumption is allowed
to stand as the scene ends. The question or not of whether the “unusual”
behaviour of their child (when she starts acting like a cat) is a product of
their homosexuality is only resolved in the conclusion of the episode,
though the presumption about the need for female role models is never
returned to.
The issue of gender difference producing possible problems appears
also in Modern Family, where Mitchell and Cameron invite Lily’s
paediatrician over for lunch. Part of this invitation rests on the assumption
that, given the paediatrician is of “Asian appearance”, her involvement in
Lily’s life should be encouraged. The narrative, however, turns into one of
distress for Mitchell and Cameron when they believe that Lily (in this
season, an eight-month-old) appears to call the paediatrician “Mummy”.
This evocation of a female parental figure in the house is a source of great
distress for the men. Whilst not specifically referring to the distress as a
product of the paediatrician being akin to a “female role model”, it is
notable that this fear of a woman assuming a mothering role to Lily (when
in fact she does have a birth mother in Vietnam) is significant.
A final example of a gay character policing himself in regards to
gender roles appears in episode two of Sean Saves the World, in which
Sean’s daughter wants to go shopping for a bra and Sean discusses with
his work colleagues whether or not he should go with her. He decides not
to go, stating: “bra shopping is such a mother/daughter thing. I’m the Dad!
I should be teaching her how to drive or punching out her soccer coach”
(original broadcast date October 10, 2013). In some ways, similar to the
example above from The New Normal, this scene is reliant upon a
normative presumption about what fathers as men should, and should not,
do. The corollary of this is that gay households that involve female
children will need the involvement of female adults (such as in the case of
bra shopping). Notable in this episode was the fact that whilst Sean
allowed Liz to take his daughter bra shopping, Liz is depicted again as a
failed woman, unable to help Ellie to choose “appropriate” underwear.
This is another example of the way in which gay fathering is framed as
valid at the expense of women.
Whilst diverse, these examples of discussions of gender role models in
the four television programmes are united by homonormativity—they are
premised on the heteronormative presumption of appropriate roles for
fathers and mothers, men and women, and these are applied to the gay
fathers with little interrogation. As Duggan (2002) has argued, such
heteronormativity becomes homonormative when gay men accept these
170 Chapter Nine

roles as legitimate, and then enact them in their own lives. It is important
to acknowledge that gay men cannot be expected to be automatically
aware, or outside, of heteronormativity. However, it is reasonable to
question how the depiction of such heteronormative ideals within
television programmes featuring gay fathers instantiates homonormativities
that regulate both gay and non-gay viewers in terms of the expectations
they place upon gay parents. Thus as Puar notes, “certain desired truths
become lived as truths, as if they were truths, thus producing all sorts of
material traces and evidences of these truths, despite what counterevidence
may exist” (2006, 68). In the case of female gender role models and the
perceived need for them in the context of gay father families (and the need
for gay men to themselves normatively enact male role modelling), this
“need” is treated in the programmes as axiomatic. Rather than opening up
space to question gender roles themselves, or reworking heteronormative
definitions of family, the shows explore how heterosexual families can be
replicated by the inclusion of female role models. Furthermore, this type
of regulation of the self is very much a hallmark of neoliberal citizenship,
thus further demonstrating how the programmes enact very specific forms
of neoliberal homonormativity that instructs viewers (both gay and non-
gay) as to how they should regulate the expressions and experiences of gay
parents.

Gay Men and Intimacy

The final form of homonormativity evident in the four programmes relates
to how the gay men are shown (or not) as engaging in intimacy. As noted
earlier, this is a frequent concern amongst reviewers and fans of the
programmes (e.g., Bruni 2012). Previous research examining the
representation of gay fathers in films (Riggs 2011) has suggested that gay
men who engage in intimacy when there are children in the house are
represented as placing themselves and their children at risk, and that gay
intimacy must be quarantined from children at all times. This same
message appears across all four of the television programmes examined
here. This is in comparison to heterosexual intimacy and bedroom scenes,
which are frequent and obvious plot devices in both House Husbands and
Modern Family across the first ten episodes of each series, where
heterosexual couples are shown in bed together, kissing, discussing
intimacy, and beginning or ending intimate relations. Intimacy between
the gay male characters, by contrast, is rendered invisible. In House
Husbands we do not see the two men touch or kiss, and we never see their
bedroom. In Modern Family we do see the two men in their bedroom, but
 Homonormativity in Representations of Gay Fathers on Television 171

one is standing at a distance from the bed whilst the other is in the bed
(this scene relates to their daughter Lily and sleep training, so the inclusion
of a bedroom scene is domesticated, not intimate per se).
In The New Normal we do see the two men in bed, but they are never
depicted in passionate embrace. We often see them say goodnight to one
another and then roll over to sleep, without even a kiss. In comparison, the
first episode of the show includes the depiction of a heterosexual couple
interrupted during sex. Finally, in Sean Saves the World there is some
discussion of Sean’s desire for other men, but these are always narratives
of the past not the present (i.e., they are discussions about previous
boyfriends or intimate relations, and throughout the entire first ten
episodes Sean does not discuss a current boyfriend or intimate partner).
Again, this is in comparison to heterosexual characters whose current
desires are utilised as plot narratives, rather than being relegated to the
past (for example: Liz relates a story of being intimate with a man
following a date throughout the space of one episode).
It is thus notable that intimacy for the gay fathers in these shows is
either invisible, or clearly demarcated from children (the only images of
two men in bed appear in The New Normal, where a child is not yet
present in the house). This is noteworthy given the existence of many
television programmes (e.g., Queer as Folk) that do not shy away from
representing gay men in intimate relations, but which do not utilise
parenting as an overarching premise for the programme. Whether or not
the spectre of accusations of child abuse shapes decisions about narratives
in the four programmes is unclear, but it is notable that the gay men are in
many ways shown as asexual in comparison to the heterosexual characters.
This is problematic for a number of reasons. First, the quarantining of gay
desire from children locates children outside the context of gay intimacy.
In other words, whilst children of heterosexual parents are often told the
story of “the birds and the bees” (which, in essence, is often a narrative of
their own creation through heterosex), gay men do not have an analogous
way of narrating the creation of a family in the context of intimate adult
relations. This contributes to the invisibility of gay desire in all its forms.
Second, the lack of intimacy shown may contribute to the sense of shame
that some gay men may feel about intimacy. Representing healthy and
positive relationships between two men—including intimacy—is an
important part of countering such shame. And finally, whilst potentially
aimed at avoiding alienating heterosexual viewers of these mainstream
network programmes, the lack of representation of gay intimacy does
nothing to challenge mainstream audiences to reconsider the stereotypes
they hold. Instead, the lack of representations only potentially reiterates
172 Chapter Nine

the belief that gay desire and intimacy should be entirely separate from
children.

Conclusion
In this chapter we have explored three key ways in which homonormativity
as a form of neoliberalism appears in the television programmes Modern
Family, House Husbands, The New Normal, and Sean Saves the World.
Specifically, we have examined how gay fathers are depicted as
reproductive citizens through the depiction of other groups of people
(specifically women) as inadequate or failed neoliberal citizens. We have
also examined how claims about gender role models and the lack of
representation of gay intimacy in the shows contributes to a
homonormative account of gay fathers, one in which gay men are seen as
appropriately engaged in their own self-regulation as neoliberal citizens.
This, we have argued, is not entirely the product of the domestic spheres in
which the programmes take place. As Gorman-Murray (2007) suggests, it
is entirely possible for domestic spheres to be “queering”, or critical of,
normative expectations. Instead, it would appear that the television
programmes are largely mired in a representational politics whereby
assimilation to a normative domestic sphere is depicted as the most
desirable.
Into the future, we would hope to see greater critical attention paid to
how gay fathers, making claims to reproductive citizenship that are
homonormative, are represented. Furthermore, we would hope that future
analyses continue to pay close attention to the racialised and classed
politics of homonormativities as they play out in the context of media
representations of gay fathers. Later storylines in Modern Family
increasingly utilise the narrative of racial differences to create “humour”,
extending from Lily’s birth parents, as discussed above, to the depiction of
Gloria as a stereotypical fiery Latina, and certainly throughout The New
Normal class differences between the two men and Goldie implicitly and
explicitly shape the humour, with the rich couple paying Goldie to have
their baby. Given the fact that the men represented in all of the shows live
relatively privileged lives, it will be important into the future that analyses
of these and other similar shows examine the specific forms that such
privileges take.
We also hope to see more analyses of the representations of lesbian
and bisexual mothers on television. As with gay fathers, there are an
increasing number of television characters who are lesbian or bisexual
mothers, in programmes such as Friends (NBC), Queer as Folk
 Homonormativity in Representations of Gay Fathers on Television 173

(Showtime and Showcase), ER (NBC), The Wire (HBO), The L Word

(Showtime), Grey’s Anatomy (ABC), Janet King (Australian Broadcasting
Corporation), and The Fosters (ABC Family). While beyond the scope of
this chapter, future researchers may like to consider if some of the issues
we have raised also play out in terms of lesbian and bisexual mothers.
To conclude, at their broadest, three of the shows (the US comedies)
we analysed in this chapter clearly orient to a neoliberal logic of
consumerism, one that shapes the storylines depicted and the characters
developed. All four of the shows are reliant upon narratives of
reproductive citizenship that arguably domesticate more than they
radicalise the representation of gay fathers. This, we have argued, is
problematic, as the television programmes, in a range of differing ways,
educate viewers into the correct modes of being for gay fathers. By
offering only a narrow range of possible roles for gay fathers, the
programmes encourage the types of self-monitoring and regulating that are
hallmarks of neoliberal citizenship, and as a result fail to give voice to
alternate ways of thinking about gay parenting beyond the homonormative.

References
Agathangelou, A. M., Bassichis, M. D., and Spira, T. L. 2008. “Intimate
Investments: Homonormativity, Global Lockdown, and the Seductions
of Empire.” Radical History Review 100: 120–43.
Australian, The. 2012. “Ten Questions: Ellie Beaumont.” September 17.
Retrieved from: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/archive/media/ten-
questions-ellie-beaumont/story-fna103qq-1226473761233
Australian Bureau of Statistics. 2013. “Population by Age and Sex,
Regions of Australia, 2012.” Cat. No. 3235.0. Canberra: ABS.
Bendix, T. 2012. “‘The New Normal’ Doesn’t Have a Lesbian Problem.”
AfterEllen.com, September 19. Retrieved from:
http://www.afterellen.com/tv/103361-the-new-normal-doesnt-have-a-
lesbian-problem
Bibel, S. 2012. “TV Ratings.” TV by the Numbers. Numerous dates of
access. Retrieved from: http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com
—. 2013. “TV Ratings.” TV by the Numbers. Date of access: September
22, 2014. Retrieved from: http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com
Bruni, F. 2012. “ABC’s Gay Wednesdays.” The New York Times, March
8. Retrieved from: http://bruni.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/08/abcs-
gay-wednesdays/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0
174 Chapter Nine

Capsuto, S. 2000. Alternate Channels: The Uncensored Story of Gay and

Lesbian Images on Radio and Television. New York: Ballantine
Books.
Clarke, V. 2006. “‘Gay Men, Gay Men and More Gay Men’: Traditional,
Liberal and Critical Perspectives on Male Role Models in Lesbian
Families.” Lesbian & Gay Psychology Review 7(1): 19–35.
Clarke, V. and Kitzinger, C. 2005. “‘We’re not Living on Planet Lesbian’:
Constructions of Male Role Models in Debates about Lesbian
Families.” Sexualities 8(2): 137–52.
Doran, S. E. 2013. “Housebroken: Homodomesticity and the
Normalization of Queerness in Modern Family” in Queer Love in Film
and Television: Critical Essays, eds. Demory, P. and Pullen, C., 95–
104. London: Palgrave.
Duck, S. 2012. “Grantley Brings Down House in New Role.” The Daily
Telegraph, August 6. Retrieved from:
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/entertainment/grantley-brings-
down-house-in-new-role/story-e6frexlr-
1226443410397?nk=35f02d9394118b6b7e48a5d6e8bd4539
Duggan, L. 2002. “The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of
Neoliberalism” in Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized
Cultural Politics, eds. Castronovo, R. and Nelson, D.D., 175–94.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Goodman, T. 2013. “Sean Saves the World: TV Review.” The Hollywood
Reporter, October 1. Retrieved from:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/sean-saves-world-tv-
review-639289
Gorman-Murray, A. 2007. “Contesting Domestic Ideals: Queering the
Australian Home.” Australian Geographer 38(2): 195–213.
Gray, E. 2013. “3 New Sitcoms and a Vampire Drama.” philly.com,
October 4. Retrieved from: http://articles.philly.com/2013-10-04/news
/42670211_1_mags-bennett-the-millers-will-arnett
Greagen, C. 2013. “House Husbands Co-Creator Drew Proffitt.” Reservoir
Dad, May 27. Retrieved from:
http://www.reservoirdad.com/blog/reservoir-dad/house-husbands-co-
creator-drew-proffitt
Hicks, S. 2008. “Gender Role Models... Who Needs ’em?!” Qualitative
Social Work 7(1): 43–59.
Hunter, T. 2012. “Gay Dads and Stereotypes.” Gay News Network,
October 24. Retrieved from:
http://gaynewsnetwork.com.au/entertainment/gay-dads-and-
stereotypes-9264.html
 Homonormativity in Representations of Gay Fathers on Television 175

Knox, D. 2012. “House Husbands.” TV Tonight, August 30. Retrieved

from: http://www.tvtonight.com.au/2012/08/house-husbands.html
—. 2014. “Renewed: House Husbands.” TV Tonight, July 30. Retrieved
from: http://www.tvtonight.com.au/2014/07/renewed-house-husbands-
3.html
Kondolojy, A. 2012. “TV Ratings.” TVbythenumbers.com. Date of access:
September 22, 2014. Retrieved from:
http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com
—. 2013–2014. “TV Ratings.” TVbythenumbers.com. Date of access:
September 22, 2014. Retrieved from:
http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com
Lacher, I. 2013. “Sean Hayes is on Top of ‘The World’.” The Los Angeles
Times, October 26. Retrieved from:
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/showtracker/la-et-st-ca-sean-
hayes-conversation-20131027-story.html#axzz2iqFDtviG
Maciak, P. 2012. “TV Review—The New Normal: Season One.” Slant
Magazine, October 10. Retrieved from:
http://www.slantmagazine.com/tv/review/the-new-normal-season-one
OzTAM. 2012. “Consolidated Metropolitan Top 20 Programs, 5 City
Ranking Report—Free To Air Only” (Television audience
measurement statistics). Date of access: September 22, 2014. Retrieved
from: http://www.oztam.com.au
Pfefferman, N. 2010. “His Home Life is Fodder for ‘Modern Family’.”
Jewish Journal, April 13. Retrieved from:
http://www.jewishjournal.com/television/article/steve_levitans_home_l
ife_is_fodder_for_modern_family_20100413/
Puar, J. 2006. “Mapping US Homonormativities.” Gender, Place and
Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 13(1): 67–88.
Riggs, D. W. 2009. “Race Privilege and its Role in the ‘Disappearance’ of
Birth Families and Adoptive Children in Debates over Adoption by
Non-Heterosexual People in Australia” in Other People’s Children:
Adoption in Australia, eds. Spark, C. and Cuthbert, D., 161–75.
Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing.
Richardson, D. 1998. “Sexuality and Citizenship.” Sociology 32(1): 83–
100.
Riggs, D. W. 2011. “Let’s Go to the Movies: Filmic Representations of
Gay Foster and Adoptive Parents.” Journal of GLBT Family Studies
7(3): 297–312.
Riggs, D. W. and Due, C. 2013. “Representations of Reproductive
Citizenship and Vulnerability in Media Reports of Offshore
Surrogacy.” Citizenship Studies 17(8): 956–69.
176 Chapter Nine

Rosenberg, A. 2010. “‘Modern Family’ and Gay Marriage: It’s

Complicated.” The Atlantic, October 13. Retrieved from:
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2010/10/modern-
family-and-gay-marriage-its-complicated/64397/
Seidman, R. 2009–2010. “TV Ratings.” TVbythenumbers.com. Date of
access: September 22, 2014. Retrieved from:
http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com
Sender, K. 2006. “Queens for a Day: Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and
the Neoliberal Project.” Critical Studies in Media Communication
23(2): 131–51.
Sepinwall, A. 2012. “Review: NBC’s The New Normal is Another
Schizophrenic Ryan Murphy Series.” HitFix, September 8. Retrieved
from: http://www.hitfix.com/whats-alan-watching/review-nbcs-the-new-
normal-is-another-schizophrenic-ryan-murphy-series
Turner, B.S. 2001. “The Erosion of Citizenship.” The British Journal of
Sociology 52(2): 189–209.
Van Meter, J. 2012. “Ryan Murphy’s Hope: Is America Ready for The
New Normal?” Vogue, September 18. Retrieved from:
http://www.vogue.com/865309/ryan-murphys-hope-is-american-ready-
for-the-new-normal/
Vickery, C. 2012. “Grantley Now Man About the House.” The Advertiser,
August 28. Retrieved from:
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/entertainment/television/grantley-
now-man-about-the-house/story-e6freeul-1226461408856
Whipp, G. 2014. “Christopher Lloyd’s Award-Winning Funny Bones.”
Los Angeles Times, August 22. Retrieved from:
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/tv/la-et-st-christopher-
lloyd-fraiser-modern-family-20140824-story.html
Yep, G. A., and Conkle, A. 2013. “The New Gay Domesticity:
Homonormativity in ABC’s Brothers and Sisters” in Race/Gender/
Class/Media (3rd ed.), ed. Lind, R.A., 218–24. Boston: Pearson.
 CHAPTER TEN

THE LONELY CLOUD:

INTENSIVE PARENTING AND SOCIAL
MEDIA IN NEOLIBERAL TIMES

ANNEKE MEYER AND KATIE MILESTONE

This chapter explores the role of mother-focused social media within

contemporary, middle-class, intensive parenting practices in Britain. We
argue that intensive parenting is a contradictory force that both responds to
and is a product of neoliberalism, whilst at the same time embodying
values that are at odds with neoliberalism. The intensive parent is expected
to be competitive and rational, yet nurturing and selfless. At the same time
neoliberalism demands flexible, mobile workers—a demand which
favours a return to the “male breadwinner” model of the nuclear family
and results in the brunt of the labour involved in intensive parenting falling
to mothers. We argue that social media aimed at and used by mothers,
such as high-profile parenting websites (e.g. Mumsnet) and mothers’
groups on Facebook, embody the contradictions and difficulties of
intensive parenting within neoliberal and postfeminist times. We
investigate the role of social media in intensive parenting, focusing on two
key themes: firstly, we look at how social media supports a gendered
division of labour in middle-class nuclear families and secondly, we
explore the way in which social media reveals the tensions and
contradictions of intensive parenting under neoliberalism.
Intensive parenting refers to a style of parenting defined by tremendous
energy, time, money and financial resources being devoted to children and
rationalised through the discourse of acting “in the best interest of the
child” (Faircloth and Lee 2010). The original concept of “intensive
mothering” was first proposed by Sharon Hays (1996) and has since
attracted much attention and some reworking, including the gender-
neutralising adoption of the term “intensive parenting” (e.g. Lee et al.
2014). Contemporary Anglo-American culture prizes intensive parenting,
178 Chapter Ten

but of course there are many other parenting styles, such as “attachment”
and “slow” parenting.
Social media has changed the landscape of parenting, especially of
mothering; it creates space for constant, live, interactive communication
about children and childrearing, often with other parents, through the
newsfeeds of social networking sites such as Facebook and the discussion
boards of weblogs and parenting websites such as Mumsnet. Lay
knowledge, experience, advice, and feelings can be exchanged in this way
and the ubiquity of social media accessed via smartphones has meant that
parents can theoretically engage in such communications anytime,
anywhere. However, there are economic dimensions to participating in the
social media realm of intensive parenting. At a very practical level, lower-
income parents are excluded from engagement with social media because
of the financial costs of social networking. The technical equipment
(smartphones and high-speed Internet connection) and contract costs can
be expensive. Moreover, the issue of time is a crucial factor in terms of
parents’ ability to engage with social media aimed at parents. In the UK
there has been a rise in numbers of “working poor”, individuals who are
both time-poor and cash-poor (Hills 2014). As Schradie points out,
weblogging (a form of online journaling, also known as blogging) requires
“the labor time, the ability to control the digital means of content
production, and multiple gadgets and resources that those from higher
classes are more likely to have” (2012, 557).
In addition, parents are differently placed in terms of how far they can
access and manipulate resources in order to strategically engineer and
shape their children’s opportunities. Annette Lareau (2002) examines what
she calls “concerted cultivation”, a parenting style concerned with
maximising children’s learning and educational opportunities. It is a style
of parenting associated with the middle classes, however evidence
suggests that working-class parents increasingly emulate these practices
when it comes to formal learning in order to enhance their children’s
educational and career opportunities (Hartas 2014). This leaves informal
learning—extracurricular enrichment activities such as gym classes or
music lessons—as the space in which middle-class parents attempt to
defend and secure capital advantage (Vincent and Ball 2007). Despite
converging parenting styles, class differences persist in educational
achievement (Hartas 2014). For parents from disadvantaged backgrounds,
intensive parenting does not tend to pay off, because individual actions
cannot offset structural disadvantage and inequality. Social class remains
the key determinant of children’s opportunities in life, enduring in
significance far beyond parenting styles (Hartas 2014).
 Intensive Parenting and Social Media in Neoliberal Times 179

Class difference now appears mostly as a difference in the extent to

which parents work on their children as a project. The deployment of
resources that aim for a concerted cultivation of children—e.g. paying for
private tutors and buying houses in the catchment areas of the best
schools—are prohibitively expensive, and thus only an option for wealthy
parents.
Such differences in parenting play out within the context of
neoliberalism, a discourse that now dominates Anglo-American culture.
Under neoliberalism, the “positivity” of the free market seems
unquestionable and market forces are argued to have the capacity to solve
an increasing range of socio-economic problems (Arestis and Swayer
2005, Frank 2001). This chapter explores how social media use shapes
intensive parenting within the neoliberal context. To this end, it is divided
into two sections which explore: firstly, neoliberalism, postfeminism and
intensive parenting and secondly, the role of social media in fuelling
intensive parenting in neoliberal times.

Neoliberalism, Postfeminism and Intensive Parenting

Intensive parenting emerges in a context of reinvigorated “traditional”
notions of family and gender relations, driven in part by the rise of
neoliberalism. To say that contemporary society is a neoliberal one (Saad-
Filho and Johnston 2005) recognises that all aspects of life, from the social
to the economic, the cultural to the technological, have been shaped by
neoliberalism. The ascendancy of neoliberalism from the 1970s onwards
began with economic decline and since then, neoliberalism has
accompanied falling standards of living in the Western industrialised
world. Neoliberalism however is much more than an economic movement;
it is a political and social philosophy popularised by Hayek (MacEwan
1999, Saad-Filho and Johnston 2005), with individualism as its
cornerstone. State intervention and collectivism are negatively framed as
“interference”, while individual provision, self-reliance and responsibility
are favoured. However, there is a deep contradiction at the heart of
neoliberalism: it does not actually result in laissez-faire policies, but takes
a deeply interventionist and disciplining role. Neoliberalism is not about
the dismantling of the state per se but the creation of a different kind of
strong state (MacEwan 1999). It is critical of the welfare state, the
principle of collective insurance and the alleged “dependency culture” that
welfare creates, yet it also promotes strong state intervention to sustain the
traditional nuclear family model and to regulate sexuality within private
life, for example by limiting abortion or giving tax breaks to married
180 Chapter Ten

couples (Hoggart 2005). Drawing on Pascall (1997), Hoggart (2005)

argues that this contradiction is embedded in Hayek’s founding work,
which sees the family unit and the individual as equally important and
connects economics and morality in the argument that the family instils
conduct—such as hard work and self-discipline—which is essential for the
successful operation of markets. Of course, a very particular, middle-class
version of the family lies at the heart of the neoliberal imagination.
Interventionist policies target “problem” families—those from lower
socio-economic backgrounds, in irregular employment, claiming social
security and so on—and designate such families as in need of “correction”,
training or discipline. Such families are then invited/compelled to attend
parenting classes, which are designed to instil in them desirable, middle-
class family values (Hartas 2014).
Both neoliberalism and postfeminism have played an important role in
the resurgence of nostalgic, traditional notions of gender relations and the
family. Postfeminist discourses tend to suggest that gender equality has
largely been achieved and feminism can be dismissed as largely
redundant, in need of updating or even as the cause of gendered
dissatisfactions (Negra 2009). Instead, as Gill (2007) argues, postfeminism
is a “sensibility” which foregrounds individual choice. For example, the
double, or even triple, shift still experienced by working mothers might be
blamed on feminism: i.e., argued to have been caused by feminists who
have erroneously told women they can “have it all”. Postfeminism has
been theorised by some as a conservative and reactionary response to the
current climate of gendered inequalities (Gill and Scharff 2013),
suggesting that what women really want is to be stay-at-home mothers and
wives. Feminism is blamed for devaluing these roles and making women
unhappy by driving them to pursue lifestyles they do not genuinely desire.
Postfeminist arguments often subscribe to the neoliberal ethos of
individualism, self-interest and competitiveness. Postfeminism promotes
the narrative of empowerment with its notions of individual choice and
freedom, and emphasises consumerism (Gill and Scharff 2013). For
example, it encourages women to live for themselves, celebrates
individual achievement in the world of work, insists women can be
whatever they want to be, and endorses self-actualisation and individual
responsibility (Budgeon 2013) over collective strategies for social and
structural change.
This neoliberal ethos at the heart of postfeminism may well help
(certain) women succeed in the workplace but it denies the continuing
importance of social structures in determining individual life chances and
negates the radical thinking and collective goals of feminism by recasting
 Intensive Parenting and Social Media in Neoliberal Times 181

female empowerment as a commodity that is only available to some

women. The tenets of neoliberalism and postfeminism can only be realised
by some women—usually affluent and educated ones—and a broader
nexus of classed, gendered and racialised power remains uninterrogated.
The career success of these women is often facilitated by an army of low-
paid female workers who do household chores in their roles as nannies,
cleaners, etc. (Tyler 2013). These workers are told that they, too, can
achieve professionally, if only they had the right aspirations—an
unrealistic prospect, given that under neoliberalism relative poverty and
inequality in the UK have increased (MacGregor 2005) and given that it is
women who are most impacted by the withdrawal of the state provision of
childcare and family services (Hartas 2014).
Intensive mothering has its roots in the permissive era of the 1960s
when childrearing started to become child-centred rather than parent-
centred (Hays 1996). Under this childrearing model, mothers are required
to think about and respond to the needs of their children continuously. In
practice it means that in addition to feeding, cleaning and caring for
children, mothers also have to engage children in activities, stimulate their
interests, gain knowledge of child development, keep up-to-date with
expert advice, use “positive” strategies to shape behaviour, and negotiate
with children rather than just instil obedience. Child-centredness makes
childrearing incredibly labour-intensive, time-consuming, energy-
absorbing, and expensive as considerable financial resources are required
to do all the things considered beneficial for children. The culture of
intensive parenting deepened and broadened in the 1990s within a context
of neoliberalism and the corresponding revival of traditional gender ideas.
In 1996, Sharon Hays coined the term “intensive motherhood” which
describes an ideology requiring women to be constantly and deeply
involved in all aspects of their children’s lives, investing huge amounts of
time, money and energy. Hence, mothering is no longer simply about
raising children but describes a specific skill-set and behavioural pattern,
which is increasingly based on attaining a certain level of knowledge of
the discourse of child development (Faircloth and Lee 2010).
Recent sociological literature (e.g. Lee et al. 2014) has favoured the
term “intensive parenting” to reflect the growing involvement of fathers in
childrearing. We are adopting this term in order to be inclusive: however it
is important to emphasise that parenting remains a gendered business. The
main burden of childrearing continues to fall on women’s shoulders. There
are greater expectations for women to stay at home (Matchar 2013) and
there is a continuing belief that fathers are inferior caregivers (Madge and
O’Connor 2006; Brady and Guerin 2010). Women still carry out the
182 Chapter Ten

majority of childrearing (Hartas 2014); for example, Vincent and Ball

(2007) show that it is largely women who are responsible for researching,
planning and facilitating their children’s care, education and
extracurricular activities.
The broadening and deepening of intensive parenting as a powerful
cultural force within the context of neoliberalism raises the question of
how the two are connected. We argue that intensive parenting thrives
because of two trends: firstly, it opposes and embraces neoliberalism’s
rational market logic. Secondly, while deeply incompatible with
neoliberalism in some ways, intensive parenting can be made to “fit”
neoliberalism through a system of class and gender inequalities and
exploitation. We want to explore both arguments through the case of social
media because, as we will show, such mediations embody these
contradictions of neoliberalism.

Social Media and Intensive Parenting in Neoliberal Times

Intensive parenting today is experienced, in multiple ways, through social
media and we focus on two important areas that we see as illuminating
how this cultural force connects to neoliberalism. First, we look at the role
of mother-focused social media in communicating ideological messages of
the traditional nuclear family model as the most effective formation for the
delivery of intensive parenting. Secondly, we explore how mother-focused
social media reveals the contradictory and jarring nature of neoliberal
intensive parenting.
In contemporary culture much of intensive parenting involves
interacting with social media. This is particularly the case with social
media that is specifically targeted at mothers, such as mothers’ groups on
Facebook and British websites such as Mumsnet and Netmums. Social
media is a key way for mothers to obtain information about issues such as
children’s development, childcare, health issues and schooling and to
communicate with other mothers. Parenting websites offer mothers
somewhere to go for advice and support, as well as an opportunity to
interact (or at least “lurk” 1) with people who are not known to them but
who share experiences of being pregnant, or being parents of preschool
and school-aged children. As Williams argues, parenting is now “a set of
skills, techniques, rules; it has become something that one does well or
badly”, (Williams 2013) and social media is a central force in the informal
regulation of normative practices of contemporary “good” parenting.
There is growing evidence that suggests pregnant women, women on
maternity leave, stay-at-home mothers and working mothers regularly call
 Intensive Parenting and Social Media in Neoliberal Times 183

upon social media sites linked to mothering (Madge and O’Connor 2006,
Pederson and Smithson 2013).
Mainstream media have long been a powerful circulatory force for the
spread of neoliberal values (McChesney 2001) and in recent years social
media has come to be a key component of this media landscape, not least
because of a huge rise in smartphone use and other mobile devices.
Research by Gibson and Hanson (2013) on “digital motherhood” found
that smartphones were of central importance amongst the “white, well-
educated mothers” interviewed for their research and they report: “many
of the new mothers interviewed, talked about their smartphones as
‘lifelines’” (2013, 8). These authors also cite US research that shows
mothers use their smartphones for social networking more than the general
population.2 Mothers are more immediately confronted with discourses of
intensive parenting because of their instantaneity via the increasingly
ubiquitous smartphone. Mothers can now connect to the Internet via their
phones while in the park, while breastfeeding, while waiting in the
doctor’s surgery or while waiting for a child’s extracurricular activity to
finish (Hjorth 2011). One of Gibson and Hanson’s interviewees talked
about the practicality of smartphones, noting: “I hadn’t appreciated [that] I
would have to learn to do everything one-handed” (2013, 9).
Social media is dominated by the major social networking platforms
such as Facebook as well as other websites that include an interactive
component.3 In the UK there are two major parenting websites, Mumsnet
and Netmums, which, alongside offering general pregnancy and parenting
advice have a number of specialist discussion boards. The sheer number of
subscribers (Mumsnet currently receives “over 14 million visits per
month”4) provides a vivid sense of the importance of these and other social
networking tools in the everyday life of contemporary mothers. Mumsnet
has emerged as a particularly powerful force in representing the
contemporary, intensive mother. Mumsnet was set up (and is used) by
educated, media-savvy, middle-class women and is a key orchestrator of
the maternal public sphere (see Jensen 2013b). Mother-orientated websites
become particularly instructive for women following birth, which is the
point at which the state begins to withdraw from the intense, medicalised
regulation of mothers experienced during a woman’s pregnancy, and
leaves new mothers to turn to social media for support and information
(Miller 2005).
These websites demonstrate the unspoken gendering of “intensive
parenting”. It is clear that the two most popular UK parenting websites,
Mumsnet and Netmums are targeting mothers by incorporating the word
“mum” into their titles. Although the home page of Mumsnet includes the
184 Chapter Ten

tagline “by parents, for parents”, the website’s sections include many
pages for women only, for example an ovulation calendar section, a
pregnancy week-by-week section, and a women’s style and beauty section.
The contributors to the most active discussion threads are overwhelmingly
female and there are a whole range of Mumsnet acronyms that further
suggest a female audience, for example LTB (“leave the bastard”) and
NAK (“nursing at keyboard—breastfeeding while Mumsnetting”).5 The
Mumsnet logo, a silhouetted image of three women holding babies and
feeding bottles, in a pose that references the US 1970s television detective
series Charlie’s Angels, suggests that Mumsnetters are powerful, stylish,
multitasking women. The logo imagines Mumsnetters to be working,
whilst also (quite literally here) holding the baby. Despite invoking the
gender-neutral term “parent”, the content of Mumsnet shows that it is still
mainly mothers who expect to participate in the practices of “good
parenting” (Lawler 2000). The jarring of gender invitations and expectations
can be seen in the following comment, which appears under the “frequently
asked questions” section of Mumsnet and asks if fathers can join the site:
“We hope Mumsnet isn’t exclusive to mums and indeed we know we have
a number of dads who log on and contribute. If it doesn’t sound too
pompous, we think the concept of ‘mumming/mothering’ goes beyond
gender, so don’t feel Mumsnet is too exclusive. We did think of calling the
site parentsnet.com but it just sounded so hideous.”6
This statement, that “mothering goes beyond gender” shuts down the
opportunity to explore how and why shared structures and ideologies of
parenting remain gendered. We find it fascinating that both Netmums and
Mumsnet considered but ultimately decided against using the word
“parent” or “parenting” in their title. Similarly, there is no explanation
provided as to why the term “parentsnet” would have been “so hideous”:
the unspoken and uninterrogated gendering of parenting culture thus
remains assumed.

Social Media and the Division of Labour

in Middle-Class Nuclear Families
We argue that many of the discussions on mother-focused social media
promote individualistic, competitive and pro-nuclear family messages.
Firstly, the way Mumsnet targets mothers rather than fathers, as
highlighted above, helps normalise a male breadwinner model and
constantly reinforces the idea that women are “naturally” more suited to
caring roles. This model has been shored up by social policies around the
family, including “the combination of a relatively long period of maternity
 Intensive Parenting and Social Media in Neoliberal Times 185

leave, meagre paternity leave, and a lack of affordable childcare for

children under the age of three” (IPPR, 2013, 5). Mumsnet tends to open
discussion space around how to navigate, rather than challenge, this
model. Secondly, the presence and possibilities offered by mother-focused
social media has provided a new, more attractive angle to being a stay-at-
home mum. Relinquishing a career in favour of becoming a full-time
mother no longer runs the same risk of social isolation as it did in the past
(Ribbens 1994). The stay-at-home mum can now be connected, interactive
and well-informed. Social media also offer new platforms to inform the
practices of childrearing. Participating in mother-focused discussion
boards is promoted as an opportunity for women to have influence by
actively engaging in debates or by tapping into alternative sources of
information when the judgement of doctors and health visitors, for
example, is called in to question. Social media is a feature of what
McRobbie calls “the professionalisation of family life”, which “forcefully
reverses the old feminist denunciation of housework as drudgery, and
childcare as monotonous and never-ending, by elevating domestic skills
and the bringing up of children as worthwhile and enjoyable” (2013, 130).
In order to explain the correlated ascendancy of intensive parenting
and neoliberalism, we now explore the “fit” between the two. This
connection appears peculiar at first glance because parenting is often
incompatible with neoliberalism (Hays 1996; Tyler 2013). The workplace
demands long hours of its workers along with punctuality, commitment,
unbroken focus and unlimited energy, and this rarely squares with the
realities of bringing up children or the intensive nature of contemporary
childrearing. Moreover, the neoliberal workplace demands the “ultra-
flexible worker”, i.e. a totally independent, flexible, geographically mobile
person who works changing and unsociable hours as the job demands
(Beck 1992). To be this kind of worker is near impossible for parents who
have to work around childcare arrangements, care for children when sick,
and are less mobile.
This lack of fit is “solved” through the entrenchment of gender and
class divides. Men who are fathers can remain ultra-flexible workers
through the exploitation of their female partners, whose domestic labour
frees men from all child-related commitments. Intensive parenting works
to support neoliberalism by encouraging women to stay at home full time
and allow men to pursue careers in the neoliberal labour market. Intensive
parenting makes raising children such an energy-absorbing, labour-
intensive and time-consuming job that it becomes virtually impossible for
women—who continue to shoulder the majority of parenting duties—to
combine work and childrearing. As childrearing duties increase in
186 Chapter Ten

intensive parenting, mothers are driven out of the labour market altogether
and into a “new domesticity” (Matchar 2013).
Encoded in the discourses of the mothering websites used by
contemporary “intensive mothers” are conservative-leaning values, which
celebrate stay-at-home mums (SAHMs), the nuclear family and the
importance of attachment parenting styles. See, for example, this post on
Mumsnet about SAHMs and government interventions on childcare, which
clearly describes the neoliberal male breadwinner model in operation in
this poster’s family:

[…] sahp often feel they have contributed to the family income because, at
least in our case, my dh [‘dear husband’] has not had to take time off
because the kids were sick or had to refuse short notice work trips because
of child care. He was able to do an mba because I covered all the kid stuff,
which gave him the time to do it. We were able to move abroad for a time
because I wasn’t committed to work here. Having to freedom to pursue his
career has helped him become well paid. While he was working his way up
he wasn’t earning enough to buy in the necessary help even if we’d wanted
to and if I’d been working I would have been unwilling to take on all the
responsibility at home in order to enable him to concentrate on his career.
So yes I do consider that I have contributed. 7

As we have argued, neoliberalism contains a peculiar blend of

postfeminist individualism (Gill 2007) with retrograde “traditional” ideas
about parenting being a role for which women are best suited. Such
discourses present stay-at-home mothering as an active choice by middle-
class mothers to exit the workplace, post-maternity leave. Drawing on
Adkins’ work on retraditionalisation, McRobbie argues: “the family
becomes a kind of unit or team, a partnership of equals, even if this means
a stay-home Mum and full-time-working father. In contemporary parlance
such a traditional arrangement reflects a team decision, one which could
easily be reversed” (2013, 130). The ideologies are clear: mothers should
be the primary caregivers and should retreat from the world of paid
employment and moreover, they are actively choosing to do so. This
model disguises the unpalatable structural factors working against
mothers’ return to the workplace, such as post-pregnancy discrimination in
the workplace or unmanageable childcare costs in the UK. The mobility of
the flexible neoliberal worker makes it increasingly unlikely that extended
family networks will be close by. It therefore appears that many stay-at-
home mothers present their decision as a choice when in reality has been
forced upon them. For mothers who do continue to work, the main way of
solving the “cultural contradictions of motherhood” (Hays 1996) i.e. of
fulfilling the conflicting demands of their positions as mothers and
 Intensive Parenting and Social Media in Neoliberal Times 187

workers, is through class exploitation. Women in professional jobs can

only ever come close to meeting the demands of the neoliberal workplace
by employing women from lower socio-economic backgrounds to perform
domestic labour as their cleaners, child-carers, and cooks (Tyler 2013).
Hence neoliberalism can continue to flourish in the age of intensive
parenting, and vice versa, because of a system of gender and class
exploitation.
In addition to legitimating gender exploitation for stay-at-home
mothers and class exploitation for working mothers, mother-focused social
media has further blurred the concept of work. To what extent do mothers’
interactions with social media sites, and parenting websites in particular,
constitute “work”? Social media sites generate a lot of value from the
unpaid labour of their users. A well-visited site can attract lucrative
sponsorship and advertising deals (as is the case with Mumsnet and
successful “mommy bloggers”) and as Terranova argues: “far from being
an ‘unreal,’ empty space, the Internet is animated by cultural and technical
labor through and through, a continuous production of value that is
completely immanent to the flows of the network society at large”
(Terranova 2000, 33).
Social media is an important part of the landscape of the
professionalisation of domestic life. Using social media requires technical
proficiency (which has often been partly gained in the workplace) and
provides a link between being a stay-at-home mother and the world of paid
work. Matchar (2013) identifies a new cultural trend in Anglo-American
societies towards a “new domesticity”, a key aspect of which is domestic
blogging where stay-at-home women produce weblogs on domestic topics
ranging from childcare to home-schooling, knitting to baking. According
to Matchar, blogging is crucial to new domesticity in two ways. First, it
transforms traditional “women’s work” into something “cool” and
desirable. Second, it makes domesticity palatable to women, creating
activities of value and adding status to their role. Conversely, Lopez
argues that many women bloggers aim to document “the truth” about
motherhood and focus on “showing the ugly side of motherhood” (Lopez
2009, 729). Jensen is sceptical of social media sites as Mumsnet that
claims to provide a space for mothers to admit their failings and
frustrations around mothering; she argues: “the ironic self-identity of bad
mother is in these contexts a partial and performative subjectivity, adopted
voluntarily by parents in the spirit of self-mockery and on the implicit
understanding that one is not really failing” (Jensen 2013b, 140). In an
intensive parenting culture where judgements about what constitutes good
and bad parenting are powerfully classed, middle-class parents can admit
188 Chapter Ten

to occasional failure with little fear of recrimination. Yet admitting to

serious, prolonged, genuinely felt failings regarding childrearing is
actually something contemporary mothers do not, and cannot, do—as
Miller’s interviews with new mothers (2005) show: the stakes, it appears,
are too high.
As Littler argues, commenting on the work of Diane Negra, the
idealisation of female domesticity is a “form of ‘retreatism’ from the
problems of the public sphere” (2013, 233). Littler also calls on the work
of Douglas and Michaels (2004) who noted that the stay-at-home mum
became promoted as a desirable and virtuous subject position concurrently
with the rise of neoliberal policies that saw the decimation of state-
provided day care provision. As authors such as McRobbie (2009) and Gill
(2011) have argued, postfeminist discourses about apparent gender equality
render these kinds of issues “unspeakable” and often unacknowledged. New
and social media have thus emerged concurrently with a “postfeminist”
(Aronson 2003) landscape—in which “traditional” feminism is represented
as outmoded and unnecessary—and with the rise of neoliberalism, in
which formal equality legislation and policies are held to be excessively
bureaucratic. Feminist politics and the demand for collective solutions on
issues such as childcare have slipped from view and an individualised
approach to parenting has moved to the fore (McRobbie 2013). On
mother-focused websites the tenor is very much one of individuals making
things happen/helping themselves: a parental determination that fits and
feeds the individualism of neoliberalism. This worldview creates a moral
imperative for individuals—especially mothers—to help themselves in the
name of “doing the best for their child”, because after all, “mothers know
best” and relying upon state and collective solutions could only ever be
second best (Song et al. 2012).

Social Media and the Contradictions of Intensive

Parenting
Intensive parenting today, lived partly through social media and in the
context of postfeminism and neoliberalism, is riven by contradictions.
Neoliberalism is built on the logic of a rationalised market that operates
according to the principles of calculation, rationality, efficiency, and
competitiveness. It is impersonal, highly individualist and driven by profit
accumulation and the pursuit of self-interest. Intensive parenting has a
contradictory relationship to these principles, being both deeply
rational(ised) and emotional. Rationality per se is no longer renounced
within parenting culture and indeed intensive parenting is often carried out
 Intensive Parenting and Social Media in Neoliberal Times 189

in highly rationalised ways, manifesting as parents seeking the competitive

edge in a race for scarce resources. Mother-focused social media facilitates
this, by providing mothers seeking to maximise the chances of their
children’s success with opportunities to seek out others’ experience,
advice, information, and insider knowledge. A good example of this can
be seen in discussion threads on Mumsnet regarding education. In one post
a mother asks for advice on how to prepare her seven-year-old for entrance
exams at a prestigious school:

Need your help/advice with admissions to 7+ for our DS [‘dear son’] for
2016 intake. We have started preparing him since last month with bond
books. He is quite strong in maths [...] the problems we have are in some
specific areas:

1. English comprehension / story-writing: Looking at what everyone has

been saying the standard seems quite high certainly compared to what he
gets/does at school. His language skills are good but not extraordinary. He
also struggles with abstract and open-ended questions. Are there any good
comprehension books we can use to practise? Also what are the types of
topics that are given for story-writing?

2. Interviews: What types of questions are asked in interviews? Are kids

expected to display certain types of behaviours or just be themselves?
Again how do we prepare? We are particularly worried about Kings’
admissions as the first filter seems to be interview […]8

This abbreviated extract gives a flavour of the lengths parents go to in

order to secure advantages for their children: they prepare the child for
months in advance of exams, they think about and plan this preparation,
they buy new books, they work out and work on their child’s weaknesses,
and post online queries to get inside information. This is highly
rationalised, instrumental behaviour typical of neoliberal times: parents set
goals and identify actions to maximise their chances of achieving them.
Parents are no longer simply moral educators but capital maximisers
(Hartas 2014). Parenting is partly a technical matter in which a series of
the “right” techniques, skills and practices produce success. On the other
hand, parenting also remains deeply emotional, in that it is seen as a
relationship that is and should be grounded in love and affection. The
parent-child relationship is often held up as one of the last bastions of
morality—grounded in moral obligation, altruism, love and care—in a
society which is said to have become morally corrupted (Beck 1992, Jenks
1996, Hays 1996). This moral corruption is at least partly blamed on
market rationalisation and commercialisation in capitalist societies, which
190 Chapter Ten

has spread into every corner of society under neoliberalism (Polanyi 1944,
cited in Hays 1996). This moral critique encourages a highly emotional
type of parenting, which is further reinforced through the “affective
fabric” of digital media (Kuntsman 2012). In her analysis of Mumsnet,
Jensen (2013b) draws on Kuntsman’s argument that digital culture is
largely made up of emotions and sentiments. Set up to give mothers a
voice and make public their dissatisfactions and problems regarding
childrearing, the content and style of many Mumsnet posts are affective:
women are angry, frustrated, compassionate, supportive, and so on, as they
share problems and advice (Jensen 2013b). Mother-focused social media
both (re)create and reinforce an emotive and emotionally expressive style
of parenting.
Today, emotionality and rationality are contrasting yet deeply
interwoven aspects of intensive parenting, reflecting its contradictory
relationship to neoliberalism and its rationalised market logic. The popular
“pushy parent” discourse is a good example of these contradictions,
because it signposts both the centrality of rationality in bringing up
children and the limits of its acceptability. Parents who are perceived as
too rational, too calculating and too competitive are criticised as “pushy”.
At some point, parents’ instrumental, rationalised actions to achieve set
goals cease to be seen as helping children succeed and instead become
interpreted as selfish parental tactics to advance their own ambitions.
Parents may try to pre-empt the “pushy parent critique”, for example, by
enrolling children in enrichment activities designed to provide a
competitive advantage claim but say that they are motivated by a desire to
let their children have “fun”—the very antithesis of parental rationality
(Vincent and Ball 2007). But the mother who posted the extract above on
Mumsnet did not engage in such pre-emptive tactics and, as a
consequence, received several negative responses criticising her for “over-
doing it” and harming her child in the process: “While I can appreciate
your desire to ensure your son is well-prepared, I think you are doing far
too much! The 7+ test is a test for boys who are 6–7 years old! [...] I think
over-preparation is counterproductive and contributes to stress in children.
Observe your child, see what he’s capable of doing and chose a school that
suits his own abilities.”1
There is something peculiar about the competitiveness of parents on
social media forums. As parents seek out and give advice to each other, we
might ask why any user would “give away” a competitive advantage in the



 Intensive Parenting and Social Media in Neoliberal Times 191

form of information. However, the real competition is not for information,

but over the value of parenting; how parents “handle” their children,
childrearing philosophies, what kind of “intellectual capital” they are
2
passing on to their children. Social media provides a forum for displaying
parental skills, children’s successes, and for supporting and criticising
other parents. The relative anonymity of mother-focused social media such
as Mumsnet makes circulating criticisms easy, and we note that
discussions on anonymous websites such as Mumsnet are much more
critical and injurious than, say, Facebook conversations in which the
participating mothers often know one other in real life.
Social media and intensive parenting also have a complex and
contradictory relationship to neoliberalism’s key tenet of individualism.
Individuals on mother-focused social media offer a lot of support and
advice to each other and much of this is experienced as helpful and
supportive (Madge and O’Connor 2006, Pedersen and Smithson 2013).
For example, the above-quoted Mumsnet query for advice received many
practical responses which provided concrete information, e.g. parents
recommended books, shared their knowledge of the particular school,
revealed questions that their children were asked during entrance exams,
gave advice on what the school’s key priorities are, and so on. Hence,
there is a certain collective feel, but this “collectiveness” is neither entirely
altruistic nor limitless. Social media use is mostly motivated by the search
for entertainment. Pedersen and Smithson’s (2013) research with Mumsnet
users shows that while individuals seek information, they cite
entertainment as the most important reason for using the site. Users report
deriving enjoyment both from posting and reading comments. At its heart,
the structure of social media sites is individualistic; parents communicate
as individuals, and this supports neoliberalism as it invites parents to see
themselves as free, individual agents who can solve any problem with the
right kind of practices and knowledge (Jensen 2013b). In the above
mentioned Mumsnet discussion thread, all the supportive posters are
parents whose children already have a place at school; that is, they are no
longer in competition in that area. Knowledge may not be as readily
shared when it is perceived to disadvantage your own chances, or when
desired goals are in “scarce supply”, because although parents may
support each other in certain situations, they subscribe to a competitive
set-up and do not collectively challenge the underlying logic of intensive
parenting. This individualism ignores structural constraints beyond
individuals’ own control and seeks to confirm that “bad parenting” is the


192 Chapter Ten

outcome of incorrect actions and bad choices (Jensen 2013b). As a result,

such social media—through facilitating constant affective talk and
individual competition—reproduce the very structures and discourses that
support intensive parenting.
The individualism displayed on social media sites is thus highly
patterned: most parents seem to be doing the same things. Intensive
parenting today involves a range of highly standardised practices including
core activities (e.g. baby yoga, sports and music classes, reading at home)
and strategies (e.g. reward charts, healthy eating). This standardisation
indicates the regulatory force of social media, especially its power to foster
self-regulation. Interactions with social media mean that individuals
cannot escape seeing what others are doing; as McRobbie argues, the age
of online communication forces women into a “mode of repetitive
looking” (2013, 132) and this in turn leads to intensified social emulation.
Social media allow intensive parenting to thrive because it facilitates its
functioning as a technology of the self, through which individuals
internally discipline themselves (Song et al 2012). Social media
communicates the kinds of practices and strategies that make up intensive
parenting, which appear as something “all parents” do, and this in turn
encourages the spread, emulation and intensification of similar practices.
The outcome is a technology of the self which appears natural because
“everyone is doing it” and because individuals opt to emulate all these
“everybodies”, whilst retaining a sense that they are exercising individual
free choice. As a consequence, intensive parenting is a rather lonely and
individualistic business. There is a social element to social media, in that
parents come together to discuss and share, but (as we hope to have shown)
since this is often combined with competitiveness, value judgement and a
belief in individualised responsibility, no genuine collectivism emerges.

Conclusion: Some Critical Reflections

In neoliberal and postfeminist times, intensive parenting is a complex and
contradictory subject position that inhabits facets of being rational and
emotional, competitive and nurturing. Mother-focused social media
embody, reinforce and reveal that on the one hand, their affective fabric
encourages the expression of emotionality, and on the other hand the
exchange of information and knowledge invites individuals to maximise
their competitiveness in order to achieve goals. While social media
facilitates interactions and communications between parents, the relations
fostered online remain individualist; a collective way of thinking does not
emerge. Social responsibility and a concern for others are limited, as the
 Intensive Parenting and Social Media in Neoliberal Times 193

dimension of warmth, love and care is restricted to parents and their own
children. This is not least due to the neoliberal ethos written into the very
architecture of social media sites. Online, the “enterprising individual”
exercises agency, self-reflexivity and responsibility in the name of “better
parenting” and on behalf of their children (Jensen 2013b), and
competitiveness between and polarisation of mothers (Madge and
O’Connor 2006, Pedersen and Smithson 2013) extends the individualistic
heart of intensive parenting and wider climate of neoliberalism.
Social media and intensive parenting foster acceptance of structural
inequalities, including those of gender and social class. Mother-focused
social media tacitly supports a gendered division of labour. Although
designed to address “parents” and parenting issues such sites actually
target mothers (and marginalise fathers) and, in doing so, normalise a
traditional nuclear family model of breadwinning father and childrearing
mother. The intensive parent is mostly the intensive mother: positioned as
the one who knows about her child’s abilities and problems, who worries,
who seeks advice, who takes action. Women today still disproportionately
shoulder the costly and exhausting demands of intensive parenting,
including the emotional strain, the loss of financial power through
interrupted careers, and the physical strain of combining household chores,
bringing up children and paid work. Mother-focused social media
legitimates intensive mothering—particularly stay-at-home, nuclear,
middle-class mothering. Social media connection to other mothers makes
stay-at-home motherhood less isolating than in the pre-digital age and the
technical aspect of communication gives mothering a more “professional”
feel and enhances its social status, especially when mothers also engage in
online activities such as blogging or moderating social media discussion
threads or webpages that blur the lines between online consumption and
production.
Through the reinforcement of traditional gender roles, social media and
intensive parenting therefore shore up neoliberalism. They free up fathers
to become the ultra-flexible and committed workers that the neoliberal
workplace values and demands. In this context, it is only middle-class
professional women who can realistically compete with men, as they are
able to exploit their class position and pay less-affluent women to perform
domestic labour during the working week. This arrangement is simply not
an option for most mothers because they cannot command the wages
necessary to “outsource” their household and childcare duties. And yet. in
spite of these structural obstacles, many such mothers and families are
stereotyped as “scroungers” or “skivers”, people unwilling to work and
“better” themselves and only too happy to rely on the welfare state (Jensen
194 Chapter Ten

2014). They continue to be hit hardest by the government’s austerity

measures, which mean an ever-increasing withdrawal of public provisions
and a deepening of structural inequalities. Social media, as a vehicle for
intensive parenting, becomes complicit in the creation of this increasingly
individualistic society through supporting such neoliberal structures and
extending neoliberal discourse to the sphere of parenting, where
everything is framed as the outcome of “good” parenting and the
importance of social structure is silenced.

References
Arestis, P. and Sawyer, M. 2005. “The Neoliberal Experience of the
United Kingdom” in Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader, eds. Saad-
Filho, A. and Johnston, D. London: Pluto.
Aronson, P. 2003. “‘Feminists’ or ‘Post feminists’? Young Women’s
Attitudes Towards Feminism and Gender Relations.” Gender and
Society 17(6): 903–922.
Beck, U. 1992. Risk Society. London: Sage.
Boyd, D. M. and Ellison, N.B. 2007. “Social Network Sites: Definition,
History, and Scholarship.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
13: 210–230.
Brady, E. and Guerin, S. 2010. “‘Not the Romantic, all Happy, Coochy-
Coo Experience’: A Qualitative Analysis of Interactions on an Irish
Parenting Web Site.” Family Relations 59(1): 14–27.
Budgeon, S. 2013. “The Contradictions of Successful Femininity: Third-
Wave Feminism, Postfeminism and ‘New’ Femininities’” in New
Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity (2nd ed.),
eds. Gill, R. and Scharff, C. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Daycare Trust. 2012. Childcare Costs Survey 2012. Daycaretrust.org
website. Retrieved from: http:www.daycaretrust.org.uk/pages/child
care-costs-survey-2012.html
Douglas, S. and Michaels, M. 2005. The Mommy Myth: The Idealization
of Motherhood and How It’s Undermined all Women. New York and
London: Free Press.
Faircloth, C. and Lee, E. 2010. “Introduction: Changing Parenting
Cultures.” Sociological Research Online 15 (4). Retrieved online.
DOI: 10.5153/sro.2249
Faludi, S. 1992. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women. London:
Vintage.
 Intensive Parenting and Social Media in Neoliberal Times 195

Frank, T. 2001. One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market

Populism and the End of Economic Democracy. London: Secker &
Warburg.
Gibson, L & Hanson, V.L. 2013. “‘Digital Motherhood’: How Does
Technology Support New Mothers” in Computer Human Interaction
13: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems. New York: Association for Computing
Machinery, 313–322. DOI: 10.1145/2470654.2470700
Gill, R. and Scharff, C. 2013. “Introduction” in New Femininities:
Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity (2nd ed.). Basingstoke:
Palgrave.
Gill, R. 2011. “Sexism Reloaded, or, it’s Time to Get Angry Again.”
Feminist Media Studies 11(1): 61–71.
—. 2007. “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility.”
European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10(2): 147–166.
Hartas, D. 2014. Parenting, Family Policy and Children’s Well-Being in
an Unequal Society: A New Culture War for Parents. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Hays, S. 1996. The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. New Haven:
Yale University Press.
Hills, J. 2014. Good Times, Bad Times: the Welfare Myth of Them and Us.
Bristol: Policy Press.
Hoggart, L. 2005. “Neoliberalism, the New Right and Sexual Politics” in
Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader, eds. Saad-Filho, A. and Johnston, D.
London: Pluto.
Hjorth, L. 2011. “It’s Complicated: Mobile Intimacy and Creativity in an
Age of Social Media and Affective Technology.” Communication,
Politics and Culture 44(1): 45–56.
Jenks, C. 1996. Childhood. London: Routledge.
Jensen, T. 2013a. “Austerity Parenting.” Soundings 55(1): 61–71.
—. 2013b. “‘Mumsnettiquette’: Online Affect Within Parenting Culture”
in Privilege, Affect and Agency: Understanding the Production and
Effects of Action, eds. Maxwell, C. and Aggleton, P. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Kuntsman, A. 2012. “Introduction” in Digital Cultures and the Politics of
Emotion: Feelings, Affect and Technological Change, eds. Karatzogianni,
A. and A. Kuntsman, A. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lanning, T. 2013. Great Expectations: Exploring the Promise of Gender
Equality (Report). Institute for Public Policy Research. Retrieved from:
http://www.ippr.org/publications/great-expectations-exploring-the-
promises-of-gender-equality
196 Chapter Ten

Lareau, A. 2002. “Invisible Inequality: Social Class and Childrearing in

Black and White Families.” American Sociological Review 67(5): 747–
776.
Lawler, S. 2000. Mothering the Self: Mothers, Daughters, Subjects.
London: Routledge.
Lee, E., Bristow, J., Faircloth, C. and Macvarish, J. 2014. Parenting
Culture Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Littler, J. 2013. “The Rise of the ‘Yummy Mummy’: Popular
Conservatism and the Neoliberal Maternal in Contemporary British
Culture.” Communication, Culture and Critique 6(2): 227–243.
Lopez, L.K. 2009. “The Radical Act of ‘Mommy Blogging’: Redefining
Motherhood through the Blogosphere.” New Media & Society 11(5):
729–747.
MacEwan, A. 1999. Neo-Liberalism or Democracy? Economic Strategy,
Markets, and Alternatives for the 21st Century. London: Zed Books.
MacGregor, S. 2005. “The Welfare State and Neoliberalism” in
Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader, eds. Saad-Filho, A. and D. Johnston,
D. London: Pluto.
McChesney, R.W. 2001. “Global Media, Neoliberalism, and Imperialism.”
Monthly Review 52(10). Retrieved from:
http://monthlyreview.org/2001/03/01/global-media-neoliberalism-and-
imperialism/
McRobbie, A. 2009. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and
Social Change. London: Sage.
McRobbie, A. 2013. “Feminism, the Family and the New ‘Mediated’
Maternalism.” New Formations 80–81: 119–137.
Madge, C. and O’Connor, H. 2006. “Parenting Gone Wired: Empowerment of
New Mothers on the Internet?” Social and Cultural Geography 7(2):
199–220.
Matchar, E. 2013. Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing The
New Domesticity. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Miller, T. 2005. Making Sense of Motherhood: A Narrative Approach.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mumsnet.com. 2015a. “About Us.” Accessed July 15. Retrieved from:
http://www.mumsnet.com/info/aboutus
—. 2015b. “Acronyms.” Accessed July 15. Retrieved from:
http://www.mumsnet.com/info/acronyms
—. 2015c. “Dads.” Accessed July 15. Retrieved from:
http://www.mumsnet.com/info/faqs#Dads
—. 2015d. Discussion on SAHMs. Accessed July 15. Retrieved from:
 Intensive Parenting and Social Media in Neoliberal Times 197

http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/parenting/2377945-SAHMs-and-
government-interventions-on-childcare?pg=4
—. 2015e. Discussion on Entry Exams. Accessed July 15. Retrieved from:
http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/primary/2376239-Wesminster-Under-
Colet-Kings-College
Negra, D. 2009. What a Girl Wants? Fantasising the Reclamation of Self
in Postfeminism. London: Routledge.
Office for National Statistics. 2013. Internet Access: Households and
Individuals (Statistical Bulletin). Retrieved from:
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_322713.pdf
Pascall, G. 1997. Social Policy: A New Feminist Analysis (2nd ed.).
London: Routledge.
Pedersen, S. and Smithson, J. 2013. “Mothers with Attitude—How the
Mumsnet Parenting Forum Offers Space for New Forms of Femininity
to Emerge Online.” Women’s Studies International Forum 38: 97–106.
Polanyi, K. 1944. The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon.
Ribbens, J. 1994. Mothers and their Children: A Feminist Sociology of
Childrearing. London: Sage.
Schradie, J. 2012. “The Trend of Class, Race, and Ethnicity in Social
Media Inequality.” Information, Communication & Society 15(4): 555–
571.
Saad-Filho, A. and Johnston, D. 2005. “Introduction” in Neoliberalism: A
Critical Reader. London: Pluto.
Song, F.W., Ellis, J, Lundy, L. and Smith Dahmen, N. 2012. “Women,
Pregnancy, and Health Information Online: the Making of Informed
Patients and Ideal Mothers.” Gender & Society 26(5): 773–798.
Terranova, T. 2000. “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital
Economy.” Social Text 18(2): 33–58.
Tyler, I. 2013. “Pregnant Beauty: Maternal Femininities under
Neoliberalism” in New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and
Subjectivity (2nd ed.), eds. Gill, R. and Scharff, C. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Vincent, C. and Ball, S.J. 2007. “‘Making Up’ the Middle-Class Child:
Families, Activities and Class Dispositions.” Sociology 41(6): 1061–
1077.
Williams, Z. 2014. “The Madness of Modern Parenting.” The Guardian,
December 6. Retrieved from:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/06/zoe-williams-the-
madness-of-modern-parenting
198 Chapter Ten

Notes1

1. 1 The practice of “lurking” is defined by Muller (2012) as “people who read
social media data, but do not directly contribute”.
2. Statistics compiled by Neilson show that 50% of mothers use their phones for
social networking compared to 38% of women in general and 37% of the
population in general NielsenWire. Infographic: The Digital Lives of American
Moms. May 11, 2012
3. Social networking sites (SNS) first started to emerge in the late 1990s. 1997 saw
the emergence of sixdegrees.com. Facebook began in 2005 and went mainstream
the following year (see Boyd, D. M. and Ellison, N. B. 2007. “Social Network
Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship.” Journal of Computer-Mediated
Communication Issue 13 (2008), 210–230 for more on history and definition).
4. http://www.mumsnet.com/info/aboutus
5. http://www.mumsnet.com/info/acronyms
6. http://www.mumsnet.com/info/faqs#Dads
7. http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/parenting/2377945-SAHMs-and-government-
interventions-on-childcare?pg=4
8. http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/primary/2376239-Wesminster-Under-Colet-
Kings-College
 CHAPTER ELEVEN

BIRTHING BABIES IN THE BLOGOSPHERE:

GENDERED LABOUR AND ENTREPRENEURIAL
MOTHERHOOD IN CYBERSPACE

ANIJA DOKTER

Over the course of my research I have collected and studied hundreds of

audiovisual recordings of women giving birth. One woman’s birth videos,
however, stand out in my memory. I watched and listened to her first birth
video over four years ago and recently returned to her YouTube channel to
find an additional recording of her second birth.
The first video contains live footage of the woman’s labour,
interspersed with a “vlog” (video weblog) commentary explaining the
scenes. The woman’s narration explains that when her uterus stopped
contracting due to exhaustion from a very long labour, the hospital
medical staff began to mention various interventions. She ended up
consenting to the use of Pitocin, a synthetic hormone for inducing uterine
contractions: “My husband, the doulas, the nurse... everyone was kind of
for this Pitocin idea... And it really just scared me and it saddened
me, ’cause you know, I am Mama Natural and I really didn’t want to have
to go that route”. She goes on to emphasise that she received “just two
drops of Pitocin, which is so minimal compared to, you know, most moms
that go on Pitocin—they give twenty to thirty drops per hour and here I
was just getting, you know, two” (Genevieve, September 25, 2010).
The woman’s second labour progressed much more quickly and she
gave birth shortly after arriving at the hospital. In the video footage, her
first reaction on seeing her baby was, “She’s so purple, is she okay? Why
is she so blue?”. Her midwife quickly assured her that everything was fine
and the woman then turned to her husband and exclaimed, “That was an
easy birth! That was a super-natural birth!”. Her husband echoed her
words, repeating: “A super-natural birth!” (Genevieve, December 5, 2013).
200 Chapter Eleven

“Mama Natural” is the online persona of Genevieve, a successful

American blogger and vlogger with a popular YouTube channel, Facebook
page, and personal website. Her online materials centre on her role as a
stay-at-home mother, with information about pregnancy, childbirth,
breastfeeding and parenting, along with “tips and tricks” for natural,
organic, healthy living. As such, Genevieve is a quintessential “mommy
blogger” (or “mommyblogger”). She is married, middle-class and a devout
Christian. Her videos are well-recorded and edited, her hair and makeup
always impeccable, and she receives substantial product placement and
advertising sponsorships, regularly giving gifts (i.e. product giveaways) to
her subscribers. Genevieve’s skills in planning, optimising, innovating and
communicating during her childbearing and mothering have helped her to
become a successful online entrepreneur—her many blogs and vlogs have
acquired substantial hits, and she gets paid accordingly.
Genevieve’s birth videos have retained a prominent place in my
memory because of the marked way in which Genevieve’s identity as a
mother is performed while she is giving birth. Genevieve started her
YouTube channel during her first pregnancy—she publicly declared
herself to be “Mama Natural” when fourteen weeks pregnant, and formed
very strong aspirations of having what she considered to be a natural birth
in a hospital setting. This declaration impacted the way Genevieve
experienced her prolonged labour and navigated options for medical
intervention, resisting any labour augmentation until she was too
exhausted to continue. She grieved the use of Pitocin and subsequently
engaged in identity work and narrative construction in order to justify this
“unnatural” aspect of her labour. i In the end, Genevieve still titled the
video “Natural Childbirth”. However, her sense of birthing achievement
changed after her second birth was Pitocin-free: if the first birth was
“natural,” the second was “super-natural”.
Genevieve’s online work is saturated with the rhetoric of personal
choice—making smart choices, choosing the best for her baby and her
family. She markets her identity as that of a striving mother, aiming to do
her very best while educating herself and others. This preoccupation with
optimising her mothering and her family’s health forms the basis of her
mothering brand: she is natural, from her low-intervention births to her
low-pesticide foods. Her brand attracts other women who are aspiring to
this particular ideal of motherhood. Although a large number of
mommybloggers aspire to be healthy and natural, there are many different
types and clusters of mommybloggers, each appealing to certain maternal
ideals and aspirations.ii
 Birthing Babies in the Blogosphere 201

The mommyblogger phenomenon has received substantial media

attention. It has come to represent the overall increase of mothers’ online
presence and the broader development and expansion of online
motherhood-related goods and services industries. Various terms have
been coined to describe these phenomena, including “mommyblogger,”
but also “mommyverse” (i.e. motherhood-related online material such as
Mumsnet) and “mommyindustries” (i.e. motherhood-related goods and
services). For the most part, these terms are not intended to be
complimentary. As Gina Masullo Chen has noted, the term “mommy”
reinforces the mother’s undervalued role as nurturers and has been used to
create a digital domestic sphere in cyberspace (2013, 510–11).
My overview of recent media reports on motherhood-related cyber
activity concurs with Chen’s argument. I have found that most media
commentators use the term “mommy” disparagingly. In order to take a
glimpse at the discourse, I searched major news publications such as The
New York Times for articles on mommyblogging and found many articles
approaching the topic with disdain or even vitriol. Candice Rainey’s
description (2013) is somewhat mild:

The first wave of mommy blogs (i.e. those that appeared pre-Facebook)
resulted in blogs that published simple updates on family matters, in the
manner of year-round Christmas letters. The second wave were
confessional soapboxes for mothers with dirty laundry to air (like
dooce.com), attracting devoted readerships, advertising dollars and
eventually public mimicry (2013). In a more cutting article entitled “Honey,
Don’t Bother Mommy. I’m Too Busy Building My Brand”, Jennifer
Mendelsohn writes: “whereas so-called mommy blogs were once little
more than glorified electronic scrapbooks […] they have more recently
evolved into a cultural force to be reckoned with […] [T]hese blogs have
become a burgeoning industry generating incomes ranging from $25 a
month in what one blogger called ‘latte money’ to, for a very elite few, six
figures” (2010).

These few women who earn six figures are criticised the most. In her
“Queen of the Bloggers” article (2011) Lisa Belkin describes one of the
most highly-paid mommybloggers as follows: “Of all of the self-exposing
bloggers striving to be heard, Heather Armstrong has emerged as the
master of the art and commerce of the overshare […] By talking about
poop and spit up and stomach viruses and washing-machine repairs […]
and countless other banalities of one mother’s eclectic life that, for some
reason, hundreds of thousands of strangers tune in, regularly, to read”.
It is significant that out of all the people indulging in “oversharing”
and voyeurism online, mommybloggers are consistently targeted by
202 Chapter Eleven

negative media portrayals. Their priorities and their status as “good

mothers” are questioned—as in Mendelsohn’s (2010) article “Honey,
Don’t Bother Mommy…”. Their lives are characterised by banalities and
abject physicalities (poop, spit up), and their online activities are restricted
to soap boxes, striving to be heard, and oversharing. The accusation of
“overshare” is particularly unjust, as mainstream media (including
supposedly respectable publications such as The New York Times) thrive
in the business of sensationalism and overshare. But instead of portraying
mommyblogging as one part of a broader cultural trend involving rapidly
changing social values of intimacy and privacy, the women are singled out
for failing to meet an unspoken ideal of modest, silent, domestic, selfless
and dedicated mothering. Lori Kido Lopez’s summary is apt: she states
that mommybloggers do not receive the same respect that male bloggers
can expect because “motherhood is commonly viewed as belonging
squarely within the private sphere and successful, strong men do not air
their dirty laundry in public” (2009, 731). Despite its negative
connotations, I find the term “mommyblogger” to be useful precisely
because helps to emphasise the devaluation of mothers’ online work. It
also suggests that the “mommies” doing this online work are real women
navigating social life and the institutions that mediate their gendered
experiences of reproduction and parenting. I wish to focus on the
continuities and ambiguities that arise when maternal work is
simultaneously online and offline, digital and material (Longhurst, 2009,
48–9).
I have found two primary academic approaches to mommyblogging.
The first seeks to characterise women’s blogging and vlogging in terms of
social force, portraying mommyblogging as potentially empowering and
subversive. Lori Lopez argues that mommyblogging exposes the “myths
of motherhood”, noting that many mommybloggers are sustained by a
readership consisting of women who value honest depictions of mothers’
struggles. This loyal readership adds strength and validity to mothers’
online work, despite the frequent criticisms directed at them from outside
of this community (729–30). The second academic approach focuses on
middle-class mommybloggers’ participation in (and their partial
responsibility for creating) false narratives of motherhood that plays into
the increasing marketisation of mothering. Alison Phipps’ analysis of
various mommyindustries contains accurate evaluations of how women’s
online activities have been formed into new advertising and commodities
markets, controlling vast amounts of consumer buying power (123–24).
However, her narrative does not address the larger context in which
mother work takes place, in effect putting a spotlight on middle-class
 Birthing Babies in the Blogosphere 203

women’s responsibilities while women’s strategies for coping with

economic disparities are left in the dark.
These two academic approaches present conflicting analyses of
mommyblogging. They take different cross-sections of the mommyblogging
phenomenon and contextualise their sample in different social struggles.
Instead of attempting to evaluate whether mommyblogging should be
considered subversive or complicit overall, I wish explore how women’s
online activities fulfill a variety of economic functions. I approach mothers’
blogs and vlogs as an archive of women’s navigation of rapidly
transforming economic systems. My focus will be on one particular
crossroads: the intersection between the naturalisation of neoliberal values,
entrepreneurial subjectivities, maternal identities, mommyblogging, and
the function of childbirth media.
Childbirth has an important place in these broader trends. The
mommyverse (the corner of the Internet dominated by motherhood-related
data) is brimming with birth stories and birth videos, which often attract a
large number of hits, shares and comments. Genevieve’s case is the norm:
her birth videos are by far her most frequently visited posts. Through
branding and posting her birth recordings, she has been able to attract a far
wider audience to her YouTube channel than she would have with
parenting videos alone. This broader viewership has immediate financial
rewards but is also a way for Genevieve to advertise her website and other
online platforms. In other words, childbirth has an important economic
function within mommyblogging and, by extension, within certain
mommyindustries.
In this chapter, I explore some of the ways in which childbirth (both
the experience and representation thereof) functions within the broader
marketisation of mothering. I wish to better understand why some women
have been effectively selling (whether for economic gain or increased
social capital) their intimate lives and bodily experiences online—in
particular, their birth videos and birth stories. My aim is to capture some
of the ways in which neoliberal entrepreneurship impacts women by
evaluating childbirth in terms of its social and economic currencies. It is
the materiality of this impact that most interests me—how the
marketisation of motherhood and mother work impacts women’s sensory,
embodied experience of giving birth. However, I do not want to construct
a narrative that solely focuses on impact and portrays women as the
passive victims of economic systems—throughout researching this topic I
have been struck by women’s resourcefulness even when they are
functioning within deeply oppressive institutions. Therefore, I will also
examine women’s skills in recognising the market value of their childbirth
204 Chapter Eleven

experiences and will focus on how dominant institutions absorb or

counteract their entrepreneurial efforts.
I will begin my analysis by putting women’s online work into
perspective: identifying the systematic inequalities that contribute to
producing an active online maternal labour force and to developing a
broad consumer base for mommyverse markets. I will draw on previous
research which identifies that mothers’ primarily undervalued (i.e. unpaid
and poorly-paid) online work, although disparagingly feminised and
undervalued in mainstream media, has in fact been exploited by a
collection of highly lucrative industries that primarily profit elite men.
Although I do not wish to overlook the many empowering aspects of
mothers’ online activities (including community formation, consciousness
raising, and information sharing), I intend to focus on some of the
economic forces and constraints that mediate women’s labour. I aim to
demonstrate that, for many women participating in the “mommyverse”,
maternal entrepreneurship is a strategy for coping with economic
inequalities that is in turn exploited. This spiral of exploitation forms an
important driving force in the neoliberal colonisation of mothering.
I will draw from vlogs and blogs created by two different types of
online entrepreneurs: beauty bloggers who transition to mommyblogging,
and intensive mommybloggers who begin blogging while pregnant. My
goal is to identify the common economic links and structural similarities
shared between these groups of women, despite the marked differences in
their online activities. In other words, my study examines the means of
women’s online work rather than their forms of expression. I will examine
the work of several well-established women bloggers, all of whom appear
to be either American or located elsewhere in the English-speaking
economic core.

The Economics of Mommyblogging

When analysing neoliberalism it is easy to be overwhelmed by its
complexity, losing one’s grasp on its structure and mechanisms—as John
Clarke asked, what isn’t neoliberal? (2008, 138). I could make a similar
rhetorical gesture regarding birth—women’s situations, expectations,
experiences and narratives of childbearing are highly diverse and are
impacted by countless social forces. Instead of trying to describe the
overall functioning of contemporary neoliberalism and birth culture, I am
going to select a few trajectories from each, narrating the daily life
experience of neoliberalism as a way of comparing and interlacing varied
stories about childbearing.
 Birthing Babies in the Blogosphere 205

In doing so, I utilise narrative on multiple levels. In the most obvious

sense, I draw from women’s own storytelling about childbearing and
mothering. On a more abstract level, I consider the larger discursive
narratives that impact women’s childbearing—including social narratives
of the good mother, good citizen, and good entrepreneur. Third, I maintain
awareness of scholarly narratives and try to fashion a reflexive method of
narrating society, economy, and women’s lives. In fashioning this
reflexivity, I focus on the materiality of narratives and storytelling: their
breath and resonance, their role in conducting and shaping power, and
their impact on women, their communities and environs.
Dominant institutions that espouse neoliberalism—including various
governments in the economic core, the IMF, and the World Bank—argue
that upholding individuality, entrepreneurship and free market principles
facilitates greater freedom, equality and poverty reduction. Feminist
political economists Meg Luxton and Susan Braedley have analysed some
of the discourses produced by these institutions. They emphasise that these
discourses legitimise neoliberalism, by masking both its origins in, and
advancement, of racist, imperialist, colonial, and sexist/patriarchal systems
of domination (Luxton and Bezanson 2006, 21–22). The overall consensus
within feminist political economy scholarship is clear: women are being
disproportionately harmed as poverty, precariousness and violence
increase around the world, due, to a large extent, to policies and practices
that enable global capital to be increasingly concentrated within a small
male-dominated elite. Without women’s unpaid and poorly paid
reproductive and productive labour, and without women’s diverse
vulnerabilities to exploitation, the current systems organising rapid
accumulation of capital could not exist. In other words, neoliberalism both
exacerbates and capitalises on women’s economic inequality. Motherhood
is inseparable from this system. In her analysis of neoliberalism, Bonnie
Fox states: “[t]he practices, social relations, and ideology of motherhood
are […] central to women’s subordination” (Luxton and Bezanson 2006,
231; see also Jensen 2012).
The mommyverse has developed within this context, and women’s
online work is impacted by these larger structures. However, current
reports on mommyindustries focus on women’s economic privilege and
power. For example, British sociologist Alison Phipps’ only comment on
the economic structure of mommyblogging is a report that
mommybloggers control two trillion US dollars’ worth of purchasing
power in the United States. iii Similarly, when Ira Bassen presented his
documentary entitled “Monetizing Mommy-hood” (2012) on national
206 Chapter Eleven

Canadian radio, he portrayed mommyblogging to be exclusively the

domain of middle-class, well-educated women.
These reports, however, are misguided. It is not enough to state that the
American mommybloggers’ conference Mom 2.0 has been endorsed by
large corporations, including Hewlett-Packard, Disney, Intel, Pampers, and
Dove (Phipps, 124). What does this information actually mean? Yes,
motherhood is big business. But nothing involving gender and power is
ever that simple. Any analysis of women’s economic activities, whether
online or offline, should be contextualised within the overall exploitation
and devaluation of women’s labour.
It is important to note that most of women’s online work is unpaid,
poorly paid and devalued. Of all the women who are active participants in
the mommyverse, only a tiny minority ends up making substantial
amounts of money from this activity. Women who cannot be successful
maternal entrepreneurs constitute the vast majority of mommyverse
participants—together, they form a significant portion of the online
mommyindustries’ consumer base. iv Those who do have the minimum
psychological, physical, social and economic means needed to participate
in mommyblogging have to invest countless hours of unpaid labour before
seeing any results—and many women never achieve their desired
incomes.v
It is often assumed that mothers blog primarily because they have
emotional needs that cannot be met offline (often characterised in derisory
terms as “airing dirty laundry”, or finding “soapbox” platforms). While
many women do find their online activities to be cathartic, this is hardly
the whole picture. Many women have financial reasons for participating in
the mommyverse. They might make some money or receive free product
samples. But they also might save money, by reading product reviews to
make good purchasing decisions, finding coupons and discount codes, and
winning product giveaways and raffles.
These myriad daily financial decisions can be understood as unseen
gendered labour. Mothers are increasingly expected to participate in
waged labour (despite pay gaps and increasing childcare costs) while men
remain socially permitted to shirk domestic labour and childcare.vi Women
must make ends meet on continually diminishing real wages, while social
welfare systems are ruthlessly dismantled. The Internet offers some
women an opportunity to compensate for these losses—to make their
unequal pay stretch a little further, to supplement their household income,
to search for ways in which they might optimise their other (paid and
unpaid) work, and to distract themselves and vent their emotions (i.e. the
labour of self-care). The nickels and dimes that make-up a blogger’s “latte
 Birthing Babies in the Blogosphere 207

money” I consider to be an important supplement to mitigate economic

inequality: if she were paid equally for her labour, would she turn to
blogging to justify her latte consumption?. Similarly, what some
commentators call “overshare”, I consider to be undervalued emotional
labour.
Moreover, the profits of moderately to highly successful enterprising
mothers (such as Genevieve/Mama Natural) pale in comparison to the
profits made by the businesses and corporations that mediate their labour.
Women are sent product samples and paid for blogging and vlogging
because these activities are part of market and business growth strategies.
The media, advertising and commodity industries that operate via
women’s online labour make large profits; fostering mommyblogging is
one way to develop and expand motherhood-related markets. Raewyn
Connell identifies the broader context of these strategies: “Neoliberalism
is a missionary faith: it seeks to make existing markets wider and to create
new markets where they did not exist before” (quoted in Luxton and
Braedley 2010, 23).
To take one example: a decade ago, most product samples were
distributed to journalists, experts (such as doctors) and stores. Today a
majority of product samples are sent to bloggers.vii Product samples related
to beauty, maternity, babies, and children are sent to women and
mothers—that is, to beauty bloggers and mommybloggers. These women,
through intensive online work, attract large audiences. When given a
sample, they write reviews. I have watched many vlogs in which women
give thankful, positive reviews of a product given to them for free (I will
discuss one such advertisement below). For the tiny price of a product
sample, these women are being employed to produce highly effective
advertisements targeting consumer markets developed through the
women’s own labour. Therefore, while mommyblogging provides some
women opportunities to mitigate economic losses, they receive but a tiny
fraction of the profits produced through their labour.

Birth in the “Mommyverse”

I previously stated that some women are selling their births online.
Perhaps that is the wrong verbal structure: women are not actively
demanding a price for their birth recordings/narratives. However, birth
stories, photos and videos have their own place within maternal enterprises.
Birth-related blogs and vlogs attract a great deal of online attention, and
are therefore particularly lucrative. Birth videos have all the components
of a modern “good story”: drama, nudity, suspense, difficulty, and reward,
208 Chapter Eleven

with a good dose of abjection and titillation thrown in. viii Birth videos
fulfill many social functions online, ranging from education to
pornography. In the following sections, I will examine the place of birth in
two different types of maternal enterprises: beauty bloggers and
mommybloggers. Although the women are often considered to be very
different from each other, I will examine the structural aspects of their
enterprisesix in order to uncover some common economic mechanisms.

Birth and Beauty Blogging

In her analysis of the impact of beauty standards on women, Susan Bordo
observes that notions of feminine beauty produce norms “against which
the self continually measures, judges, ‘disciplines’, and ‘corrects’ itself”
(1993, 25). Although Bordo penned this analysis long before the mass
expansion of the Internet, her observations hold true for online media.
Beauty bloggers blog and vlog about hairstyles, makeup, fashion, and
etiquette; their activities are intertwined with the beauty industry and, like
mommybloggers, frequently feature product placements, reviews, and
giveaways. Beauty bloggers reflect girlhood/womanhood ideals that fuse
consumerism with class and gender performances through intricate
identity rituals.
Imogen Tyler has extended Bordo’s analysis to beauty norms during
pregnancy. She argues that contemporary pregnancy is situated within a
new era of “maternal femininities”, visible in the mainstream as the
sudden rise of pregnancy pornography, erotic advertising using images of
pregnant women, and maternity fashion and beauty industries. Where
pregnancy was once stoically endured in private and considered an
ordinary (if abject) physical state, it has been reconfigured as a “sexy
bodily performance: a body project to be coveted and enjoyed” (in Gill
and Sharff 2011, 22–24). These new ideals of “pregnant beauty” are, she
argues, a neoliberal merging of femininity and maternity that has created a
wide range of new markets and new identities. Imogen Tyler describes it
as a “highly spectacular and contradictory [set of ideals] that combines
signifiers of (sexual) freedom, consumption, choice, agency and futurity in
a powerful and seductive post-feminist cultural ideal” (23).
Beauty bloggers present an interesting case because they are already
highly invested in beauty norms by the time they become pregnant. As
with mommybloggers, beauty bloggers tread a fine line when constructing
their enterprises: they have to navigate femininity so that they maintain a
somewhat clean, virtuous image—capitalising on certain gender
stereotypes while escaping others. Many of these women are very careful
 Birthing Babies in the Blogosphere 209

to avoid presenting any overly “slutty”, “trashy”, or “shallow” behaviours.

Their makeup and hairstyle routines are often described as elegant,
innocent, cute, fresh, and fashionable. Some claim that makeup is an art
form, and many employ the rhetoric of loving and valuing the self or
“being the best you can be”.9 These narratives help these women (who are
often young) avoid negative feminine stereotypes that would damage their
online enterprises and perhaps their offline reputations as well.
Many beauty bloggers continue their online work when they become
pregnant and so perpetuate these values throughout their childbearing.
Anna Saccone is a popular Irish beauty vlogger with over 550,000
subscribers on YouTube. When she started her channel in 2008 most of
her posts were beauty-related. She became pregnant in late 2011, giving
birth in 2012. The following year she became pregnant with her second
child. As with many beauty bloggers, Anna Saccone gradually transitioned
to mommyblogging after having children and although she maintains a
fashionable image and posts vlogs on beauty topics, most of her recent
uploads centre on motherhood.
Anna Saccone navigated this transition through performances of
pregnant beauty. During her first pregnancy, she posted many updates on
her purchases for herself and her baby, and general guides to maternity
fashion and makeup, including “How to Rock Your Bump” (YouTube
2012). In one video entitled: “What’s in My Hospital Bag?” (YouTube
2012), Anna demonstrates what she is bringing with her for her three-day
stay in hospital. The first item she selects from the main compartment of
her suitcase is the bag containing her makeup brushes—she references
them multiple times and emphasises that they are “very important”.
Earlier in her pregnancy, Anna Saccone posted a video entitled “How
to Look Good During Labour” (YouTube 2012). In the video, she
introduces the topic by saying, “I want to look kind of cute at the same
time. That might sound really vain. But it’s true! And I know a lot of
people out there are like me—like, a lot of girls and moms want to be
stylish when they’re pushing”.
I find Anna’s choice of words fascinating: the phrase “girls and moms”
precisely reflects her transition from young woman to mother and her
navigation of the conflicting social standards that complicate the process.
As a girl, she was valued for working hard to be pretty and desirable, but
now that she has attracted a husband and is pregnant, the same behaviours
may be considered inappropriate. She is conscious of other people’s
opinions of her as she navigates this terrain. She justifies her priorities, and
heads off any objections that she might be vain and therefore not self-
sacrificial enough to be a good mother. Her focus on makeup during her
210 Chapter Eleven

hospital stay reflects her determination to maintain her beauty blogger

image during the process of giving birth; she turns to the ideals of
pregnant beauty to merge the social expectations that come with both
girlhood/womanhood and motherhood.
The video turns out to be a product review (i.e. advertisement) for a
fashionable pink polka dot hospital gown and matching newborn outfit.
Anna was sent these items for free by the company, and she shares her
glee. However, instead of emphasising the gown’s fashionable qualities,
she begins her review with a note on modesty during childbirth: “You
know how in the hospital, um, all those, like, the gownies that you get...
are kind of, like, “manky” and they’re not really that nice and, you know,
other people have worn them before? They also have holes in the sides so
you’re kind of, like… your modesty just goes out the window. You know,
[laughing] if we’re filming for the blog and everything, I don’t particularly
want to have, like, my boobs hanging out here or, like, just be really
sloppy-looking”.
Anna then reveals the pink hospital gown, emphasising that its design
“means no slipping of the nips or other body parts that you just don’t want
to show or have on display...”. Anna is clearly determined to be
photogenic, fashionable and virtuous.
Striking a balance between fashion and feminine/maternal virtue is a
common theme. Another popular beauty blogger named Emily posted
instructions for a long-lasting makeup routine for childbirth in a video
entitled, “Makeup that Survived Childbirth” (YouTube 2014). Another
beauty blogger named Kate expressed her feelings in a blog entitled, “How
to Look Great During Labour”, in which she writes, “I was determined to
hang on to some shred of my former makeup-loving self, and come out of
the whole experience glowing, despite the stretch marks and imminent
hemorrhoids” (Makeup & Beauty Blog website 2011). However, both
Kate and Emily were careful to repeatedly express that their dedication to
motherhood outweighs their dedication to their appearance.
It is fascinating that for some of these women, medicalised delivery is
one of the ways in which birth is sanitised. Very few of the beauty
bloggers I have encountered shared any video footage of giving birth.
However, the few who did emphasised the merits of epidural birth,
because it was clean, quiet, and they could maintain their usual personality
and behaviour throughout the birthing process. The comments under one
birth video on the CelestWhoknows YouTube channel demonstrate
viewers’ perceptions of the cleanliness of births that involve epidurals—
one viewer has written: “Now that’s a beautiful birth!!!! Nice and clean!
#teamEpidural”, and another expressed a similar sentiment, “It seems easy
 Birthing Babies in the Blogosphere 211

to have a baby after watching your video [...] You seemed very calm and
happy!” (YouTube, 2010). Anna’s own birth was a scheduled non-
emergency induction, so that even the surprise of labour’s onset was
eliminated.
Nice, clean, calm, happy, beautiful, and scheduled—these words
reflect many intersecting feminine-maternal anxieties around childbearing.
These anxieties are complex and varied, and might include fear of losing
control over the body, fear of being less valuable or desirable after birth,
fear of losing one’s humanity and acting in an animalistic or barbaric way
during labour, fear of pain, injury and loss, fear of being disgusting or
immodest (releasing body fluids or faeces, nudity, nipple erection), and
fear of being judged as a bad mother or bad woman. Many women
experience these fears, and for very good reasons. The embodied, social
experience of childbearing can be very intense, overwhelming and
precarious. It is often very difficult for women to navigate the confusing
and contradictory social ideals that mediate their life transitions. However,
these fears and anxieties are closely related to marketisation, as they
propel body performances and influence consumer behaviour. Many
women purchase goods and services to feel more secure and prepared for
childbirth. For beauty bloggers, this involves intense body work and
identity work to reduce the sights, sounds, smells, and other perceivable
transformations of the maternal body. Beauty bloggers edit out the abject
aspects of birth—nudity, screaming, blood and other bodily fluids,
exhaustion, extreme emotional shifts—by using narrative, video editing,
makeup, fashion, or pharmaceuticals.
For women who expect their births to be photographed or filmed, the
visual and sonic aspects of birth are primary sites of intervention. In some
cases, sensory avoidance of the abject birthing body constitutes maternal
entrepreneurial “success” and women turn to experts for childbirth
preparation training in order to develop skills in controlling themselves
during birth. From the “Quiet Birth?” discussion thread at the Babycenter
online forum: “I was so calm that the nurses didn’t really believe that I
was in labor until my baby boy was out (a nurse ended up catching :)). I
was told I was in the top 5 most quiet laboring moms they’d ever seen. I
really think it was because I was so mentally prepared and relaxed because
of our Hypnobabies classes and the affirmations track” (Babycenter, 2011).
While this woman turned to alternative hypnotherapy childbirth
preparation classes for auditory censoring, Anna, Kate and Emily turned to
makeup and fashion for visual censoring. It is important to note that all of
these products are expensive.
212 Chapter Eleven

Nurses and other medical professionals provide women with important

feedback. While nurses told the woman using hypnobirthing techniques
that she sounded great, Kate reports that nurses told her she looked great:
“I can tell you that it felt great to be told by every nurse in the maternity
ward, I can’t believe that you just had a baby! You look great!” (2011).
Both childbearing “achievements” are marked by absences: the absence of
birth vocalisations on one hand, and the absence of visible signs of
exertion or exhaustion on the other. For beauty bloggers, neoliberal
maternal femininity is often constituted by a series of such absences. The
message is one of restrictive body work leading to success: a woman who
does not show that she is undergoing the intense transformations of
childbirth will receive social approval, including compliments and praise
from medical staff. Women judge their own performances, make decisions,
discipline their bodies, and construct their narratives accordingly.
Women’s experiences of birth are shaped by these interactions.
The merging of beauty blogging and mommyblogging has an important
economic role. Both beauty work and mother work overwhelmingly
constitute “women’s work,” and blogging on these topics is relegated to
the equivalent “domestic sphere” of online work. Women are not paid for
their (often extensive) body/beauty work, domestic work, and
maternal/reproductive work. However, lifestyle, beauty and motherhood
ideals demand that women spend a great deal of time and money on these
endeavours. Makeup, fashion, fitness, interior design, home care,
childbearing and childrearing are associated with large commodity and
services industries. Good women (mothers, marriageable daughters,
homemakers, wives) consume these goods and services in order to satisfy
social ideals. Supplying the means for this feminine, maternal, and
domestic labour can easily become a substantial part of a woman’s overall
living costs.
To try to put beauty bloggers’ standards into perspective, I made a list
of what I would need to achieve one of Anna Saccone’s “looks.” I would
need to purchase makeup and brushes, makeup remover, clothes, shoes,
and accessories. I would need to visit a hair salon, buy hair styling
products and hair accessories, as well as products for removing body hair.
Even when shopping cheaply, I would be spending hundreds of pounds—
all to perform one feminine presentation. Moreover, the time spent
shopping, shaving, and styling would impact how much time I have to
work and rest.
Women who are highly invested in beauty standards will have high
costs, both in terms of purchases and working time. Fashionable, intensive
mothering involves further costs. Given women’s unequal and gradually
 Birthing Babies in the Blogosphere 213

declining economic status, the ability to market feminine/maternal

performances online may help some women meet the associated costs. Of .

course, this applies offline as well; “looking good” at work helps many
women meet performance expectations in their jobs. Others may find that
“looking good” helps them form social bonds, including friendships,
romantic relationships and marriages. For beauty bloggers, sharing their
lives online may generate enough income to offset some of the costs of
their beauty/body work. For example, a YouTube beauty channel, if
successful, could enable a blogger to purchase higher-quality makeup
without draining her primary income. This, in turn, could help her attract
more attention, admiration, and online traffic.
These feedback relations become all the more important when women
enter childbearing. Pregnant and mothering women typically have lower
incomes and higher living costs. For women already blogging and
vlogging, their online income might become an even more crucial income
supplement once they become mothers. Beauty bloggers may transition to
mommyblogging not only because they are used to documenting their
lives and wish to share their experiences, but because mommyblogging is
popular and one of the most lucrative options for women bloggers.
Women with infants and young children may have less time to perform
beauty work, but they can still update their blogs and vlogging channels
with baby- and mothering-related materials, maintaining or widening their
audiences and therefore their incomes. This, in turn, would help these
bloggers to afford fashionable baby products in order to present an
attractive and admirable online mothering image.

Birth and Intensive Mommyblogging

Mama Natural did not start as a blog about beauty. Instead, Genevieve
opened her YouTube channel and blog early in her first pregnancy.
Women who start blogging during pregnancy (who are primarily or
exclusively mommybloggers) develop vastly different approaches to
childbirth photos, videos and narratives. Unlike beauty bloggers who edit
out many of the sensory and emotional aspects of birth, mommybloggers
frequently post substantial video recordings containing unedited sights and
sounds of labour, and construct narratives about the precise aspects of
birth that the beauty bloggers avoid. There are many blogs and vlogs about
childbirth that seek to inform other women about the aspects of birth that
might take them by surprise: painful postpartum bowel movements, the
experience of various obstetrical interventions, Caesarean section recovery
difficulties and suture care, breast engorgement, the feeling of penetrative
214 Chapter Eleven

sex after recovering from vaginal birth, and so on. One mommyblogger,
Sarah Spencer, posted a video entitled “Ten Things They Don’t Tell You
About Childbirth”, in which she admits that many of the things she
discusses could be considered “TMI” (“too much information”) or “gross”
(November 11, 2014). Sarah also posted a recording of her homebirth
online in a series of ten videos, which were only lightly edited to reduce
length. Nudity, birth vocalisations, bodily fluids, and emotions (including
boredom) were included in her videos (YouTube 2012).
The birth narratives of beauty bloggers may seem to be in opposition to
the birth narratives of mommybloggers. Literature on online motherhood
often draws sharp contrasts between different approaches to childbearing
—for example, those who are “too posh to push” versus those glorifying
the pangs of natural labour. However, similar economic mechanisms are at
work in both maternal beauty blogging and mommyblogging. Women
may form different ideals of what a good woman/mother is, but their
ideals are formed and capitalised on in similar ways. Mommybloggers,
whether they aspire to natural births or believe that medicalised delivery is
optimal, communicate a very distinct set of maternal values in their online
work. All of the mommybloggers I have encountered communicate an
intensive focus on their children and an intense desire to develop and
refine their mothering skills. The very act of dedicating their online
enterprise to childrearing aligns these women’s online performances with
the practices of intensive motherhood. Intensive motherhood is associated
with neoliberal entrepreneurship, and is characterised by a range of
phenomena that have been described extensively in feminist literature.
Sharon Hays defines intensive mothering as “child-centered, expert-guided,
emotionally absorbing, labor-intensive, and financially expensive” (1996,
8). Moreover, the logic of intensive mothering entrenches the separation of
mothering work from paid work, so that the former is firmly located
within the private realm and completely outside the scope of direct market
valuation (122–29). This definition clarifies the first parallel I wish to
draw between beauty blogging and mommyblogging: both involve
significant unpaid labour, expense and time commitment.
The doctrine of intensive mothering carves a space in which femininity
is constituted less via beauty and fashion and more via dedication to
family (in particular, child development). This enables intensive
mommybloggers to break many of the beauty and modesty boundaries to
which beauty bloggers must adhere: they can break taboos because the
baby is the focus. The difficulties and intensities of childbirth merely
represent the beginning of the difficulties and intensities of mothering—
and total dedication to the former provides evidence of total investment in
 Birthing Babies in the Blogosphere 215

the latter. While beauty bloggers sanitise their births to demonstrate

continued adherence to feminine ideals, intensive mommybloggers expose
the intensity of birth to demonstrate their self-sacrifice and commitment to
maternal ideals.
Intensive mommybloggers, such as Genevieve, construct an additional
narrative to justify their detailed birth videos and birth stories. They often
portray their enterprise as primarily educational. Genevieve describes her
YouTube channel as follows: “This is a community for natural mamas
who are into real food, healthy living, and conscious parenting...
Information found on the Mama Natural site and in videos is meant to
motivate you to make healthy choices based on your own research”. Her
birth videos fit in with this goal—Genevieve is able to expose her intimate
physical experience of giving birth because of a higher goal to prepare
other mothers for the intensities of childbearing.
It is interesting that both Anna Saccone and Genevieve posted “What’s
in My Hospital Bag?” videos. While Anna emphasised her makeup and
clothing, Genevieve emphasised alternative and organic products
(YouTube 2013). She posted a long list of products on an accompanying
blog post, including homeopathic remedies, essential oils, natural
supplements, organic snacks and beverages, as well as intrapartum and
postpartum care products. It is important to note that all of these products
are intended to mediate the body in some way, whether optimising
labouring, birth or healing. In other words, these products are not just
purchases, they are tools for extensive body work.
Genevieve provides links for most of these products, so that when her
followers purchase the items, she receives a commission. When I began to
add up the cost of these products, I quickly surpassed six-hundred US
dollars. Genevieve rarely addresses the issue of how her ideals for natural
birth are unattainable for most mothers. Not only is preparing for this kind
of birth a very expensive process, but it also involves a great deal of time
and emotional input. Maternal entrepreneurship is one of the ways in
which Genevieve is able to meet the costs of her natural birth ideals—her
blog is successful and her income helps to support her lifestyle and
aspirations.
Both beauty bloggers and intensive mommybloggers are educating
women through their channels and blogs. However, what are they
teaching? This question always involves grey areas. Some of their
materials are helpful and innovative. For instance, Genevieve posted a
DIY video for making inexpensive back massagers out of tennis balls and
old stockings that can help during pregnancy and labour (YouTube 2010).
Anna posted a video on how to compile a maternity wardrobe from
216 Chapter Eleven

generic clothing, helping her viewers save money by avoiding needlessly

expensive maternity fashion (YouTube 2012). However, both Anna and
Genevieve also communicate questionable or harmful values. Anna
teaches women techniques for restricting their bodies during childbirth (to
be modest and cute in photos and videos) by buying certain products and
engaging in beauty work. Genevieve teaches women that it is their
responsibility to prepare intensively for labour, by buying expensive
products and services and performing body work. In both cases, the
message is familiar: women are responsible for optimising their labours
while striving towards a variety of (oftentimes conflicting) maternal and
feminine ideals. This message implies that the tools for optimising the
maternal body are external to women themselves—that is, in the form of
purchased products and services. These standards for maternal striving are
expensive, time-consuming, and labour-intensive. Mommyblogging is one
of the ways women manage to afford and navigate these ideals, but as with
all competitive enterprises, success is reserved for the few.
Of course, neither Anna nor Genevieve invented these values.
Entrepreneurial motherhood is constructed and enacted via a dynamic set
of values that reverberate far beyond mommyblogging. As neoliberalism
has “assumed the status of a dominant narrative or a regime of truth in the
Western world”, our communities, relationships, bodies, experiences,
identities and narratives are all impacted (McDowell, 145). These effects
are deeply gendered. Raewyn Connell writes: “there is an embedded
masculinity politics in the neoliberal project. With a few exceptions,
neoliberal leadership is composed of men. Its treasured figure, ‘the
entrepreneur’, is culturally coded masculine. Its assault on the welfare
state redistributes income from women to men and imposes more unpaid
work on women” (in Luxton and Braedley, 33). The increasing
intensification of childbearing women’s unpaid body work and maternal
work is an important part of this redistribution.
It is important to recognise the peculiar place of the maternal within
this context. Imogen Tyler (2013) has described “the fundamental
incompatibility of maternity and neoliberalism” (2013, 30), observing that
“there is something about the maternal, understood as a relation between
subjects, that troubles neoliberalism” (31). Christine Battersby’s (1998)
analysis of the concepts of individuality provides a possible explanation
for this troublesome incompatibility. The neoliberal entrepreneur is
constructed as an autonomous, individual subject—a long-held patriarchal
Western ideal. This construction cannot account for blatantly dynamic
bodies-in-relation—bodies that are interdependent, fragile, single and
multiple at one time—bodies that bear children, are born, bodies that need
 Birthing Babies in the Blogosphere 217

and care. Of course, all bodies and all subjects are so entangled, but the
loudness of childbearing entanglements is undeniable. Battersby’s detailed
analysis of Western intellectual history helps unravel how patriarchal
systems can be both the product and the producer of modes of thought—
neoliberalism among them—that silence perspectives gained by intense
entanglements such as those made so unavoidable during childbearing.
Throughout my research into this topic, I have been aware of the many
eerie absences through which neoliberal motherhood reverberates. Both
intensive mommybloggers and beauty bloggers perform neoliberal
reconfigurations of the maternal, in which the complex interrelations
inherent to biosocial reproduction are obscured. When interacting with
beauty bloggers, I find myself asking, “where is the baby?” and with
intensive mommybloggers I often wonder, “where is the woman?”. It
seems that both cannot fully exist in the current context of feminine and
maternal performativity—each is fragmented, commodified, marketised
and sold. Neoliberal states can be characterised by their ruthless
dismantling of social welfare systems and this lack of concern for welfare
reveals neoliberalism’s intention to disrupt the social care bonds that unite
vulnerable populations against exploitation. It is highly significant that the
deeply symbolic maternal-infant bond is so covertly disrupted that
mainstream media place the blame for the negative consequences of this
social fragmentation on the women themselves. This is why it is necessary
to avoid blaming mommybloggers for their complicity in the increasing
marketisation of motherhood.
In my analysis, I have aimed to demonstrate that women’s (and
particularly mothers’) online work remains poorly remunerated and highly
demanding precisely because clearly entangled subjects are excluded from
neoliberal masculinist ideals of individuality and entrepreneurship.
Childbearing women therefore participate in the current economic system
from a necessarily disadvantaged position. Pregnancy and childbirth perch
on top of the fault line of these contradictions, exposing the emergence,
dynamic interrelation, gradual differentiation, and negotiation of needs
that are essential for social reproduction. Instead of assuming that these
features of the reproductive body are mere flaws, we can reconfigure them
as sites of creativity, knowledge production, and resistance. The
challenges presented here are multiple: how can we assist women and
mothers who are coping with the negative effects of neoliberal policies in
their daily lives? How can we develop new modes of thought and action
(such as the countercultural maternal aesthetic proposed by Imogen Tyler)
that might resist neoliberal hegemony? Perhaps these questions can be
answered in part by examining the sites of resistance and creativity that are
218 Chapter Eleven

already established on the margins of the mommyverse, including the

work of teen mothers, feminist, anti-capitalist and queer activist mothers
and gestational parents, and minority ethnic and anti-racist activist mothers
who are developing modes of mothering that resist patriarchal, imperialist
and white supremacist neoliberal colonisation. Stories have their own
currency. In this study, I have focused on the stories of relatively
privileged women living in the English-speaking economic core; these
stories are granted moderately high social currency and gain wide
audiences and it is important to note that most maternal narratives are
afforded far less social value. However, these stories can help to bring the
knowledge and skills of “other mothers” (i.e. mothers who cannot or
refuse to satisfy dominant social expectations) from the margins to the
centre of social change.

References
Bassen, I. 2013. “Monetizing Mommy-hood.” CBC Radio Documentary,
January 3. Retrieved from:
http://www.cbc.ca/thesundayedition/coming-up/2012/01/03/coming-
up---monetizing-mommy-hood/
Battersby, C. 1998. The Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and
the Patterns of Identity. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Belkin, L. 2011. “Queen of the Mommy Bloggers.” The New York Times
Magazine, February 23. Retrieved from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/magazine/27armstrong-
t.html?pagewanted=all
Bordo, S. 1993. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the
Body. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Celest Whoknows. 2010. “*PART 2* Labor & Delivery with Epidural.”
YouTube video, August 23. Retrieved from:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jhGeCY-gY8
Clarke, John. 2008. “Living With/in and Without Neo-Liberalism.”
Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology (51): 135–47.
Cox, J. L., Martinez, E. R., and Quinlan, K. B. 2008. “Blogs and the
Corporation: Managing the Risk, Reaping the Benefits.” Journal of
Business Strategy 29(3): 4–12.
Douglas, S. J., and Michaels, M.W. 2004. The Mommy Myth: The
Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women. New
York: Free Press.
Emily (Emilynoel83). 2014. “Makeup That Survived Childbirth.”
YouTube video, October 10. Retrieved from:
 Birthing Babies in the Blogosphere 219

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOVrkZ9X7pg
Faw, L. 2012. “Is Blogging Really A Way For Women To Earn A Living?”
Forbes Woman, April 25. Retrieved from:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/larissafaw/2012/04/25/is-blogging-really-
a-way-for-women-to-earn-a-living-2/
Genevieve (Mama Natural). 2013a. “My Natural Childbirth: Part 1, Labor.”
YouTube video, December 3. Retrieved from:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqyjuTXzbRY
—. 2013b. “My Natural Childbirth: Part 2, Delivery.” YouTube video,
December 5. Retrieved from:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reVk6fI68lE
—. 2013c. “What’s in My Hospital Bag?” YouTube video, November 19.
Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAJJBP8nvVE
—. 2013d. “What’s in My Hospital Bag? Natural Birthing Aids.” Blog
post, November 19. Retrieved from:
http://www.mamanatural.com/my-hospital-bag/
—. 2013e. “Why Was My Childbirth So Easy?” YouTube video, December
12. Retrieved from:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVAa_10V4yE&feature=youtu.be
—. 2010a. “About [Mama Natural]” YouTube channel visitor information.
Date of access: January 4, 2015. Retrieved from:
https://www.youtube.com/user/MamaNaturalBlog/about
—. 2010b. “AMAZING Back Massager For Pregnant Women.” YouTube
video, August 22. Retrieved from:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-nhQsB9B_c
—. 2010c. “Natural Childbirth Scenes: Part 2, Delivery [GRAPHIC].”
YouTube Video, September 26. Retrieved from:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSnC8a2xizQ
—. 2010d. “Natural Childbirth Scenes: Part 1, Labor.” YouTube video,
September 25. Retrieved from:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aWxDXjtaxs
Gill, R., and Scharff, C. (eds.) 2011. New Femininities: Postfeminism,
Neoliberalism, and Subjectivity. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Hays, S. 1996. The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. New Haven:
Yale University Press.
Jensen, T. 2012. “Tough Love in Tough Times.” Studies in the Maternal
4(2) 1–24. Retrieved online. DOI: 10.16995/sim.35
Kate. 2011. “How to Look Great During Labor.” Blog post on Makeup &
Beauty Blog website, February 2. Retrieved from:
220 Chapter Eleven

http://www.makeupandbeautyblog.com/beauty-tips/how-to-look-great-
during-childbirth/
Longhurst, R. 2009. “YouTube: A New Space for Birth?” Feminist Review
93(1): 46–63. Retrieved online. DOI:10.1057/fr.2009.22.
Lopez, L. K. 2009. “The Radical Act of ‘Mommy Blogging’: Redefining
Motherhood through the Blogosphere.” New Media & Society 11(5):
729–47. Retrieved online. DOI: 10.1177/1461444809105349.
Luxton, M. 2001. Getting by in Hard Times: Gendered Labour at Home
and on the Job. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Luxton, M., and Bezanson, K. (eds.) 2006. Social Reproduction: Feminist
Political Economy Challenges Neo-Liberalism. Montreal: McGill-
Queen’s University Press.
Luxton, M., and Braedley, S. (eds.) 2010. Neoliberalism and Everyday
Life. Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Masullo Chen, G. 2013. “‘Don’t Call Me That’: A Techno-Feminist
Critique of the Term Mommy Blogger.” Mass Communication and
Society 16(4): 510–32. Retrieved online.
DOI:10.1080/15205436.2012.737888.
Mcdowell, L. 2004. “Work, Workfare, Work/life Balance and an Ethic of
Care.” Progress in Human Geography 28(2): 145–63. Retrieved online.
DOI:10.1191/0309132504ph478oa.
Mendelsohn, J. 2010. “Honey, Don’t Bother Mommy. I’m Too Busy
Building My Brand.” The New York Times Fashion & Style, March 12.
Retrieved from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/fashion/14moms.html?pagewante
d=all
Phan, M. “About.” Michelle Phan YouTube Channel. Date of access:
December 10, 2014. Retrieved from:
https://www.youtube.com/user/MichellePhan/about
Phipps, A. 2014. The Politics of the Body: Gender in a Neoliberal and
Neoconservative Age. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Plummer, K. 1995. Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change, and Social
Worlds. London: Routledge.
Rainey, C. 2013. “Mommy Blog or a Glossy Fashion Magazine?” The
New York Times: Fashion & Style, June 12. Retrieved from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/13/fashion/mommy-blog-or-a-
glossy-fashion-magazine.html
Saccone, A. 2012a. “How to Look Good During Labor.” YouTube video,
May 15. Retrieved from:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdXhHtHFkVM
 Birthing Babies in the Blogosphere 221

—. 2012b. “How to Rock Your Bump.” YouTube video, May 17.

Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIqsjWemfYE
Saccone, A. 2012c. “What’s in My Hospital Bag!” YouTube video,
August 3. Retrieved from:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDFRUfmO740
Spencer, S. 2012. “Audrey’s Birth Part 7.” YouTube video, November 10.
Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvb8x_6aSOM
—. 2014. “10 Things They Don’t Tell You About Childbirth.” YouTube
video, November 11. Retrieved from:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dt-29jzpJQY
Straus, T. 2014. “What Stalled the Gender Revolution?: Child Care That
Costs More Than College Tuition.” California Magazine, Winter 2014.
Retrieved from: http://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/winter-
2014-gender-assumptions/what-stalled-gender-revolution-child-care-
costs
Tyler, I. 2013. Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in
Neoliberal Britain. London: Zed Books.
Wolf, J. 2011. Is Breast Best?: Taking on the Breastfeeding Experts and
the New High Stakes of Motherhood. New York: New York University
Press.
VanRysdam, P. 2010. Marketing in a Web 2.0 World: Using Social Media,
Webinars, Blogs, and More to Boost Your Small Business on a Budget.
Ocala, Florida: Atlantic Publishing Company

Notes

i. Genevieve expresses this sentiment in a further video: “I needed two drops of
Pitocin even to push my son out. It was brutal. And I actually had to go through a
grieving process because it was not the birth that I’d wanted” (December 12, 2013).
ii. In The Mommy Myth, Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels state that the new
“momism” is a powerful overarching narrative in media and other public discourse
that promotes a romanticised view of motherhood as the most important thing a
woman can do. Momism promotes competition between women—women are held
individually responsible for every aspect of their children’s development and
wellbeing, and must battle with each other to justify their own mothering choices.
Similarly, “healthism”, characterises people as responsible for their own well-
being, for making good choices that optimise their physical development over time.
People who become sick or disabled may be blamed for their bad choices. (Wolf,
63) Consumer consciousness movements that perpetuate the status quo propel both
momism and healthism. They are deeply embedded in risk culture. The links
between momism, healthism and risk culture are explored in Joan Wolf’s study of
infant feeding (16–17).
222 Chapter Eleven


iii. Phipps reports: “The growing industry of ‘mommybloggers’ […] is estimated to
control around US$2 trillion worth of purchasing power” (124). However, her source
reports that this figure applies to all American mothers, not simply mommybloggers
(Bassen, 2012). These statistics demand rigorous critique, as they conflate
“purchasing work” (i.e. women being expected to do the shopping and being held
responsible for household frugality) with “purchasing power” (i.e. women being
empowered to control household finances). The sources of these statistics are hard to
find, and can be traced back to highly questionable online articles such as: “She-
conomy: A Guy’s Guide to Marketing to Women” (she-conomy.com).
iv. Many women may be restricted from participation due to demanding schedules
filled with waged labour as well as domestic labour, childcare and other forms of
unpaid labour. Other women may not be able to financially afford the process of
constructing an appealing entrepreneurial image. They may be unable to afford
cameras and computer equipment, or may not have access to quiet private spaces
in which to film, write and record materials. Some women may fear exposure
online, or be restricted by the expectations of their partners, husbands, families and
communities, while others may simply be too emotionally exhausted to expose
their intimate lives.
v . A Forbes report from 2012 contains the following estimates for women’s
blogging in general: 18.9 million women write blogs. 20 percent make no profit,
70 percent make “some modicum of profit” and the remaining 10 percent have
larger enterprises (such as book deals and business partnerships) that make
considerable profit. However, these statistics refer to all blogs authored by women,
and I would expect statistics regarding mothers’ blogging to differ substantially
(Larissa Faw, 2012).
vi. Meg Luxton emphasises that women do more work and have less leisure time
than men because of these systems of gendered labour division (in Luxton and
Bezanson, 26; see also Straus 2014 and McDowell 2004, 151).
vii . This is reflected in current corporate communications literature. See
VanRysdam (2010, 173) and Cox, Martinez, and Quinlan (2008).
viii. Ken Plummer (1995) has analysed the social functions of sexual stories, tracing
a rapid increase in the sharing and selling of intimate narratives throughout the
twentieth century. Birth stories are a type of sexual story. In much of cyberspace,
birth media totters on the boundary between the arousing and abject, the terrifying
and titillating. This is one of the reasons why birth videos receive a far greater
number of hits than mommyvloggers’ other uploads. It is apparent that a high
percentage of birth video viewers do not not otherwise visit mommyvloggers’
channels and websites. Many birth videos are pornified through comments on
YouTube and re-uploads to pornography websites. This is one of the reasons why
women commonly censor certain sights and sounds in their birth videos (see
Longhurst 2009).
ix. Highly successful beauty vlogger Michelle Phan combines both these narratives.
In the “About” section of her YouTube channel, she describes the purpose of her
beauty vlogs as “teaching and inspiring everyone to become their own best makeup
artist :)”.
MATERNAL REFLECTIONS: AMBIVALENCE
AND ANXIETY
 CHAPTER TWELVE

CAVORTING IN THE RUINS?

TRUTH, MYTH AND RESISTANCE
IN CONTEMPORARY MATERNAL MEMOIRS

ROBERTA GARRETT

The state’s institutionalised desire for children is, obviously, a desire for
productive adults rather than children themselves […] The individuals
whom we have painstakingly inducted into a childfree society and
established there, with a lifestyle entirely centered upon achievement and
self-gratification, now have to disrupt that pattern. The sacrifice is
enormous and they are to expect no reward or recompense. If the
management of childbearing in our society had actually been intended to
maximize stress it could hardly have succeeded better (Greer 1984, 5–6).

Germaine Greer’s mid-1980s analysis of trends and attitudes in Western

parenting culture emphasised the growing separation between the
dominant norms and values of competitive neoliberal societies and the
expectations and pressures placed on the nuclear family. As many
subsequent cultural critics have observed, the neoliberal fragmentation and
dissolution of the traditional (extended) family, community support
structures and welfare provision has gone hand in hand with an enhanced
state preoccupation with policing parental behaviour (Harvey 2005; Gillies
2007, 2–8; Furedi 2008; Bauman 2013; 8–13; McRobbie 2013). The
dominant neoliberal parenting model is one in which parents are exhorted
to plough considerable personal and financial resources into turning out
driven, high-performing adults while also attempting to ensure that the
family functions as a bulwark of emotional comfort and security in a harsh
world. These conflicting demands inevitably produce particular tensions
for modern mothers, who, whatever else they may aspire to, are still
placed in the role of primary homemaker, educator and carer. As Ruth
Quiney argues: “In British and North American contexts, motherhood has
become the focus of acute anxieties about (re)productivity in the context
of advanced global capitalism […] the tasks of birthing and raising future
 Cavorting in the Ruins? Truth, Myth and Resistance 225

workers and consumers are increasingly presented to women as a curious

and urgent mixture of career (with its own regimes of training, information
and on-the-job surveillance) and sacrificial moral vocation” (2007, 20).
This politicisation and privatisation of motherhood is a phenomenon
expressed, perpetuated and resisted in a number of burgeoning mother-
authored and mother-orientated literary and cultural forms such as
mummy blogs and vlogs, comic “mum’s literature”, domestic thrillers and
maternal memoirs. It is also a topic addressed in different ways in many of
the chapters in this collection (see: Dokter, Cain, Sarkar, Mahbub, Dhillon,
Mayer and Milestone, Guaraldo and Lombardi). My own contribution
comprises a brief, contextualised overview of the development of the
maternal memoir, followed by a close analysis of two highly controversial
recent additions to the genre by established British novelists: Julie
Myerson’s The Lost Child and Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath: on Marriage and
Separation. It aims to build on existing feminist scholarship in this area by
exploring the evolution of the maternal memoir away from its initial focus
on pregnancy and early motherhood. As the chapter will demonstrate,
Myerson and Cusk’s elusive accounts of the challenges of raising older
children and, in Cusk’s case, the transition from socially validated middle-
class wife to single mother, chart the slow and painful dissolution of the
author’s investment in the heteronormative, neoliberal, neotraditionalist
view of motherhood and family life.

Neoliberal Parenting Culture and the Emergence

of the (Postfeminist) Maternal Memoir
The first cycle of contemporary Anglo-American maternal memoirs
emerged in the late 1990s and were written either by established academics,
or novelists; e.g. Life After Birth (Kate Figes, 1997), Misconceptions
(Naomi Wolf, 2001), Becoming a Mother (Rachel Cusk, 2001), Making
Babies (Ann Enright, 2004) and Love Works Like This (Lauren Slater,
2003). The maternal memoir or “confession” explored the spoiled
identities of mothers who, by their own admission, had fallen far short of
the standards of feeling and behaviour required to conform to current
standards of good motherhood. The intimate, solipsistic tone of these texts
combined with their description of isolated and highly intensive parenting
practices, works to individualise and decontextualise these accounts.
Pregnancy and early motherhood are perceived as feminine rites of
passage that jolt the writer into a rude awakening to the eternal misery of
the female condition, a condition which they, as (self-acknowledged)
members of a privileged and educated group of Western women, have thus
226 Chapter Twelve

far been spared. In hindsight, it seems obvious that the cycle was a
response to the increasingly prescriptive state and media approach to
mothering cited by critics such as Quiney (2007), yet the memoirs rarely
register these broader cultural shifts directly.
Looked at in the context of certain key demographic and ideological
trends, the sudden explosion of maternal memoirs in the late 1990s can be
attributed to a specific cluster of causes. The decades between the first
wave of feminist scholarship on motherhood, in the 1970s (see: Rich
1976; Kristeva 1977; Chodorow 1978), and the maternal memoir not only
witnessed the increasing politicisation of motherhood, it was also a period
in which Western patterns of marriage, childbirth and educational and
career opportunities for women changed drastically. By the late 1990s,
educated (generally middle-class) women were tending to marry and have
children in their early thirties, having already spent some years in the
workplace. This demographic trend was heavily skewed towards the
neoliberal script of self-governance, material achievement and career
aspiration. Although the issue of childcare provision and gendered
domestic roles had been a major focal point of second-wave feminist
activism, such mundane considerations rarely surfaced within 1990s “girl
power” rhetoric. The discourse of female empowerment was targeted
primarily at young, childless, white, middle-class women. Academic and
career achievements were no longer simply acceptable goals for such
women: they became the focus of considerable pressure and expectation,
while early motherhood (the mark of success for women of all classes in
the previous generation) was increasingly stigmatised and associated with
low aspiration and benefit dependency (Walkerdine 2003, 237–248;
McRobbie 2004, 258–264; Tyler 2008, 17–34).
However, as writers born in the 1960s and 1970s (such as Cusk, Wolf,
Enright and Figes) were to discover, the popular postfeminist rhetoric of
female achievement and individualism stopped abruptly at the door of the
maternity ward, to be supplanted by the socio-cultural imposition of a
highly prescriptive ethic of “child-orientated” devotion and self-denial.
The defeatist tone of the first cycle of maternal memoirs in the late 1990s
is thus as much a response to this historically specific sense of shock and
disillusionment as a rearticulation of prior feminist work on the cultural
idealisation of motherhood.
In addition to this, it drew on two predominant strands in contemporary
life writing: firstly, an established body of feminist autobiography which
followed the development of feminist literary criticism in the 1960s and
70s. This form countered the self-aggrandising mode of much mainstream
life-writing by highlighting the problematic nature of constructing and
 Cavorting in the Ruins? Truth, Myth and Resistance 227

maintaining a coherent sense of selfhood in a culture in which the ideal

speaking subject is constituted as male, white and economically privileged
(Felski 1998, 83–93). Secondly, the more recent cycle of “painful lives” or
“misery” memoirs. This is highly significant in terms of the negative
cultural response to confessional maternal memoirs (as opposed to other
form of female life-writing). Although misery memoirs address a range of
life events, such as illness and disability, the cycle’s preferred theme is the
adult revelation of child neglect and abuse (Luckhurst 2008, 1–13).
The public discourse that surrounds misery literature is one that
generally places high value on the exploration and expression of humiliating
and “shameful” admissions, but the adoption of this tone in accounts of
pregnancy and new motherhood was regarded as inappropriate and
indicative of a lack of true maternal feeling. The maternal memoir’s
emphasis on the disempowering effects and tedious nature of pregnancy
and early motherhood collided headlong with an increasingly powerful
state- and media-endorsed cultural narrative of the sacred and vulnerable
infant and an associated fear of maternal neglect and abuse (Furedi 2008;
Guildberg 2009, 32–45; Reece 2013). The amnesty normally granted to
writers of self-denigrating autobiographical material was revoked, often to
be replaced by spluttering outrage. Reviewers, many of who were
members of the same pool of privileged middle-class mothers, appeared
keen to quell outbreak in the ranks by publically distancing themselves
from what they regarded as anti-maternal views and perspectives.
The critical response to the late 1990s–early 2000s cluster of maternal
memoirs thus worked against the general tendency whereby women’s
autobiography could provide a privileged cultural space for the exploration
of female experience “if contained within a narrative of self-abasement”
(Anderson 2010, 123). As the continuing popularity of chick-lit indicates,
women’s failure to live up to ideal socio-cultural standards of beauty,
slenderness or competence in the domestic sphere are now permissible
subjects for self-denigrating female humour (Garrett 2013), but the cult of
the sacred and vulnerable child continues to place strong edicts on the
public exploration of maternal ambivalence. As Ruth Quiney observes:
“Maternal writers engage with the longstanding feminist fight to write the
unspeakable, those abject discourses of (traditionally feminine) experience
and emotion that transgress gendered and social norms to the extent that
they are forcibly repressed in quotidian interaction and communication”
(2007, 20).
I want to take Quiney’s comment as the starting point for my analysis
of The Lost Child and Aftermath. The memoirs extend the themes and
concerns of the first cluster of maternal confessionals in three areas.
228 Chapter Twelve

Firstly, the narrative focus shifts from the relatively insular world of
pregnancy and new motherhood to the challenges of raising older children
and teenagers. In previous decades (even in the late twentieth century) this
stage would have heralded the beginning of a more independent life for the
mother as young adults strived towards self-sufficiency. However, the
current intensive parenting model extends the period in which parents are
viewed as wholly responsible for the success of their offspring well into
the teen years and beyond. The discourse of “infant determinism”—the
idea that a child’s lifelong level of mental health and well-being is
determined in the first three years—also produces particular anxieties as
the child’s independent character begins to blossom and is viewed as
visible evidence of the quality of maternal care in infancy (Kagan 1998,
83–151). Even without these factors, as the neoliberal-parenting model is
highly risk-averse and driven by the pursuit of “wholesome” family
activities, it inevitably comes under particular strain when set against the
beckoning world of teenage subcultures.
Secondly, the “confessional” aspect of the pregnancy and early
motherhood memoir is determined largely by the mother’s own perception
of her inner world and her unwillingness to adjust to her shift in status and
social identity without resentment. In contrast, the maternal failure
recounted in the work of Myerson and Cusk is no longer just a self-
identified source of anguish, but encompasses more tangible events, such
as teenage drug use and marital breakdown. In this sense, the writers are
propelled—reluctantly in Myerson’s case—towards a more reflective and
critical view of the neotraditionalist, neoliberal-mothering role. Thirdly,
and more significantly in terms of the overall argument of this chapter,
while the early motherhood memoirs tend to tread a torturous path
between the internalisation and resentment of the contemporary discourse
on motherhood—rarely offering any alternative—the more recent memoirs
offer a “frame” narrative in which other models of childrearing are
expressed and explored. Once again, the memoirs produced a chorus of
mother-shaming in the media. Following a round of battering reviews in
British broadsheets, heavyweight political journalist Jeremy Paxman
interrogated Myerson on the BBC’s news programme Newsnight as to
whether she should have published The Lost Child. Cusk was spared trial
by television, but Aftermath provoked a number of particularly vicious
reviews, including a savage and dismissive piece by Sunday Times writer
Camilla Long that was later awarded The Omnivore’s “Hatchet Job of the
Year Award” (2012). It seems likely that, once again, the heightened
response to such texts was provoked by their distanced and uneasy
relationship to the hegemonic, middle-class mothering role.
 Cavorting in the Ruins? Truth, Myth and Resistance 229

Julie, Jake and the Lost Mother

Prior to the publication of Julie Myerson’s The Lost Child, reviewer for
The Sunday Times Minette Marin was so eager to strike the first blow for
good motherhood that she published the following inflammatory and
erroneous criticism of Myerson’s autobiographical work, having mistaken
it for a roman-à-clef rather than a maternal confessional: “For a woman to
cast out her adolescent son and then to write a novel about it, and then to
announce to the world that the troubled, destructive boy in her so-called
fiction is in fact her son, is a comprehensive betrayal. It is a betrayal not
just of love and intimacy, but also of motherhood itself ” (Marin 2009).
The vituperative “review” led to the rush publication of The Lost Child
and a further round of media commentary, culminating in the Paxman
interview. This centered on the question of whether Myerson was right to
evict her seventeen-year-old son (a decision she makes after concluding
that he is a drug addict who needs to reach “rock bottom”) and to reveal
intimate details of their family life. The uproar was exacerbated by the
revelation that Myerson was the author of an anonymous Guardian
lifestyle column entitled “Living with Teenagers” that also explored the
more challenging aspects of modern family life, albeit in a more light-
hearted manner (Myerson 2009).
As with other maternal memoirs, critical evaluation of The Lost Child
was conflated with an assessment of Myerson’s parenting skills and
choices. In their haste to condemn her, few critics bothered to mention that
The Lost Child is only partially concerned with Myerson’s own family
troubles. It is a convoluted blend of biography and autobiography, in
which Myerson’s account of her quest to recover information about Mary
Yelloly, an early- nineteenth-century female artist, takes up as much of the
text as her account of the breakdown of her relationship with her teenage
son. Journals, letters and notes belonging to the Yelloly family, a selection
of Jake’s poems and glimpses into Myerson’s own troubled childhood are
also a significant (if lesser) presence. The neglected Yelloly sections are
highly significant from a feminist/historical materialist viewpoint, as they
are indicative of Myerson’s shifting class identification and her growing
ambivalence towards socially validated notions of good motherhood.
Myerson initially attempts to link the two strands of the narrative through
the theme of the “lost” child. At several points she compares twenty-one-
year-old Mary Yelloly’s death from tuberculosis (in 1838) with Jake
Myerson’s drug use and subsequent eviction from the parental home at the
age of seventeen. This is implied in the section in which Myerson and her
husband arrange a rendezvous with another affluent couple whose sons
230 Chapter Twelve

have drug-related problems: “Out there, all over the country, plenty of
families are dealing with this, says the woman, flicking a look at the
London skies. Far more than anyone realises. Seriously, it’s a whole new
way to lose your kids. I look closely at her face and I recognize the weight
of grief behind her eyes. Her face, but also mine. A whole new way to lose
your kids” (140).
By any standards, the analogy between the truculent behavior of a
twenty-first-century teenage drug user and the tragic and untimely death of
a promising early-nineteenth-century artist (along with no less than five of
her siblings) lacks credibility. Such a far-flung comparison makes sense
only when looked at in the context of Myerson’s initial investment in the
hyperprotective, intensive mothering role. The cover photo of The Lost
Child indicates Myerson’s prior self-identification with this role.
Presumably taken in the early 1990s, it shows a young, blonde, slender
Myerson laughing unselfconsciously while holding the infant Jake. As
Douglas and Michaels have pointed out, the early 1990s were a turning
point in the cultural representation of high-profile media mothers (2004,
125–133). The new maternal ideal—associated with the late Princess
Diana’s carefully crafted image of laid-back, easy-going “fun”
motherhood—spurned formality and authority, establishing itself in
opposition to what was increasingly presented as the stuffy, emotionally
inept mothering of the previous generation. It was, and continues to be, a
model of motherhood that is most compatible with babyhood and infancy,
and the romanticised world of the nursery. The work of Cusk, Wolf and
other writers of baby and infancy memoirs questions and critiques this
highly sentimentalised view and the expectations it projects onto pregnant
women and new mothers. Rosikar Parker’s (1995) study of maternal
ambivalence also explored the way that the cultural desire to invest in
unambivalent motherhood is projected most forcefully onto mothers at the
very stage when they are struggling to renegotiate their social role, and
when the demands made of them—physically and emotionally—are at
their height. In contrast, Myerson’s begins by following the approved
script in which good mothers desire to prolong this period indefinitely and
bitterly regret that their innocent, dependent babes grow into what Virginia
Woolf’s literary ubermother, Mrs Ramsey, describes as “long-legged
monsters”. i Myerson states: “We had our babies too fast, too easily. I
didn’t think it at the time but it’s what I think now. I think we were having
much too good a time of it, taking for granted how easy it all was, just
jumping in there without much thought or fear. We were so young. We
thought we were perfect. We didn’t know that bad things could happen.
 Cavorting in the Ruins? Truth, Myth and Resistance 231

We didn’t look down. But I’m looking down now, from the dark churning
centre of my middle-aged anxiety” (87).
When asked about her offspring by a mother of young children, she
pulls a face and describes them as “horrible teenagers” (56). Similarly,
when advised by a drug counselor to rally Jake’s extended family and
friends into confronting him about his persistent drug use, she dreamily
states: “all I could think of were the poppers on his Babygro, the way he
used to shriek when I kissed his tummy” (65). As suggested above, given
that the neoliberal mothering script strongly endorses the creation of an
entirely “mummy-led” world of wholesome, family-orientated activities
over parental attempts to foster independence, it is not surprising that the
optimum period for successfully embodying this role is in the early years.
However, Myerson’s wholly conventional nostalgia for her children’s
early years and her accompanying aversion to modern teenagers is given
particular force as it is mirrored by her interest in a contrived vision of
early- nineteenth-century English country childhoods. Her intense
psychological and emotional investment in Mary Yelloly, whom she refers
to throughout as “you”, strongly suggests a textual desire to preserve her
own lost moment of childhood innocence and unambivalent maternal
feeling by relocating it in the distant and much mythologised world of
post-Regency era rural gentility. After describing a particular
uncomfortable scene with her defiant, angry teenage son, the subsequent
passage begins: “You are first put into my hands on a shrill spring
morning in Mayfair, in a sun-flooded room that smells of beeswax polish”
(5). The passage refers not to Jake’s birth (as the reader is led to expect)
but her first encounter with the watercolor portraits of family life produced
by the young Mary Yelloly. There are no images of the portraits included
in The Lost Child but Myerson describes them in the following manner:

Over two hundred paintings of what appears to be a made-up family—the

Grenvilles. You’ve written out their full name and ages, you’ve told us how
they spent their days. Reading, doing lessons, dancing, painting, watering
flowers, visiting the sick and the poor. Scene after scene of grand country
houses and dappled English countryside […] Bonnets and shawls, stripes and
frills—kittens frolicking, dark gleaming wood furniture, china silver, curls and
bows” (7).

Myerson later comes across a number of family sketches, journal entries

and letters:
232 Chapter Twelve

Dear Mama,
I hope I shall be good and practice my dancing and I hope I shall do it well
and command my temper (naughty thing) not to get the better of me for I
am determined I will master it…
Your Very Dutiful Daughter, Sarah Yelloly.

Dear Mama,
I will try to be good and do my lessons well and I will try and please you
dear Mama and I will not quarrel with my brothers and sisters at all.
I am my dearest Mama your affectionate daughter,

Jane D Yelloly

(126).

The Yelloly textual remains evoke a genteel, feminised world of

adoring children and triumphant motherhood. It is a view of family life
which is far removed from Myerson’s account of her own conflict-riven
urban nuclear family, in which Jake—who at one point strikes her—is
presented as having more in common with Lionel Shriver’s “monstrous”
teen protagonist (Kevin) than the loving and obedient Yelloly daughters.
As described by Myerson, the Yelloly family portraits seem familiar to
modern readers, drawing on the visual rhetoric associated with Charles E.
Brock’s illustrations of Jane Austen’s novels, or the later images of
Regency childhoods produced by the famous children’s books illustrator
Kate Greenaway. Myerson chooses to interpret these family portraits and
the formalised Yelloly letters and journals as a transparent window into
the lost world of this “numerous and united” family: a family tragically
destroyed by an external foe (tuberculosis) rather than internal conflicts
and tensions. Such an interpretation is highly problematic, given the
constructed nature of such images and the pervasive influence of the
Romantic discourse of childhood innocence and the increasing cult of
domestic life in the early nineteenth century. In fact, the privileged
lifestyle enjoyed by such families was being questioned and challenged by
an increasingly vociferous group of public commentators and activists at
this moment. Yelloly’s short lifespan (1816–1838) coincides with a key
period of English social and political reform. This was a response to the
social upheaval produced by the industrial revolution, in which poorer
children—those excluded from Yelolly’s family portraits— became
particularly vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. The first major Factory
Act (1833) and the Reform Act (1834) were indicative of a shifting society
in which class relations and the dynamic between country and city were
being rapidly reconceptualised. This broader cultural history is neglected
 Cavorting in the Ruins? Truth, Myth and Resistance 233

in favour of a series of polite encounters with Yelloly descendents. These

follow the format established by television programmes such as Who Do
You Think You Are?. Personal is preferable to social history and digging
into the family past results in the unearthing of previously hidden family
trinkets and secrets which are then treated with awe and reference. In the
course of her research Myerson encounters a number of well-mannered,
affluent, rural dwellers that would not seem out of place in the BBC radio
drama serial The Archers. She visits a Yelloly descendent and we are told
that his wife, Bryony, “is serving lunch out of the Aga” (98). When
Myerson and a younger Yelloly descendent pay an unexpected call on a
family living in a restored part of the old Yelloly mansion they also “have
Sunday lunch laid out on the table—a low beamed kitchen, an Aga” (148).
A visit to another, grander former Yelloly property results in “tea out of
Cath Kidston cups in the homely kitchen at Narborough Hall” (55). While
Myerson’s descriptions of these encounters linger over the families’ faux-
rural accoutrements, the Yelloly sections slide into pure speculation. For
example, the opening scene depicts Mary’s sister inside the carriage in
which Mary’s coffin is carried and is described in the following way:
“Suffolk, June 1838. A day so hot the air is glass. Splash of poppies in the
hedgerows. Cow parsley high as your shoulder. Above it all, the soaring
summer sky” (1).
Myerson later returns to the scene and reimagines it: “Suffolk, June
1838. The road to Woodton. But who’s to say it’s such a perfect summer’s
day? Maybe it’s tearing down with wind and rain—one of those grim,
wintry June days we’ve had so many of recently, days when the whole
world has a tighter lid of darkness” (25).
Myerson’s investment in Yelloly culminates in a fantasy encounter
with Mary in the churchyard, in which she reassures Myerson that her son
“will come back to her” (314). Yet addressing the reader, rather than
Mary, she later states: “Mary is gone. She lies under the church floor at
Woodton, her bones dissolved to nothing, her brief, unknown life turned to
dust […] It makes no difference that I found her, that I know where she is,
that I wrote this book, or that you chose to read it. I never met her, and
neither will you […] nothing I think or feel will bring that young girl back
to life […] but I know now and I think I can live with it. I’ve learned to
live with so many other things” (314).
Myerson’s moment of existential crisis also marks the point at which
her fantasy of an entirely benign, unambivalent and all-powerful
motherhood begins to strain. As the narrative progresses, Myerson’s
doubts about the biographical project are echoed by disclosures which
undermine her earlier assertions regarding her own children’s “perfect”
234 Chapter Twelve

infancy. Significantly, she discloses that her father (who is portrayed as a

selfish, demanding character) committed suicide on the night her second
child was born, causing her to fall into a “fog” of depression. There are
also more general hints that her memories of Jake’s untroubled
preadolescent years may be clouded by her strong desire to conform to an
aspirational fantasy of middle-class family life:

My boy at five years old. Five and a half. Summer mornings before school
we have a little routine… breakfast outside in the garden together—French
breakfast!—him drinking hot chocolate and eating baguette, me drinking
coffee and reading aloud… I am entirely happy. I think these days will go
on forever, that is how life will be from now on, will always be. I think I
will have this same experience with his brother and sister, that I will go on
having it, that I have got it all to come. But in fact that was it. I didn’t do
the same thing with them. And it was just that one summer… In fact, I say
summer but it was probably just a few weeks of warm weather that
particular term. It might not even have been weeks. It might have been
days (31).

The Lost Child concludes with a mawkish scene in which Myerson

weeps as the stroppy Jake sings her a self-composed song about “being
lonely in the rain”, but the acknowledgements end on a more pragmatic
note —one which challenges the basic tenants of the intensive, neoliberal,
mothering role: “you can’t make them safe, you can’t choose how their
lives turn out” (326). Myerson’s convoluted narrative journey thus not
only calls into question whether it is possible for “good mothers” to shield
their innocent babes against the toxicity of the modern world (the surface
premise of The Lost Child) but, more subversively, whether this particular
mode of neoliberal self-congratulatory, middle-class parenting (what
Helen Reece refers to as “positive parenting” or the “be nice” approach)
might actually be an aspect of the contemporary culture from which it is
advisable to shield children (Reece 2013).

“Marriage is Civilization and Now the Barbarians

are Cavorting in the Ruins”: Maternal Rage
and Neomodernist Illusion in Cusk’s Aftermath
Continuing in this self-reflective vein, Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath goes
much further towards directly confronting the author’s own investment in,
and gradual departure from, the hegemonic mothering role. Aftermath: On
Marriage and Separation was published roughly ten years after her first
maternal memoir A Life’s Work: Becoming a Mother. As mentioned above,
 Cavorting in the Ruins? Truth, Myth and Resistance 235

A Life’s Work is one of the initial pregnancy and early motherhood

“trauma” narratives that were subject to high levels of public scrutiny and
criticism. Cusk recently stated that, although wounded by the response to
A Life’s Work, she was far more shocked when Aftermath received the
same brutal treatment, having assumed that a warts-and-all memoir of the
trauma of divorce would be more attuned to public taste than a stinging
account of the disempowering effects of pregnancy and early motherhood
(Cusk 2012). In terms of the pervasive ideology of neoliberal motherhood,
it seems likely that Aftermath incited both ridicule and disapproval for
exactly the same reasons as A Life’s Work. Firstly, it is written in an
erudite and elusive style that is still regarded as inappropriate and
pretentious when applied to humdrum female experience. Secondly, its
account of divorce and single parenthood is as critical of the
heteronomative idea of family life as A Life’s Work is of bullying childcare
experts and the sentimentality and narcissism which surrounds early
motherhood (Cusk 2001). In between the publication of A Life’s Work and
Aftermath Cusk also published a series of neomodernist novels and short
stories: The Lucky Ones (2003), In The Fold (2005), Arlington Park
(2006), and The Bradshaw Variations (2009) in which the tensions and
conflicts produced by attempting to maintain the proscribed model of
aspirational family life is a core theme. Cusk’s domestic fiction is peopled
with resentful housewives, exhausted working mothers and embittered
grandmothers. Both A Life’s Work and Aftermath also interrogate and
reject the power of heteronormative and deeply conservative fantasies of
motherhood and family life. The key distinction is that the postpartum A
Life’s Work is written from “inside” the heteronormative family while
Aftermath, Cusk’s account of the period following her acrimonious
divorce ten years later, emanates from beyond its firmly erected and
socially endorsed boundaries.
The problem addressed in A Life’s Work is: how do women retain their
integrity and identity when they enter into the socially and historically
sanctioned but heavily censored cultural spotlight of modern motherhood?
Aftermath confronts the dark side of this cultural binary: can female-led
families flourish in the shadow of the oppressive but ubiquitous and
socially approved model of the male-led family? In A Life’s Work, Cusk
locates the source of gender oppression in medical and government
discourses in the childcare advice industry and in the competitiveness and
conformity of other mothers, rather than in her own family. She uses
phrases such as “even in the most generous household, which I
acknowledge my own to be” (12). Ten years on and her tone has shifted. It
is evident that her husband’s assumption of the domestic/childcare role (a
236 Chapter Twelve

“reversal” they eventually agreed on as Cusk found the world of mothers

and small children so stifling) had not led to true equality, but a
performance of it. Like so many working mothers, Cusk “did both things,
was both man and woman, while my husband—meaning well—only did
one” (23). Her husband accrued the traditional respect awarded to mothers
as caregivers while Cusk was still—due to the some residual force cultural
pressure—held responsible for all the tedious household drudgery. As she
baldly states, “I didn’t want help, I wanted equality” (22). In the
introduction to Aftermath, in which she describes her initial visit to a
solicitor, Cusk states that she is shocked to find herself venomously
asserting that “the children belong to me” (9); viewing this as a return to
“the primitivism of the mother, her innate superiority, that voodoo in the
face of which the mechanism of equal rights breaks down” (10). Yet from
what Cusk has already revealed, in both A Life’s Work and the
introduction to Aftermath, genuine equality has proved elusive. In the light
of these earlier comments, the “primitivism” of the mother appears not as
evidence of the residual fixity of human gender roles but more as a
hyperbolic means of conveying Cusk’s legitimate rage at the continued
power of those roles—even in supposedly more enlightened marriages.
Cusk uses a range of metaphors and cultural allusions to convey the
sense of disorder, marginality and abjection she experiences through her
loss of the protective power and prestige of the socially validated, male-led
family. This begins with the fairly obvious metaphor of the post-divorce
family as an incomplete jigsaw puzzle. We are told that one of her
daughters is attracted to jigsaw puzzles, the other repelled by them. This
response echoes Cusk’s own shifting feelings towards marriage and the
old patriarchal (marital) order throughout the narrative. The text is also
woven together by what Camilla Long’s savage review unfairly described
as “mad, flowery metaphors and hifalutin’ creative writing experiments”.
Cusk likens their single-parent family to that of Britain in the dark ages
before “the first thrust of male ambition”, and cheerily comments:
“marriage is civilization and now the barbarians are cavorting in the ruins”
(4). Their appearance at a family carol service produces the same
conflicting response. Initially she expresses feelings of exclusion and loss
of status: “I feel our stigma, our loss of prestige: we are like a gypsy
caravan parked up among the houses, itinerant, tents”, but then reflects:
“We have exchanged one kind of prestige for another, one set of values for
another, one scale for another. I see too that we are more open, more
capable of receiving than we were; that should the world prove to be a
generous and wondrous place, we will perceive its wonders” (28).
 Cavorting in the Ruins? Truth, Myth and Resistance 237

The opening sections of Aftermath thus signal its neomodernist

preoccupation with the fluctuating processes of the human mind in crisis.
Although the overall arc of the memoir moves from rejection and
humiliation to acceptance and rebirth, it meanders down a number of
allusive pathways before arriving at the external viewpoint adopted in the
final chapter, in which Cusk assumes the perspective of her own Eastern
European nanny and refers to herself as “the woman”. Long’s dismissal
and ridicule of Cusk’s implementation of an inventive narrative structure
and an esoteric range of references to address her transition to single
motherhood suggests a more subtle form of censorship than the crude
mother-shaming directed at Myerson. Cusk was characterized as a
“peerless narcissist”, Aftermath viewed as whinny, pretentious and self-
indulgent. As other defenders of her work have pointed out, these are
charges rarely levelled at male writers who subject their day-to-day lives
to intense scrutiny or draw on an extensive range of cultural references to
do so. Cusk makes frequent references to Greek tragedy, a form that she
views as offering a salutary dose of anger and passion to the generally
airbrushed view of middle-class family life presented in popular forms
such as comic mum’s lit. In a manner that echoes James Joyce’s semi-
comic juxtaposing of the banal and everyday with the central mythologies
of Western culture, she draws on modernist allusionism and defamiliarisation
to address her fear of marginalisation and social stigma.
Although pregnancy, birth, new motherhood, divorce and lone
motherhood are common enough female experiences, as we have seen,
they are still subject to strong taboos. The increase in single mothers, in
particular, has been a contentious political issue for the last three decades.
Much of the political rhetoric concerning single mothers either pities or
demonises them (Gillies 2007, 49–61; Tyler 2007). The recent post-
recession attack on the welfare system has intensified public hostility
towards this group, while applauding a small number of entrepreneurial
single mothers who are respected for exhibiting the grit and determination
necessary to raise themselves and their children out of the penury and
humiliation usually associated with female-led families (Garrett 2015).
Cusk’s account of single parenthood in Aftermath does not sit easily
with these stereotypes. She is neither a “deserving” (nor undeserving)
welfare recipient nor a resourceful, single “mumpreneur”. Much of the text
involves acknowledging and confronting the prejudices that she too has
held towards families that are viewed as less desirable or valid. For
example, she recounts her unease at her elder daughter’s friendship with
girls who introduce electronic gadgets and “crisps and nail varnish”; items
which, though Cusk doesn’t state this explicitly, are strongly coded as
238 Chapter Twelve

lower-class and associated with English middle-class parents’ fears of

contamination by working-class children. Another girl joins the circle that
Cusk states is “more to my taste […] she is polite, observant, interesting.
D does not gaze at screens. Her nails are unvarnished [...] I tell my
daughter that I like her. I want to show my approval. Yes, my daughter
replies coolly” (88). But, as Cusk’s daughter’s coolness implies, though
clearly coded as middle-class, D turns out to be a lot nastier than the
feared “chav” girls. She excludes Cusk’s daughter from a sleepover,
leaving her tearful and causing Cusk to speculate upon whether D’s nice,
wholesome, middle-class parents have deliberately excluded her daughter
from the group “as though her parents’ separation is a mark of shame”
(94). The passage refrains from making any obvious connection between
Cusk’s snooty attitude towards the lower-class girls and D’s parents’
rejection of her own now-diminished family, but the inclusion of her
daughter’s viewpoint offers insight into the distorted perspective produced
by her own class prejudices and fears and fantasies concerning her status
and competency as a single mother. The text continues to explore such
fears through its implementation of the Todorovian fantastic, in which
everyday experiences drift into the bizarre and uncanny.ii A trip to an all-
female dental surgery brings forth the anxiety that the smartly dressed,
outwardly competent women are actually malevolent and reckless
creatures. Cusk fears they may have injured, possibly even murdered, a
male patient: “He lay there like a broken toy they had, between them,
destroyed; as though, fascinated by their power over him, they had
forgotten for a moment his fallibility [...] Was this what a world run by
women looked like?” (41). Cusk draws a parallel between the female
dentist and Clytemnestra’s slaughter of Agamemnon on his return to
Argos after the Trojan wars, revealing her own internalised fear of female
authority. Once again, the daughters’ perspective appears to
counterbalance Cusk’s, as they see nothing untoward and are surprised
when Cusk shoos them out of the surgery. Aside from suggesting a slide
into mental illness at this point, the use of ancient myth combined with the
daughters’ baffled responses highlights Cusk’s recognition of the power of
narratives that perpetuate the cultural fear of feminine power.
The shadow side of this fear is Cusk’s greater terror of social rejection
through the loss of her status as a married middle-class mother. This is
explored in a more extended but equally surreal passage, in which Cusk
takes the girls on their first holiday as a single-parent family. That we
should interpret the trip as semi-mythical is signaled through an ominous
allusion to the fate of Creon, who unwillingly assumes power and ends up
destroying everyone he cares for. This foreshadows her impending
 Cavorting in the Ruins? Truth, Myth and Resistance 239

encounter with her own projected fear of marginality in the witch-like

single woman who rents rooms for tourists in Devon:

[S]he is so dishevelled it is hard to get a sense of her, vaguely I apprehend

a large mounded body, a shock of grey frizzy hair, a clutch of big yellow
teeth, a red leathery face grotesquely made-up. The teeth are bared: she is
either panting or smiling. I can’t tell. She has a pair of crutches strapped to
her arms on which she leans forward and with which she occasionally
gestures, like the forelegs of some gigantic insect [...] Her voice is rather
loud and braying; I notice her clothes, rainbow-covered draperies in
chiffon and velvet (108).

Again, the text has slipped from the truth-telling, confessional mode of
feminist autobiography into a neomodernist use of the grotesque within the
quotidian. The use of the phrase “the forelegs of some gigantic insect”
suggests a conscious allusion to Kafka’s Metamorphosis, as does the
gallows humour of the scene. The monstrous woman’s attempt to look
conventionally attractive through the use of makeup and brightly coloured,
feminine clothing also invokes a specific feminine form of the grotesque.
By creating a female figure who is unkempt, damaged, old and fat, the
petite and genteel Cusk summons her fear of what she may become—and
already feels like—now that she is no longer awarded the social status
conferred on middle-class mothers within the male-dominated nuclear
family. To add to Cusk’s sense of degradation, the monstrous landlady
demands that she vacate her room and move her family to the dingy
basement, insensitively stating: “Some other people want to be up here…
they’re a family, she says. Lovely people... they’ve just come back from
Geneva where the husband is some big cheese, and she’s had to make all
the arrangements herself, and my heart just bled for her really. The thing is
she’s got the children to think of. Such a sweet family” (109).
The move signifies Cusk’s “abasement” or debasement to a lower
social stratum. Cusk and her children are now clearly regarded as second
best to the socially validated family and Cusk herself viewed as inferior to
the financially dependent, infantilised mother. That we are being invited to
read this passage as prophetic, mythical and thus neomodernist in both its
use of the unreliable narrator and the presence of the uncanny is, once
again, indicated by the lack of external corroboration (the daughters do not
appear to see or comment on this peculiar vision). Perhaps the strongest
clue as to the character’s function as a projection of Cusk’s fear of social
marginalisation and rejection is that landlady also claims to be a writer.
After refusing to accept her family’s literal and symbolic relocation, Cusk
is offered a room at the landlady’s house. This turns out to be a suitably
240 Chapter Twelve

neo-Gothic dwelling near the busy bypass which combines elements from
a longstanding Gothic and fairytale tradition—cobwebs, broken chimney
pots and windows—with modern signifiers of poverty and abjection such
as a hospital bed and chained Alsatian dog.
Cusk makes a hasty escape but also recounts that, once safely home,
she finds a self-published book written by the witch-like creature. Its
subject is: “a woman’s loss of value as she ages, the decay of the body...
She shocks people with her desire to live: they expect her to give in, to go
away quietly, to hide herself away somewhere and politely rot. And so she
has come to enjoy their shock, she dresses in garish colours. She goes out
into the battlefield” (114).
Again, the coincidental discovery of the book, indeed its very
existence, lacks plausibility but its symbolic truth lies in the empathy
evoked by the grotesque figure. Her uncanny presence perpetuates the
narrative pattern in which Cusk initially flees from, but finally
acknowledges and accepts, the fear of the rejection and marginalisation
which may accompany her independent life: “I felt that I ought to love it,
for all at once I understood that its failure came not from some evil
intention but from the fact that it was unloved. That failure had frightened
me, menaced me” (114).
Significantly, the final section “Trains” also takes an unexpected
direction, doubling back on the narrative and disorientating the reader by
offering an account of the couple’s separation through the eyes of Cusk’s
troubled Eastern European au pair. This is also the point at which
Aftermath moves beyond the solipsism of the maternal memoir. Despite its
overwhelmingly middle-class outlook, the maternal memoir rarely
mentions childcare or domestic help. While Myerson exhibits appropriate
levels of middle-class maternal guilt at leaving her children with
“unsuitable” nannies, she registers little concern for the nannies themselves.
Cusk’s lacerating view of her own childcare arrangements therefore shows
an unusual willingness to acknowledge the exploitation of poorer women
by richer ones in order to ease the burden of the latter’s intensive
mothering. We follow Sonia’s journey from Eastern Europe and
experience her fear and alienation upon her arrival in the UK. Cusk, who
is referred to as “the woman”, displays little empathy and is depicted as
having unrealistic expectations as to how rapidly Sonia will adjust to her
new role: “I want you to cook”, says Cusk / “the woman”. “I want you to
cook dinner. I want you to do the laundry. I want you to tidy up around
here” (137). Cusk is initially friendly but quickly becomes hostile and
irritated as it becomes evident that Sonia has a history of depression and is
struggling to cope with her new role and surroundings: “Why weren’t we
 Cavorting in the Ruins? Truth, Myth and Resistance 241

told about this? You need to go back”, demands Cusk angrily. Like the
earlier episodes involving her daughter’s less affluent friends and her
encounter with the witch-like figure, her haughty attitude towards Sonia
precedes a reversal of fortune and a shift in perspective. Cusk endures a
bout of serious illness and is reduced to a state of helpless dependency in
which Sonia successfully takes control of her household. Cusk, in turn,
learns to value Sonia and show greater empathy towards her. Cusk’s
adoption of Sonia’s voice does not of course give us access to the “real”
Sonia, whose view of her ex-employer might be radically different and far
more critical. Her character and experience are woven into Aftermath’s
first-person narrative of fall and rebirth. Nevertheless, through the figure
of Sonia, Aftermath extends the maternal memoir’s analysis of modern
motherhood from the conflicts and tensions experienced by individual
middle-class mothers to the more general issue of women’s domestic
labour and exploitation. By doing so, Aftermath perhaps signals the
decline of the solipsistic and insular maternal memoir.

Conclusion: Re-Reading the Maternal Memoir

As we have seen, there were specific factors that led to the emergence of
this form in the late 1990s. The writers of such memoirs experienced an
acute conflict between the mainstream interpretation of second-wave
feminism (in terms of female academic and career success) and the
imposition of a neoliberal “child-centred” ethos of intensive, round-the-
clock mothering. This disparate set of forces produced the particular
combination of anger, resentment and maternal guilt, which is common to
pregnancy and early infancy memoirs of the late 1990s–early 2000s. The
work of Myerson and Cusk revisits these tensions at a later stage of
maternal experience. While neither pays much attention to the broader
social and political narratives within which their own family stories take
shape, their fluid and elusive style makes them particularly resistant to
being situated within “common-sense” notions of good and bad mothering.
The mother-shaming that surrounded the publication of The Lost Child
and Aftermath: on Marriage and Separation, tells us very little about Cusk
and Myerson’s strange and complex work and everything about the
restrictive and oppressive culture of neoliberal motherhood. If “ideal”
neoliberal subjects i.e. educated, affluent, white, middle-class women such
as Cusk and Myerson cannot achieve or sustain this mode of family life,
then what of those without flourishing careers, property, nannies and the
option of private or selective schools? As maternal memoirs illustrate,
there are few ways to succeed at neoliberal, neotraditionalist mothering
242 Chapter Twelve

but many ways to fail. As children develop and the writer-as-mother

reflects on the dominant parenting culture, the limitations and
contradictions of this model becoming increasingly evident. As Myerson
discovers, it is so intensely invested in the notion of maternal benevolence,
childhood innocence and the belief in wholesome, mother-centered
middle-class life that adolescent rebellion is equated with nothing less than
the catastrophic destruction of the entire family unit. Cusk’s cynicism
towards the cult of motherhood protects her from Myerson’s particular fall
from maternal grace, but Aftermath’s passage into Todorovian nightmare
explores the second-class status awarded to even affluent and privileged
single mothers. Despite their intensely emotive tone, the “failure”
recounted in maternal confessionals is thus predominantly ideological
rather than personal. The neoliberal construction of the family appears to
endorse choice and self-determination whilst actually stigmatising single-
parent families and enforcing neotraditionalist, intensive mothering
practices that deny and restrict the growth and development of both
mothers and children

References
Abrams, L. 2002. The Making of Modern Woman. London: Routledge.
Anderson, L. 2010. Autobiography. London: Routledge.
Bauman, Z. 2013. Liquid Love: On the Fragility of Human Bonds. New
York: Wiley and Sons.
BBC Radio 4. 2012. “Interview with Rachel Cusk” (Radio broadcast).
BBC Woman’s Hour, March 1.
Beck, U. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage.
Cusk, R. 2012. Aftermath. London: Faber and Faber.
—. 2006. Arlington Park. London: Faber and Faber.
—. 2005. “Silly Old Mum: Confessions of a Bad Mother by Stephanie
Calman.” New Statesman, September 26.
—. 2003. The Lucky Ones. London: Harper Collins.
—. 2001. A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother. London: Faber and
Faber.
Donzelot, J. 1997. The Policing of Families, trans. Hurley, R. Baltimore:
John Hopkins University Press.
Douglas, S. and Michaels, M. 2004. The Mommy Myth: The Idealisation
of Motherhood and How it Has Undermined All Women. New York:
Free Press.
Enright, A. 2004. Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood. London:
Jonathan Cape.
 Cavorting in the Ruins? Truth, Myth and Resistance 243

Felski, R. 1998. “On Confession” in Women, Autobiography, Theory: A

Reader, eds. Smith, S. and Watson, J., 83–95. Wisconsin: University of
Wisconsin Press.
Figes, K. 1997. Life After Birth. London: Penguin.
Garrett, R. 2015. “Austerity Culture and The Myth of the Mumpreneur.”
Paper presented at the Austerity, Gender and Household Finances
conference, University of Kent, UK, June 27, 2015
—. 2013. “Novels and Children: ‘Mum’s lit’ and the public
mother/author.” Studies in the Maternal 5(2): 1–28. Retrieved online.
DOI: 10.16995/sim.25.
Greer, G. 1984. Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility. London:
Harper Collins.
Guldberg, H. 2009. Reclaiming Childhood: Freedom and Play in an Age
of Fear. New York: Routledge.
Jensen, T. 2012. Tough Love in Tough Times. Studies in the Maternal.
4(2): 1–26. Retrieved online. DOI: 10.16995/sim.35.
Kagan, J. 1998. Three Seductive Ideas. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Kristeva, Julia. 1983. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans.
Roudiez, L. New York: Columbia University Press.
Leach, P. 1977. Your Baby and Your Child. London: Knopf .
Long, C. 2012. “Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation by Rachel
Cusk.” The Sunday Times, April 3.
Merritt, S. 2003. “Mum’s the Word: Granta has named Rachel Cusk as
One of Our Best Young Novelists, Stephanie Merritt Finds Out Why.”
The Guardian, March 30. Retrieved from:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/mar/30/fiction.stephaniemerritt
.
Marin, M. 2009. “Her Son Was Betrayed Because She is a Writer First, a
Mother Second.” The Sunday Times, March 8. Retrieved from:
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/Features/Focus/article1547
54.ece
McRobbie, A. 2013. “Feminism, the Family and the New Mediated
Maternalism.” New Formations 80–81:119–137.
—. 2004. “Post-feminism and Popular Culture.” Feminist Media Studies
4(3): 255–264.
Myerson, J. 2009. The Lost Child. London: Bloomsbury.
Quiney (Cain), R. 2007. “Confessions of a New Capitalist Mother:
Twenty-First Writing on Motherhood as Trauma.” Woman: A Cultural
Review 18(1):19–40.
244 Chapter Twelve

Reece, H. 2013. “The Pitfalls of Positive Parenting.” Ethics and Education

8(1): 42–54.
Todorov, T. 1975. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary
Genre, trans. Howard, R. New York: Cornell.
Tyler, I. 2008. “‘Chav Mum, Chav Scum’: Class Disgust in Contemporary
Britain.” Feminist Media Studies 8(1): 17–34.
Wolf, N. 2001. Misconceptions: Truth, Lies and the Unexpected on the
Journey to Motherhood. London: Vintage, 2001.
Woolf, V. [1926] 1977. To The Lighthouse. London: Grafton.

Notes

i. “Oh, but she never wanted James to grow a day older! or Cam either. These two
she would have liked to keep for ever just as they were, demons of wickedness,
angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-legged monsters. Nothing
made up for the loss” (Woolf [1926] 1977, 56–7).
ii. Tzvetan Todorov distinguishes between the fantastic, in which the reader is
unsure whether apparently bizarre experiences have taken place, and the
marvellous, in which the reader is encouraged to accept the existence of
supernatural occurrences with in the text.
 CHAPTER THIRTEEN

RECONSTRUCTING THE NEO-INDIAN MOTHER

THROUGH MEMOIR

SUCHARITA SARKAR

The announcement of the New Economic Policy (NEP) on July 24, 1991
ushered in a wave of popular media-circulated euphoria about the changed
status of Indian women. The popular media of that time stated that “the
Indian woman has never had it so good: she storms male citadels, rewrites
the home equations, and is on the threshold of a brave, new, sensual
world”.i Some would even summarily dismiss feminism’s project as being
complete (Nabar 1995).
The critical counter-discourse, however, exposed how neoliberal policies
“promised equitable distribution of resources and equal opportunity, but
their operation tells the opposite story” (Roy 2012, 5). Even though
neoliberalism was “thrust on India by the World Bank, the IMF and the
US”, a section of the class and caste elite had ensured its hegemonic
continuance by controlling the means of popular cultural production and
dissemination to produce consent and marginalise dissent (Ahmed 2009,
49). Crucial to the perpetuation of neoliberal regimes is the dual
construction of women as consenting producers/reproducers (Simon-
Kumar 2009, Vandenbeld Giles 2014). Since the 1990s, popular culture
texts such as cinema, television, advertisements and the print media have
represented the “new Indian woman” as a hybridised amalgam of the
modern “globalising India”; this representation embodies both self-
confidence, and the “idealized Bharatiya Nari [traditional Indian woman]”
who retains the “core values” of subservience (Oza 2006, 22). The nexus
of economic neoliberalism and patriarchy in India produces this
anomalous construct.
The Indian situation is further complicated by “the simultaneous
production of neoliberal and welfare policy” (Ahmed and Chatterjee 2013,
86). The National Policy for the Empowerment of Women, formulated in
2001 (and tokenised as the “Year of Women’s Empowerment”) has been
246 Chapter Thirteen

criticised for its neoliberal doublespeak: “The neoliberally imagined

empowerment logic seeks to enable grassroots actors, and especially
women, to fulfil their own needs through market mechanisms instead of
relying on state largesse” (Sharma 2008, 16).
Categorising India as both neoliberal and anti-natal, Rachel Simon-
Kumar analyses how the erasure of mother/worker and producer/reproducer
binaries disempowers women “either as subjects or objects of markets and
policy” (2009, 143). This brief overview is intended to indicate the
complex terrain of neoliberal praxis in India, and the divergences between
popular and critical discourses. In this paper, I will interrogate the
contradictory responses to neoliberalism through a textual analysis of
personal mothering narratives written in post-NEP India. The boom in the
publishing industry has produced an increasing number of mothering
memoirs in the twenty-first century (Davidar 2012; Basheer 2014). These
memoirs are disseminated from a variety of locations: feminist publishers
like Zubaan (Misra 2013), academic publishers like Sage (Bhattacharya
2006; Gulati and Bagchi 2005), and mainstream publishers like Penguin
India (Halder 2006; Ray 2011; Kapoor 2013), HarperCollins India
(Ravindranath 2013), Amaryllis (Iyer 2013) and Rupa Publications
(Narayan 2012; Purohit 2013). Some of these maternal memoirs reiterate
the popular euphoria at the “tremendous transformations” accelerated by
neoliberalism (Ray 2011, 313).
This euphoria needs to be understood in the context of the patriarchal
construction of motherhood in India, “the only country in the world today
where the goddess is worshipped as the great mother” (Krishnaraj 2010,
15). This sacralisation simultaneously privileges motherhood while
disempowering mothers. Indian motherhood is approved only within
heterosexual, endogamous marriages; the “good mother” bears sons and
provides selfless and silent service to the family (Nabar 1995, Krishnaraj
2010, Sangha and Gonsalves 2014). The paradox of “glorification without
empowerment” persists even in neoliberal India (Krishnaraj 2010). Right-
wing Hindu discourses still insist that women’s primary role is
motherhood, which must be vigorously policed to ensure the perpetuation
of the neoliberal nation. The continuation of patriarchal inequities has
been resisted throughout India’s long history of women’s activism. The
memoirs of Ray (2011) and Gulati and Bagchi (2005) narrate personal
histories of gradual female progress. Multiple factors: nineteenth-century,
middle-class progressive movements promoting female education; the
anti-colonial movements; the equal rights granted by the Indian
Constitution post-1950; increased urban and global migration; changes in
internal family dynamics; and the neoliberal opening up of job markets—
 Reconstructing the Neo-Indian Mother through Memoir 247

all contributed to the relative empowerment of urban Indian women, but

these have also intensified urban-rural disparities.
Mothering memoirs articulate oblique critiques of patriarchal and
neoliberal impacts on the self and the family, through their negotiation
with the lived realities of contemporary mothering. These memoirs are
situated in the subcontinent and in the diaspora, and positioned at different
intersections of age, class, caste, education and profession to trace the
multiplicity and contradictions of the different axes of mother-family-
workplace-society dynamics.
This chapter is theoretically grounded in Adrienne Rich’s (1976)
seminal distinction between motherhood as oppressive patriarchal
institution and mothering as enabling female experience. The texts are
located in “third-wave mothering”, which has been defined as mothering
from a site of “unusual multiplicity, positionality, opportunity […] in a
time characterised by […] global capitalism and information technology,
postmodernism and postcolonialism” (Kinser 2008, 1; also Mann and
Huffman 2005). I hope to establish the polyvocality that forms the crux of
third-wave feminism, and to re-vision contemporary mothering by
inquiring into the many ways in which the maternal is experienced and
represented. I will also use the theoretical perspectives of empowered and
feminist mothering/s. According to Andrea O’Reilly: “Empowered
mothering […] signifies a general resistance to patriarchal motherhood
while feminist mothering refers to a particular style of empowered
mothering in which this resistance is developed from and expressed
through a feminist identification or consciousness” (2007, 798).
I am also indebted to recent interdisciplinary research on neoliberalism,
gender and mothering, in both global and Indian contexts (Oza 2006,
Donner 2008, Vandenbeld Giles 2014, among others). In the sections that
follow, I will locate and critique some of the recurrent thematic concerns
that these memoirs engage with: the restructuring of Indian families and
their existing anomalies, the generational changes in mothering praxis, the
gendering and devaluation of mother work by the state and society, the
normative embodiment of motherhood in a consumerist society, the
creation of mother-daughter legacies, the new markets for subaltern
mothering, and the possibilities of empowered mothering germinated in
these memoirs.

From Joint to Dispersed Families

As Ahmed and Chatterjee note, “India’s transition to a neoliberal economy
constitutes a complex reworking of old social relations”, including
248 Chapter Thirteen

traditional family structures (2013, 89). Memoirist Tutun Mukherjee

writes: “My mother represented the kind of lifestyle and hospitality that
was a part of the joint, extended family culture, and which is fast
disappearing from our societies” (2006, 81). Defined as “two or more
elementary families joined together”, Indian joint or extended families are
usually patrilineal, patrilocal, multi-generational and multi-functional
(Shah 1998, 18–23). The traditional joint family structure, cemented
through endogamous marriages arranged by family elders, has been a
primary vehicle of patriarchal ideologies. Women in joint families are
assumed to be “swamped by the never-ending demands of caring for not
only the home, husband and children but also for the aged” (Nabar 1995,
192).
But the lived experiences of women often provide a counter-discourse
to such assumptions. Ray recounts how, after her wedding (in the 1960s),
she “came to live in the huge joint family mansion […] There were thirty-
four members, two kitchens” (2011, 226). As the first “working woman”
in her married household, Ray acknowledges, “women in a joint family
have fun, but they have problems too” (2011, 228). She tried to be
“systematic” and help with the household chores but the clashing
schedules of work and home forced her to be “selfish” and leave domestic
responsibilities to her stay-at-home mother and sister-in-laws; this made
her feel “a little guilty” (2011, 231). This guilt felt by working women in
joint families—because they assume that their contribution to the
household is inadequate—has its genesis in the Indian construct of the
ideal wife and good mother. Indian mothers “understand their roles as that
of providing selfless service to the family while putting their own needs
last” (Sangha and Gonsalves 2013). Such guilt and restrictions coexisting
with camaraderie and support make a woman’s existence in a joint family
an ambivalent experience.
In the post-Independence decades, many joint families underwent a
“phase of dispersal” and transition to separate nuclear households (Shah
1998, 81). When Ray moved to her husband’s “company flat” with him
and their daughters she had “mixed feelings” of sadness at leaving “the
family home you shared for five years”, which lessened the thrill of
“running my own establishment” (2011, 235). The loss of support was
recompensed by the increase in agency.
Neoliberalism, in tandem with globalisation and transnational
migration, resulted not only in joint families dispersing across the
diaspora, but also in the fragmentation of many nuclear families. Sons and
daughters are studying and then settling abroad while their aging parents
remain in India. Mothering in the Indian diaspora has adapted to these
 Reconstructing the Neo-Indian Mother through Memoir 249

changes in family structure and dynamics in diverse ways. Ray recalls how
her daughter, who became a mother at forty-four, was much more in
control of her maternal experience: “Times change. In my time, I was
cared for by my Shashuri-ma [mother-in-law] and Ma [mother] both
before and after I gave birth. Isha (my daughter) did not ask me or her
mother-in-law to come to Berkeley […] [S]he adopted modern techniques,
took assistance from professionals and managed the baby and herself,
looking slim and beautiful, ten years younger than her age” (Ray 2011,
307–8).
While this may be viewed as a romanticised, second-person perception
of globalised, neoliberal mothering, we must also acknowledge that the
prevalence of such perceptions, especially among our mothers’ generations,
indicates their pride in their daughters’ agencies and capabilities.
However, first-person experiences of diasporic Indian mothers reveal
alternative perspectives. To cope with the dual pressures and isolations of
migration and being a new mother, diasporic Indian families have altered
traditional structures and practices. “The tradition of daughters going to
their maternal homes to give birth has been replaced for us non-residents
by an even more convenient practice, where our mothers come to our
place to take care of us” (Ravindranath 2013, 6–7). Narayan recounts a
similar reversal of the customary natal-home journey: “My parents came
from India to help with the delivery. In generations past, Indian women
went to their mother’s home for deliveries. Nowadays, most of us want our
kids to have the advantages of American citizenship. So every year, a
small contingent of Indian parents fly overseas to help deliver and care for
their infant grandchildren” (2012, 218).
Family support extends beyond new mothering to working mothers.
Ray, who shifted from her marital joint household, still relied on her
mother-in-law’s support to run her nuclear household (in the same city)
while she was at work: “Shashuri-ma [mother-in-law] visited us every day
at 2.30 p.m. and stayed on till 7 p.m.” (2011, 236). The continuance of
intergenerational ties in globalised, urbanised Indian society addresses a
genuine psychological need in new mothers: “Most women really want
their mothers around or during childbirth, and definitely during the first
few months after giving birth […] no one else can understand your
postpartum mood swings like your mother can” (Iyer 2013, 110).
Ravindranath also contends that a lower level of postnatal stress in
Asian mothers is because of “the culture of new mama pampering …[in
the form of] attentive female relatives, miracle-working diets, prayers to
midwifery gods and, importantly, massages” (2013, 168). Mothers provide
generous, non-judgmental help to their daughters: “While I looked after
250 Chapter Thirteen

my baby, my mother looked after me” (Iyer 2013, 111). The presence of
mothers and mother-surrogates provide an enabling network of support
and comfort, and this has led to the continuation of the joint family system
in many restructured guises. While these temporary need-driven re-
formations of the family shift the mother and baby to the centre of the
structure, they also reveal the ongoing gendering of care work.

Generational Changes in Mothering Practices

A vital dynamic in joint families is the role of grandparents as bridges to
pass down cultural and familial traditions and memories (Meyer 2014,
Norat 2005, Singh 2013, Timonen and Arber 2012). In the new urban and
global modified families, this legacy continues in diverse and innovative
ways. Ray writes, “The bonds of the joint family loosened” but, “the
children were not at all cut off”, because of her mother-in-law’s daily
visits and father-in-law’s Sunday visits (2011, 294). Networked families
use communication technology to stay in touch, although that process
often has a bittersweet affect: “With Amma [mother] and Achcha [father],
we Skype twice a week, so that they can see [their grand-daughter] in
action. Chunmun already recognizes the buzzer on the laptop and waves
her hands about. I feel sad that so much of our interaction with such close
family needs to be online” (Ravindranath 2013, 64).
When grandparents come to stay and share the nurturing work of their
grandchildren, nuclear families once again become multi-generational,
joint households, although with far fewer family members than earlier
extended families (Shah 1998, 69). The restructured family provides not
only immense support and resource for mother work; it also becomes a site
of generational conflict between the new mother and her own
mother/mother-in-law. The mothering memoirs I studied document the
changes and continuities in the practices of childbirth and childrearing.
The timeless legacies of mothering and nurturing are passed down
matrilineages, even in the diaspora. Ravindranath writes: “Softly, I sing
her the Malayalam lullaby Amma [mother] used to sing to us as children,
the one my grandmother once sang to her” (2013, 2).
This transfer of maternal legacies often becomes conflicted because of
generational differences between “traditional” and “modern” ways, and is
further intensified by the marked changes in mothering praxis in
neoliberalised, globalised India. Donner observes: “Throughout the 1990s
the lifestyle of the Indian middle classes changed dramatically, and a new
consumerist orientation challenged many of the certainties embedded in
everyday practices” (2008, 155).
 Reconstructing the Neo-Indian Mother through Memoir 251

The Westernised, English-medium education of neoliberal mothers

make them question or diverge from traditional mothering rituals.
Ravindranath, who had to struggle through several months of sleep
deprivation because of her daughter’s habit of frequent night waking,
writes about the conflict of opinion on this issue between her and her
mother. While her mother is dismissive about the efficacy of childcare
books that Ravindranath initially tries to follow (e.g. questioning “How
many books do you need to read to bring up a baby?”) and advices her,
“not to indulge in crazy methods that come out of books” but to be “real”
and “natural”, she herself is faced with doubt: “Dare I say that […] even
she, my dearest mother, could sometimes be wrong?” (2013, 161–170).
Iyer also asserts: “There will always be ‘her way’ and ‘your way’. She [her
mother] was a believer in maalish [oil massages]. I wasn’t. She wanted the
baby swaddled. I didn’t […] Then there was the matter of ghee [clarified
butter]. And lactation. And nutrition. And rest” (2013, 110–111).
Despite the differences, Iyer is deeply grateful: “I consider myself
blessed and I can never forget how much my mother helped me during the
hardest time of my life” (2013, 111). The unselfishness of mothers in
supporting their daughters’ mother work is an extension of the ideal of
motherhood as selfless sacrifice, an ideal that is transferred to the
daughters as well. The daughters are expected to internalise and perform
the “ideal of the committed mother” (Donner 2008, 140–141). This ideal,
recontextualised in the neoliberal Indian nuclear family, is closely allied to
more recent, Western practices of neoliberal intensive mothering.
Intensive mothering assumes that the mother will be the single primary
caregiver and regards appropriate childrearing to be an emotionally
absorbing, child-centred, expert-driven and full-time nurturing process
(Hays 1996, Douglas and Michaels 2005).
Ravindranath’s memoir is both an engagement with and a rejection of
the standards of Western intensive mothering. She tries to “battle” the
night waking of her baby and her consequent sleeplessness by following
the US childcare expert’s “Fordian schedule” but is constantly forced to
deviate from its strict norms (2013, 77). When she visits her parents in
India, her Westernised sleep-training methods clash with her mother’s
advice, which is traditional but equally intensive: “It’s all part of being a
parent, waking at night, feeding, sleeping. You think at thirteen she’s
going to be waking you in the middle of the night?” (2013, 176). Unable to
choose, Ravindranath alternates between traditional and modern methods
of intensive mothering, driven by frustration and guilt. Iyer, on the other
hand, breastfed her son for three years as a free and informed choice: “I
chose natural, like I always do. It’s a decision I have never regretted,
252 Chapter Thirteen

despite the fact that there were days when it got a little overwhelming and
I felt like I needed a breast sabbatical […] The bond it formed between us
was just too special to tamper with” (2013, 126).
Iyer is privileging her own choice but also highlighting its limitations.
Her intensive, ecofeminist mothering practice is aligned to Indian
traditions of breastfeeding till toddlerhood but interestingly, Iyer conflicts
with her mother who belongs to a generation who did not demonise bottle
feeding: “Everybody gives formula. What’s wrong with it? And they say
mother’s milk is not enough” (2013, 110). The “they” refers to parenting
experts whose frequently changing advice (often circulated by the media)
both controls and confuses mothers, and adds to their guilt at not meeting
prescriptive standards.

Negotiating the Second Shift

One such prescriptive standard circulated by the media is that of the
“supermom”: the working mother who balances work and home with ease
and success. The socially produced supermom construct demands that
women be elastic enough to optimise both worker/mother roles: “socio-
economic condition[s] in India ha[ve] contributed to the need for dual
income in middle-class families” and this has driven more women to the
workplace (Ramasundaram 2011, para. 5; Vandenbild 2014, 4).
Deconstructing neoliberal media representations of working mothers
reveals how they trivialise maternal exhaustion and guilt, glibly assume
the availability of support, and transform the working mother from a social
exception to a social norm. “It is certainly possible to be both good
mothers and competent professionals”, “with opportunities aplenty and the
help that is available” (Ramasundaram 2011, para. 6–11). Even when
media reports claim to empathise with working mothers’ guilt, they tend to
give normative, generalised tips that underrate the conflicting pressures
faced by working mothers: “Balancing work and motherhood is a tough
job, but a few small changes to your routine can get you smiles and love
that will make the extra effort worth it!” (Sen 2013, para. 12).
The “good working mother” is insidiously linked to empowerment
discourse as a strategy to mask the realities of the “second shift” these
mothers have to negotiate (Hochschild 1989). The working mother
occupies a very important role in the family. She commands respect from
her children because she exhibits the characteristics of an industrious
person, full of self-confidence, maturity, decision-making capability,
intelligence and accountability (Ramasundaram 2011, para. 15).
 Reconstructing the Neo-Indian Mother through Memoir 253

Feminist critics have contended that false consciousness allows

mothers to be co-opted into the neoliberal economy where they must be
both self-optimising economic producers and self-sacrificing reproducers
(Chatterjee 2012; Vandenbild Giles 2014). The lived experiences of the
mothering memoirists also rupture and problematize the false certitudes of
the media-constructed supermother. Iyer, for instance, destabilises the
assumption of assured support by writing about her problems in finding
and retaining paid help: “[A] baby-maid quitting without notice […] is a
catastrophe that causes your entire workflow to collapse” (2013, 166).
The need for a stable and dependable support system arises partly
because of the inadequacies of the maternity leave policies implemented
by the state. Government intervention in support of working mothers led to
the amendment of the Maternity Benefit Act in 2008, which increased paid
maternity leave “to six months, besides instituting paid leave to its female
employees for a further two years (to be availed of at any time) to take
care of minor children” (Menon 2013, 14). However, this intervention is
both limited and normative. Many constituent state governments have not
adopted all the clauses of the Act, and private sector employers also do not
have to conform. This reveals how welfare policies are also embedded in
the neoliberal ethics of non-intervention. Mothers who have not completed
their probationary service period are excluded from the monetary benefits
of the Act: this further limits the impact of intervention. The normative
bias of the state—which also has an explicit population control policy that
promotes an ideal family of four (father, mother and two children)—
restricts the benefits of the Act to the mothering of the first two children
only.
Not just the state—some working mothers in positions of corporate
power also respond without empathy to the issue of maternity leave.
Purohit, who is the CEO of a media company, feels that companies with
generous maternity leave policies have a “sort of reverse bias” against men
(2013, 91). Comparing a woman employee who has taken a fully paid
three-month maternity leave with a man who has worked for the whole
year, she asks rhetorically that if both of them have achieved similar
targets at work, “he will also end up getting the same amount [of
incentive] in spite of having worked three more months than her. Is it
fair?” (2013, 91). Purohit’s argument is fallacious in its limited definition
of “work” as economically productive labour, and in the negation of
reproductive labour and care as “work”.
Even many stay-at-home mothers, especially of previous generations, echo
this fallacious trivialising of mother work and this is partly because the
Indian ideal of motherhood is embedded in self-effacement. Academic
254 Chapter Thirteen

Tutun Mukherjee’s mother “distinguished between her work and ours,

always insisting that she worked merely to pass time whereas our jobs
were important” (2006, 85).

As a “rather idealistic HR person” who quit her job because she found
the six-month maternity break insufficient, Ravindranath critiques the
“inadequacy and inequality of parental rights across the world: Maternity
is often seen as an unavoidable but inconvenient break in your career, like
a loud sneeze during a very important meeting, and then women are
supposed to resume their lives” (2013, 119).
Iyer reiterates that mothers returning to work after maternity leave
have to face shocking levels of “callousness at work” and “eventual
marginalisation” (2013, 222). She asks her husband to pay her a salary to
make her “feel good” about her stay-at-home status, and declares that she
will resume working only when she finds a company “that treats
motherhood as ‘normal’ and not something you do on the sly”. Through
such strategies she is articulating a resistance to, and restructuring of,
skewed work-home maternal politics.
The amended Act provides for paternity leave of fifteen days,
implicitly accepting the “sexual division of labour” that “keeps the
economy going” (Menon 2013, 15). Such discriminatory leave policies
reify traditional gender roles in mother work. Iyer writes, “Unless
paternity leave changes into something more respectable […] fathers will
never feel that they are an equal party in the whole parenting thing” (2013,
235).
Indian families negotiate the issue of de-gendering of care work in
different ways. Sheryl Sandberg’s solution of mutual “leaning in”—by
women at work and by their partners at home—is echoed in Ray’s
celebration of the “mutuality of understanding, working together and
equality in companionship” that she sees in double-income families of her
daughters’ generation (Sandberg 2013, 121; Ray 2011, 314). If one comes
home late, the other helps with household work. If the wife has to travel
abroad for research or office work, the husband steps in to look after the
children (Ray 2011, 314).
The “ifs” are revealing: exceptional circumstances apart, care work is
still primarily the mother’s responsibility. Ravindranath, a diaspora stay-
at-home mother, admires the weekend parenting of her husband, which,
although involving imperfectly coordinated outfits and uneven lumps of
food, is done with “sheer joy”: “Like many dads these days, he wants to be
as involved as possible in her care, and juggles work and fatherhood in his
own way” (2013, 243).
 Reconstructing the Neo-Indian Mother through Memoir 255

Contextualised against the entrenched gender roles in traditional Indian

families, Sandberg’s coda is an elusive possibility. Even mass media
reports reveal that, in India, “Women work roughly twice as much as men,
combining home and workplace. They have a lot more responsibilities and
accountability at home than men” (Ramasundaram 2011, para. 7). Some
memoirists navigate the forced necessity of care work with ironic humour
and resignation. Iyer, writing about “the myth of the hands-on daddy”,
absolves her husband: “I have stopped asking the husband to do any baby-
related work, because it just causes a capillary to burst in my head. He still
asks me where his knickers are or what his porridge looks like. Does that
make him a bad father? No” (2013, 215).
Iyer’s humorous defence is embedded in her guilt at opting out of her
career and staying at home to nurture her son. “I made a deal with my
husband that I provide the lion’s share of caregiving while he provides the
lion’s share of the family income. The flip side is, he thought he was
completely absolved of baby duty” (Iyer 2013, 207).
Purohit is a working mother who has necessarily had to create and use
all available “support systems […] mother, neighbours, husband,
household help” (2013, 86). Yet her response to the leaning-in debate is
ambiguous. Like Iyer, Purohit seems more resigned to, than resisting, the
gendered nature of mother work: “There comes a time in most women’s
lives when we will have to take a break from our careers to go through the
process of childbearing. We need to take it in our stride and not resent our
partners for not being able to play an equal role in the process” (2013, 66).
Articulating an essentialist view—albeit with humour—she states that
women “are born with the multitasking gene embedded in them”, whereas
men have to be “trained” in housework, “one instruction at a time” (2013,
24–26). Yet the possibility of “training” implies a willingness to change
gender relations within the family. Purohit feels that many similarly
positioned working mothers do not ask their husbands to help “not because
they won’t get it, but because it often means loss of control” (2013, 86).
She advocates reassigning familial gender roles to de-gender domestic
work: “Ask your husband and children to help, but without demarcating
responsibilities according to gender. Girls should sweep—while boys
repair the light bulb—are stereotypes to be junked” (2013, 87).
The pernicious persistence of gender stereotypes in neoliberal work-
discourse produces the normative myth of the supermom. This media-
created myth impacts maternal self-making in various ways, as evidenced
in the memoirs. Purohit accepts the challenges but resists the label: “I
figured out that you […] need to begin by acknowledging the problems
that come with being a working mom, the guilt that is a constant
256 Chapter Thirteen

companion in whatever you do, the balance you try to find between [an]
[…] ill child and an important presentation, and the fact that, however
much you try, you just can’t be superwoman. And then life becomes
easier” (2013, 3).
Iyer also articulates rejection as assertion: “I have complete respect for
mothers who manage career, baby, home and social life, but I didn’t see
myself as one of them. I opted out of the race for superwomen” (2013,
236).
Opting out has multiple resonances: it can be an empowering choice
that contests neoliberal imperatives of working motherhood, but
neoliberalism-inflicted economic compulsions also ensure that it is a
choice restricted to the privileged few who can afford it. The claim of
these memoirists is complicated by the problematic nature of the notion of
choice: “We often claim that we are ‘choosing’ options that actually are
not open choices” (Peskowitz 2005, 104).
The memoirs reassert that there is no generalised right or wrong in the
stay-at-home-mother vs. working mother debate. Living through the inner
guilt and social criticism that accompany both roles, the memoirists try to
assert the individuality of their choice and the sense of fulfilment that is
generated. Kapoor speaks out about her self-inflicted guilt: “I would be in
tears every time I left home because I felt guilty about leaving my kids
behind. Gradually it became better” (2013, 148).
Ravindranath opted to nurture her daughter in an adopted country, but
she is constantly—and rather unusually—urged by her father to “plan” for
her future and to return to—at least part-time—employment that will use
her “skills and talents” (2013, 192). Despite the implicit social/male
judgement of mothering as unskilled labour and in spite of the recurring
guilt, frustration and sleep deprivation, Ravindranath asserts that
mothering gives her “a greater sense of accomplishment than ever before”
(2013, 209). By sharing their ambivalent feelings, the memoirists expose
the impossibility of the supermom construct.
The glibness of Kapoor’s advice to “[l]et your feelings dictate”
whether you want to stay at home or work erases the lack of choice that
many mothers experience (2013, 150). Either they are forced to go back to
work because of financial compulsions or peer pressure, or they are forced
to stay at home because of lack of family support and approval, or mother-
unfriendly workplaces. However, by strategically avoiding taking sides in
the “mommy wars” between working mothers and stay-at-home mothers
Kapoor, like the other memoirists, is dismantling the “good mother”
debate and urging the mothers to decide for themselves (Peskowitz 2005).
 Reconstructing the Neo-Indian Mother through Memoir 257

Consuming the Maternal Body

Decision making in a hypermediated, market-driven neoliberal society is
subjected to multiple influences. Kapoor ends each section of her memoir
with an “affirmation” such as, “I will take time out for my body every
day” and “I won’t stop focusing on myself” (2013, 103 and 132). To
motivate her readers to make similar decisions she shares “fifteen fashion
tips” and “five post-delivery fashion tricks” on how to “look voluptuous
and quite the yummy mummy” (2013, 125–30). By positioning her memoir
as a “yummy mummy guide” Kapoor embodies neoliberal celebrity
motherhood that is pressured to conform to normative beauty codes
through intrusive cultural surveillance. The increased circulation of such
celebrity motherhood spectacles pressure other mothers to conform (Nash
2012).
Kapoor highlights how the neoliberal refashioning of the maternal
body requires mothers to focus on themselves through planned diet and
exercise routines: this resists the Indian ideal of selfless motherhood. Yet,
the self-focused decisiveness integral to the process of becoming “yummy
mummy” is often problematized by obsessive anxiety, self-surveillance
and dysmorphia. Kapoor reveals, “During my first pregnancy, I was quite
anxious about being so fat” (2013, 99). Continuously looking at “before-
and-after pictures” motivated her “boot camp routine” (2013, 102 and
107). When she writes, “There is no excuse for not looking after yourself”,
she is disciplining herself as much as her readers (2013, 98). The
hyperfeminised “yummy mummy” construct that Kapoor embodies and
promotes is critiqued by Imogen Tyler through the notion of “pregnant
beauty”, a “seductive postfeminist ideal [which] signals the deeper
commodification of maternity under neoliberalism” (Tyler 2011, 23).
The consumerist desires of the mother extend beyond her body to her
children, indicating a continuing sense of ownership. Kapoor reminisces,
“I would go shopping for different dresses, shoes, clips, hairbands, and do
all sorts of dressing up. [My daughter] was my little doll and I loved it”
(2013, 175). When she writes, “I love coordinating my clothes with my
children’s for occasions like Christmas or Diwali […] It makes the kids
feel more bonded with me” (2013, 177), she expresses the neoliberal
philosophy of equating consumption with happiness, by causally linking
the external image of commoditised harmony with the interior feeling of
connectedness.
A similar valediction of consumerism is expressed by Ravindranath: “I
admire my coral-painted toes, peeping out of my sparkly FitFlops […] I
feel exactly as I’ve always wanted to feel, a blissful mummy with a
258 Chapter Thirteen

blissful baby. The FitFlops are an epiphany” (2013, 113). Both memoirists
apparently validate the critique that “women and mothers form the
productive, reproductive, and consumptive basis to ensure neoliberalization”,
although they prioritise not the commodity, but the affect it produces
(Vandenbeld Giles 2014, 5).
This espousal of neoliberal consumerism is qualified with the
traditional Indian practice of frugality. Going against the grain of
neoliberal market-economics, Kapoor advises: “Give [your child] what
you can afford; never feel pressurised to do more […] I don’t buy brands
for my children often” (2013, 176–77). By unravelling her own construct
of yummy mummy consumerism, Kapoor is highlighting its incompatibility
with her own instincts as prudent family provider.
Ravindranath also critiques the neoliberal culture of excess from a
different perspective. Referring to the proliferation of childcare manuals
that offer “prescriptive” and “dictatorial” concepts of good mothering, she
admits her struggles to balance advice with experience: “Ford, Sears,
Pantley, Hoff—I distilled a cocktail of all their advice and did what I
thought would be best for my baby, and our family” (2013, 67 and 266).
Ravindranath counters the neoliberal “cult of the new” by balancing
consumerism with non-monetised rituals: she tries to make her daughter
happy by buying the “entire Fisher-Price 0–6 month collection of toys”, as
well as by giving her traditional “oil massages” (2013, 48). Ray’s memoir
also makes a trenchant critique of neoliberal consumerist excess by
comparing it to her own childhood in the 1940s: “There were no
indulgences in our lives, but there was contentment” (2011, 185).

The Legacy of Motherlines

Ray’s purpose in comparing generations is not just to critique, but also to
strategically create a “motherline”: a notion developed by feminist writer
Naomi Lowinsky in the context of black mothering practices (1992).
Andrea O’Reilly considers motherlines to be expressions of empowered
mothering that “ground a […] daughter in a gender, a family and a
feminine history” (2014, 109).
Recontextualised in the Indian context, motherline creation often
coincides with the daughter’s experience of becoming a mother, when it is
customary for her to have the company of her own mother. In affective
terms, these encounters, often lasting for quite a few months after
childbirth, deepen and strengthen mother-daughter bonding. Ray
remembers the support and comfort she experienced when she went to stay
with her mother after giving birth through a painful forceps delivery: “A
 Reconstructing the Neo-Indian Mother through Memoir 259

new mother finds relief in her own mother’s care, with whom she can
discuss physical problems without inhibition. I felt so relaxed in body and
mind and so close to my mother emotionally” (2011, 293).
Such intimate “discussions” often lead to the sharing of stories to
create motherliness: “The first time I asked my mother about her birth
story (of me) was when I was pregnant” (Iyer 2013, 107). Many maternal
memoirs are consciously feminist projects to create and bequeath
motherlines. Ray writes: “It cannot be denied that a powerful yet invisible
chain of values, hopes, aspirations were bequeathed from mother to
daughter […] In a sense, my story deals with how this stream operates
through generations” (2011, 13).
A feminist historian and academic, Ray painstakingly retrieved the
surviving diaries of her great-grandmother to trace the trajectory of her
motherline from her “Sundar-ma” down the next four generations to her
own daughters, as a strategic act of resistance against the patrilineal family
structure: “In most parts of India, family histories are traced through the
male line […] But I have chosen to break with tradition and tell my story
of five generations via the female line” (2011, 13).
Although Ray’s “personal story” “operates within the patriarchal joint
family structure”, it is also a “true” and important documentation of the
shifting subjectivities of women, and their changing private and public
roles in family and society, from the pre-Independence era of the late
nineteenth century to the neoliberalised twenty-first century (2011, 13–
16).
Niche academic publishers like Sage are contributing to the creation
and dissemination of motherliness. In the memoir collection A Space of
Her Own (Gulati and Bagchi 2005), twelve women academics and artists
narrativise memories of their mothers, grandmothers and daughters and
subversively attempt to “reflect on the emotional lines of matriliny within
patriliny” (2005, 10). As Tutun Mukherjee—a contributor to the Sage
volume—asserts, these memoirists are “conscious of a tremendous
responsibility to ensure that the legacy of the motherline that I have
inherited passes on to my daughter” (2006, 86).
O’Reilly emphasises that the mothers’ stories function as a map of
both encouragement and warning to their daughters (2014, 104). The first
working woman/mother in her natal and married families, Ray rhetorically
asks her mother, who “gave up sports and studies”—the two fields that she
had excelled in—to plunge “into the role of a full-time housewife”: “Why
did you make such a mistake, Ma?” (2011, 123). As daughters learn about
the restricted spaces their mothers negotiated and the reasons behind their
260 Chapter Thirteen

silences, they become more resilient and determined to be agents of their

own lives.
Sometimes, motherlines are created from stories of cultural markers
like dress and food. When C.S. Lakshmi persuaded her mother to write a
journal, she wrote mostly about her experiences of producing food during
difficult circumstances, using food as a “mode of communication,
assertion and adventure” (2006, 50). In the diaspora, too, mothers weave
experiences around garments and foods of their homeland as a legacy to
their children (Raghuram et al 2008; Mannur 2010). Narayan wore a saree
for a month as a deliberate “experiment with childrearing” (2012, 160).
Apart from her husband’s approval and her child’s curiosity, Narayan
herself felt a deepening of maternal affect: “I felt as if I was part of a long
line of Indian mothers who had rocked their children in this way” (2012,
163).
In a way, motherlines are deeply felt tributes to the memoirists’ own
mothers, of how their mothers shaped them: “I realise today that what I am
is entirely my mother’s handiwork” (Chatterji 2006, 43). The production,
circulation and consumption of these motherline memoirs in neoliberalised
markets and families shift their scope from private to public. As public
documents of mother-daughter bonding, these motherline narratives are
also immensely valuable as resistances against the patriarchal son preference
of Indian societies, where “practices such as passive infanticide, gross
neglect of a daughter […] and the selective aborting of the female foetus
are rampant within urban and semi-urban contexts” (Johri 2014, 19).
Chatterji concludes: “This is not only one daughter’s emotional tribute to
her mother but a tribute to all the mothers who give up their todays to
create better tomorrows for all of us” (2006, 45).
These motherlines are ideologically and strategically feminist in that
they “provide the space […] for feminist mothers to record and pass on
their own life-cycle perspectives of feminist mothering” (Green 2006, 18).
The fact that Ray’s motherline is published by the popular and mainstream
Penguin Books highlights the irony that it is the neoliberal widening of
markets that allow for such feminist motherliness—which often engage
critically with neoliberalism—to connect with others and to create and
circulate a legacy of feminist mothering.

Subaltern Mothers Speak

Another, harsher, embodied irony of neoliberal motherhood is the growing
number of poor urban mothers employed as domestic workers. Their
underpaid and unregulated labour enables the privileged class of mothers
 Reconstructing the Neo-Indian Mother through Memoir 261

to manage their homes and work. Iyer eulogies the “precious, worth-her-
weight-in-gold […] baby maid […] who can make life easier for you when
the baby pops out” (2013, 163). Kapoor “made full use of that network” of
“maids, ayahs, nannies and extended families” and advises her readers on
“how to manage your maids” in order to balance work and home (2013,
151). Yet, neither Iyer nor Kapoor write of these maids as also being
disadvantaged mothers. Their deeply internalised class privilege prevents
them from having intersectional solidarity with their maids. The
coexistence of these different classes of mothers in close employer-
employee relationships without much mutual empathy or even engaged
communication shows up the contradictions within the neoliberal
mothering discourse in India.
Vandenbeld Giles comments that, while some “privileged” mothers
may “choose” to work by “offloading the responsibilities of mothering
onto other mothers and caregivers”, for the majority performing both
labour and mothering is “not a question of choice, but rather economic
necessity” (2014, 6). Indian neoliberalism has “widened social cleavages,
intensified exploitation, and given rise to greater and newer social
contradictions” (Ahmed and Chatterjee 2013, 95). The marginalisation of
the poor in the neoliberal discourse of economic agency is addressed in the
unusual subaltern female memoir of Baby Halder (2006), which is a
complex engagement with the necessities and contradictions of neoliberal
poor mothering.
Halder’s desire to provide herself and her children a better future
enables her to write her story. Halder’s affirmative life-writing is made
possible not just by her employer-mentor’s encouragement but also by the
expanding markets that catalysed the transformation of her notebook
jottings into a widely circulated printed text. Ironically, Halder’s story
exposes the “unspeakable miseries on the bottom 800–1000 million” in
neoliberal India (Das 2012, para. 10). An urban migrant deserted by her
husband, she is a single mother working as a domestic help. The slums she
lives in are crowded and unhygienic: “there was no toilet in the house”
(Halder 2006, 147). Urban slums are the neglected by-products of the
NEP’s “spatial-scalar project” which dispossesses the poor to create new
spaces for “elite consumption” (Das 2012, para. 16). Slum-dwellers are
often evicted to make way for high-rises or malls. Halder exposes the
precarious existence of slum families: “One day, as I was coming back
from work my children came up to me, crying. They told me that our
house had been broken down […] when we got home, I saw that they had
thrown everything out on the street. I sat down there with my head in my
262 Chapter Thirteen

hands […] how would I find a new place so soon, at this time of the day?
The children and I sat down there and wept” (2006, 154).
Living under the constant threat (and often, actuality) of displacement
and homelessness, Halder also articulates the financial anxieties of the
underprivileged-class parent: “Now I began to think about getting some
extra work because the money I was earning was not enough for all three
of us” (2006, 147).
It is this compulsion in poor families to increase earnings that has
produced a new kind of mother: the commercial surrogate mother. India
legalised commercial surrogacy in 2002, but in a typical neoliberal non-
interventional strategy, the government has yet to pass the necessary
legislation to regulate the glaring inequities in the flourishing surrogacy
market. Surrogacy hinges on multiple biological and ethical ambivalences.
Reproduction becomes income-earning production, the notion of
biological motherhood is fractured; but in the process, the maternal body is
commoditised and controlled through unequal power relations. In the
“liberal-market model” of surrogacy in India, the surrogates themselves
are just anonymous vessels, without rights or voices (Pande 2013, 136;
Menon 2012, 192–195).
Researchers like Pande (2013), Sarojini and Marwah (2013) and
Aravamudan (2014) are transcribing oral narratives of poor and often
uneducated surrogate mothers. These retold memoirs reveal how such
subaltern surrogate mothers exert agency within exploitative paradigms
and how they redefine “the meaning of motherhood” in India by
emphasising the claim of “sweat and blood” in mothering ties (Pande
2013, 135–6). Like Halder’s memoir (2006), the surrogates’ stories are
inserting hitherto silenced voices into the Indian neoliberal mothering
discourse, making it more inclusive and layered.

Writing as Project, Writing as Product

This chapter has looked at memoir writing as a project of maternal
articulation that reshapes motherhood, reclaims agency and realises
selfhood. The memoirists emphasise that “motherhood without the
mother’s selfhood is not complete” (Bagchi 2006, 20). As Iyer asserts,
“every [mother] has a story” and the very act of choosing to narrate, and
share, one’s story is a transformative change for the self as well as for
other mothers (2013, 146). The memoirists exert agency by making
choices, but their life choices are problematized by compulsions and
circumstances not always of their own making (see Menon 2012, 212). It
will be prudent to remember here that “neoliberalism is a mobile, calculated
 Reconstructing the Neo-Indian Mother through Memoir 263

technology for governing subjects who are constituted as self-managing,

autonomous and enterprising” and we should be aware of the overt and
covert coercive power structures in which these memoirs are embedded
(Gill and Scharff 2011, 5).
Despite these contradictions and compulsions, I would like to conclude
that the mothering memoirs engage with neoliberalism in critical but
ultimately affirmative ways. Ray’s transgenerational perspective gives her
a sense of pride in the achievement of her daughters (the “fifth generation”
who are “at the eye of the storm of globalisation”): she celebrates their
multifaceted-ness, their “sense of liberation” and their “inner drive
towards self-improvement” (2011, 314).
Similarly, the long-distance, diasporic gaze of Narayan (2012) looks at
neoliberalised India as a place that has changed positively, offering the
hope and a site of homecoming. She and her family—like many of her
immigrant friends—will return to India after seventeen years abroad, for
the traditional values and neoliberal opportunities, and for the deeper and
simpler reason that they can reconstitute their dispersed families and live
closer to their aging parents (2012, 187). From her position of privilege,
Narayan echoes the positive development story of Indian neoliberalism:

India had also advanced a lot since the time Ram and I left. The IT
[information technology] boom had made available technologies that were
on par with, and occasionally better than, those available in America.
Metros like Bangalore and Delhi had spawned scores of wealthy Indians
who demanded the latest consumer goods […] India, in short, was
attempting to preserve eons of tradition and culture while embracing
Western technology and products with a vengeance. It was possible to have
a good life there. With a dollar income, it was possible to have a great life
(2012, 237–8).

Although words like “scores” and “dollar income” reveal the elitism of
Narayan’s position, they nonetheless reflect the changing dynamics
between the new India and diasporic families. Purohit, positioned in the
here-and-now of neoliberal India at a privileged intersection of class and
ability, also celebrates: “We are blessed to have lived in this era and in this
environment […] Everywhere you look around a metro city in India today,
parents are pushing their daughters to study and to work” (2013, 126).
Again, fissures like “a metro city” and “pushing” reveal that gender
politics is different in the villages of India, and that working women have
to negotiate many pressures and expectations. Yet the feeling of being
“truly fortunate” persists among many of those women “who have both the
ability and the freedom to work” (Purohit 2013, 126).
264 Chapter Thirteen

These memoirists’ optimism about neoliberal free choice and

female/maternal agency can be critiqued as a privileged and limited
perspective about an illusory “repackaging of patriarchy that partially co-
opts feminist motherhood” (Leite 2014, 19). It is true that the popular
neoliberal discourse valorises a certain kind of normative motherhood and
erases most other kinds of mothering. But neoliberal cultures are both non-
totalising yet hegemonic (Vandenbeld Giles 2014). This paradox of
neoliberalism, created by the expansion of free markets, has opened up
enough postmodern space for the insertion of alternate, anti-neoliberal
mothering voices. Although it is often brave niche publishers who are
enabling the writing of feminist and alternate mothering, even bigger
publishers are participating in the process of bringing out “non-fiction
narratives” that resist and complicate mothering from within neoliberal
patriarchal parameters (Davidar 2012).
When domestic worker Halder is assailed by doubts (“I’m wondering
if I will be able to write or not”), her mentor/employer assures her, “Of
course you will be able to write… why ever not? Go ahead: write” (Halder
2012, 153). Not only does Halder write her own self, this self-making
project is first translated and published by feminist publisher Zubaan and
then again by multinational market-leader Penguin. It may be argued that
neoliberal “market fetishism” (Das 2012) is commoditising mothering
narratives from selfhood projects to consumable products demanded by
book markets that are driven by middle-class aspirational demands. Even
if some of these memoirs are overtly commoditised as self-help mothering
manuals (Kapoor 2013, Iyer 2013), they are still valuable as self-
empowering projects. Iyer asserts that she quit her job and “decided to
write full-time as my baby grew” (2013, 236). Even if the identity project
is imbricated with a “bestseller” product that is marketed as “a lesson in
courage and survival”, its genesis is still an expression of agency (Halder
2012, back cover). In fact, mothering in post-NEP India is a constellation
of choices and compulsions that are interconnected and mutually
dependent.
Whether the compulsions of commodification, which insists on
normativity and palatability, compromise the authentic articulation of
maternal experience is a debate beyond the scope of this paper. However,
it is undeniable that these memoirs are using neoliberal market-driven
opportunities (and the very process of commodification) to reach out to
create a community of mothers who will hopefully be similarly
empowered to resist and celebrate. Here, I use the term empowerment to
mean a “pedagogic process that facilitates a transformation of both the self
and society” (Sharma 2008, 10).
 Reconstructing the Neo-Indian Mother through Memoir 265

Most importantly, these memoirs provide localised alternative counter-

discourses that prioritise maternal needs and experiences within neoliberal
contexts of work, home and family. The final line of Ray’s memoir—“Life
at home has become one with life in the world”—may be critiqued as a
facile hope (2011, 315). In diverse ways, however, these maternal
memoirists, by transforming domestic silences and self-denials into public
agency and self-expression, are achieving exactly that.

References
Ahmed, W. 2009. “From Mixed Economy to Neo-Liberalism: Class and
Caste in India’s Economic Transition.” Human Geography 2(3): 37–
51.
Ahmed, W. and Chatterjee, I. 2013. “Contradictory Policies of
Neoliberalizing India.” Human Geography 6 (2): 85–97.
Aravamudan, G. 2014. The Baby Makers: The Story of Indian Surrogacy.
New Delhi: HarperCollins Publishers India.
Archer Mann, S. and Huffman, D. J. 2005. “The Decentering of Second
Wave Feminism and the Rise of the Third Wave.” Science & Society:
Marxist-Feminist Thought Today 69(1): 56–91.
Bagchi, J. 2006. “Foreword: Motherhood Revisited” in Janani—Mothers,
Daughters, Motherhood, ed. Bhattacharya, R., 11–21. New Delhi:
Sage Publications Ltd.
Basheer, K.P.M. 2014. “Publishing Industry Booming in India.” Hindu
Business Online, July 6. Retrieved from:
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/news/states/publishing-industry-
booming-in-india/article6182874.ece.
Bhattacharya, R. (ed.). 2006. Janani—Mothers, Daughters, Motherhood.
New Delhi: Sage Publications Ltd.
Bhattacharya, S. 2012. Dad’s the Word: The Perils and Pleasures of
Fatherhood. Chennai: Westland Ltd.
Butalia, U. 2013. “Childless, Naturally” in Of Mothers and Others, ed.
Misra, J., 112–124. New Delhi: Zubaan.
Chatterjee, I. 2012. “Feminism, the False Consciousness of Neoliberal
Capitalism? Informalisation, Fundamentalism and Women in an Indian
City.” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography,
19(6): 790–809. Retrieved online. DOI:
10.1080/0666369x.2011.649349.
Chatterji, M. 2006. “My Mother, My Daughter” in Janani—Mothers,
Daughters, Motherhood, ed. Bhattacharya, R., 36–46. New Delhi:
Sage Publications Ltd.
266 Chapter Thirteen

Das, R. D. 2012. “The Dirty Picture of Neoliberalism: India’s New

Economic Policy.” Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal,
April 11. Retrieved from: http://links.org.au/node/2818.
Davidar, D. 2012. “Will Indian Publishing Continue to Boom?” Forbes
India, January 4. Retrieved from:
http://forbesindia.com/article/biggest-questions-of-2012/will-indian-
publishing-continue-to-boom/31782/1.
Donner, H. 2008. Domestic Goddesses: Maternity, Globalization and
Middle-Class Identity in Contemporary India. Hampshire UK: Ashgate
Publishing Ltd.
Douglas, S. and Michaels, M. 2005. The Mommy Myth. New York: Free
Press.
Forbes, G. 1998. The New Cambridge History of India, IV.2: Women in
Modern India. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Gahlot, D. 2006. “No Baby, No Cry!” in Janani—Mothers, Daughters,
Motherhood, ed. Bhattacharya, R., 138–145. New Delhi: Sage
Publications Ltd.
Giles, M.V. 2014. Mothering in the Age of Neoliberalism. Bradford, ON:
Demeter Press.
Gill, R. & Scharff C. 2011. New Femininities: Postfeminism,
Neoliberalism and Subjectivity. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Green, F. J. 2006. “Developing a Feminist Motherline: Reflections on a
Decade of Feminist Parenting.” Journal of the Association for
Research on Mothering 8(1–2):7–20.
Gulati, L. and Bagchi, J. (eds.) 2005. A Space of Her Own: Personal
Narratives of Twelve Women. New Delhi: Sage Publications.
Halder, B. 2006. A Life Less Ordinary, trans. Butalia, U. New Delhi:
Zubaan in collaboration with Penguin Books.
Harrington Meyer, M. 2014. Grandmothers at Work: Juggling Families
and Jobs. New York and London: New York University Press.
Hays, S. 1996. The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. New Haven:
Yale University Press.
Iyer, L. 2013. I’m Pregnant, Not Terminally Ill, You Idiot! New Delhi:
Amaryllis.
Johri, R. 2014. “From Parayi to Apni: Mothers’ Love as Resistance” in
South Asian Mothering: Negotiating Culture Family and Selfhood, eds.
Sangha, J. K. and Gonsalves, T., 17–32. Bradford, ON: Demeter Press.
Kapoor, K. and Banerjee, M. 2013. My Yummy Mummy Guide: From
Getting Pregnant to Being a Successful Working Mom and Beyond.
New Delhi: ShobaaDe Penguin Books.
 Reconstructing the Neo-Indian Mother through Memoir 267

Kinser, A. E. (ed.) 2008. Mothering in the Third Wave. Toronto: Demeter

Press.
Krishnaraj, M. (ed.) 2010. Motherhood in India: Glorification without
Empowerment? New Delhi: Routledge.
Lakshmi. C.S. 2006. “When Alamelu Shrugged” in Janani—Mothers,
Daughters, Motherhood, ed. Bhattacharya, R., 47–56. New Delhi:
Sage Publications Ltd.
Leite, M. 2013. “(M)Othering: Feminist Motherhood, Neoliberal
Discourses and the ‘Other’.” Studies in the Maternal 5(2). Retrieved
online. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/sim.19
Lowinsky, N. R. 1992. The Motherline: Every Woman’s Journey to Find
her Female Roots. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher.
Mannur, A. 2010. Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic
Culture. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Menon, N. 2012. Seeing Like a Feminist. New Delhi: Zubaan-Penguin
Books.
Misra, J. (ed.) 2013. Of Mothers and Others. New Delhi: Zubaan.
Mukherjee, T. 2006. “My Mother’s Gardens” in Janani—Mothers,
Daughters, Motherhood, ed. Bhattacharya, R., 80–86. New Delhi:
Sage Publications Ltd.
Nabar, V. 1995. Caste as Woman. New Delhi: Penguin Books.
Narayan, S. 2012. Return to India: An Immigrant Memoir. New Delhi:
Raintree by Rupa Publications.
Nash, M. 2012. Making ‘Postmodern’ Mothers: Pregnant Embodiment,
Baby Bumps and Body Image. Hampshire and New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Norat, G. 2005. “Latina Grandmothers: Spiritual Bridges to Ancestral
Lands.” Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering 7(2):
98–111.
O’Reilly, A. 2014. “African American Mothering: ‘Home is Where the
Revolution Is’” in Mothers, Mothering and Motherhood across
Cultural Differences: A Reader, ed. O’Reilly, A., 93–117. Bradford,
ON: Demeter Press.
—. 2007. “Feminist Mothering” in Maternal Theory: Essential Readings,
ed. O’Reilly, A., 792–821. Toronto: Demeter Press.
Oza, R. 2006. The Making of Neoliberal India: Nationalism, Gender and
the Paradoxes of Globalization. New York & London: Routledge.
Pande, A. 2014. “The ‘Sweat and Blood’ of Womb Mothers: Commercial
Surrogates Redefining Motherhood in India” in South Asian
Mothering: Negotiating Culture Family and Selfhood, eds. Sangha,
J.K. and Gonsalves, T., 135–149. Bradford, ON: Demeter Press.
268 Chapter Thirteen

Peskowitz, M. 2005. The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars: Who Decides
What Makes a Good Mother? Emeryville, CA: Seal Press.
Purohit, A. 2013. Lady, You’re Not a Man! The Adventures of a Woman at
Work. New Delhi: Rupa Publications.
Raghuram, P, Kumar Sahoo, A., Maharaj B., and Sangha, D. (eds.). 2008.
Tracing an Indian Diaspora: Contexts, Memories, Representations.
New Delhi: Sage Publications Ltd.
Rai, S. 2015. “‘Every Hindu Woman Must Produce at Least 4 Kids’:
Sakshi Maharaj.” The Times of India, January 6.
Ramasundaram, A. 2011. “The Working Mother, a Winner All the Way.”
The Hindu, August 19. Retrieved from:
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/open-page.
Ravindranath, K. 2013. Good Night and Good Luck: A New Mum Battles
Manuals and Myths. Noida: HarperCollins India.
Ray, B. 2011. Daughters, trans. Karlekar, M. New Delhi: Penguin Books.
Rich, A. 1976. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and
Institution. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Russell Hochschild, A. 1989. The Second Shift. New York: Penguin.
Sandberg, S. 2013. Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead. London:
W.H. Allen.
Sangha, J. K. and Gonsalves T. (eds.) 2013. South Asian Mothering:
Negotiating Culture, Family and Selfhood. Bradford, ON: Demeter
Press.
Sangha, J. K. 2014. “Contextualizing South Asian Motherhood” in
Mothers, Mothering and Motherhood across Cultural Differences: A
Reader, ed. O’Reilly, A., 413–428. Bradford, ON: Demeter Press.
Sarojini. N. and Marwah, V. 2013. “‘Shake Her, She is Like the Tree that
Grows Money!’ Contests and Critiques in Surrogacy” in Of Mothers
and Others, ed. Misra, J., 185–206. New Delhi: Zubaan.
Sen, Debarati. N. 2013. “Are You Suffering from Working Mothers’
Guilt?” The Times of India, June 2. Retrieved from:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/relationship/parenting.
Shah, A.M. 1998. The Family in India: Critical Essays. New Delhi: Orient
Longman Ltd.
Sharma, A. 2008. Logics of Empowerment: Development, Gender and
Governance in Neoliberal India. Minneapolis & London: University of
Minnesota Press.
Simon-Kumar, R. 2009. “‘Productive’ Reproducers: The Political Identity
of Mothering in Contemporary India.” Journal of the Association for
Research on Mothering 11(2): 143–152.
 Reconstructing the Neo-Indian Mother through Memoir 269

Singh, A. (ed.) 2012. Indian Diaspora: Voices of Grandparents and

Grandparenting. Rotterdam: Sense Publishing.
Singha Roy, S. 2012. “Portrayal of Women in Indian Media in the Era of
Neo-liberal Economy.” Commentaries: Global Media Journal (Indian
Edition) 3(1): 1–5.
Timonen, V. and Arber, S. (eds.) 2012. Contemporary Grandparenting:
Changing Family Relationships in a Global Context. Bristol, U.K.:
The Policy Press.
Tyler, I. 2011. “Pregnant Beauty: Maternal Femininities under
Neoliberalism” in New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and
Subjectivity, eds. Gill, R. and Scharff, C., 21–36. Hampshire & New
York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Vandenbeld Giles, M. (ed.) 2014. Mothering in the Age of Neoliberalism.
Bradford, ON: Demeter Press.

Notes

i . See “Bahus, Betis and Businesses” Femina, July 8, 1992; “The Changing
Woman” India Today, July 15, 1992; “Women on Top” Femina, March 23, 1994.


CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE NEW TIES THAT BIND:

HELICOPTER PARENTING AND SURVEILLANCE

KAREN L. LOMBARDI

Amy Chua’s The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011) has been
characterised variously as a model for the success of upward mobility in
certain ethnic groups immigrating to the United States and as an assault
against the liberal values of American culture. Chua, who is neither an
immigrant (she was born in the United States) nor upwardly mobile herself
(her father, Leon Chua, who earned advanced degrees from MIT and the
University of Illinois, is a professor of electrical engineering and computer
sciences at Berkeley), speaks to a larger movement of anxious parents who
are focused on the eventual success of their children who live in a society
where upward mobility, or indeed, “ordinarily expectable” middle-class
security, is felt to be slipping away. Parents of middle-class backgrounds,
under the increasing pressure of test scores and competition for entrance
into desirable colleges and universities, are currently more involved in
organising and directing their children’s lives than in past generations.
Parental control is not limited to involvement in their children’s academic
work, but extends to the organisation of their social and imaginal lives.
Play dates are scheduled, homework times are organised, time on the
computer is regulated (often unsuccessfully), “mommy and me” classes
for toddlers are paid for in organised efforts to provide proper
social/developmental experiences for preschool children, and so on. This
degree of regulation stands in contrast to the social organisation of
children as little as forty years ago, when children were expected to
discover their own interests, talents, and friends. Chua’s narrative stands in
contrast to Druckerman’s cultural memoir of the bewilderment of an
American mother raising her children in Paris, where her notions of
parental control fail her (2013).
This chapter will address the economic pressures on the contemporary
family that may contribute to over-involved parenting, as well as the


 The New Ties that Bind: Helicopter Parenting and Surveillance 271

effects of contemporary culture on the imaginative life of children. Recent

data (Beller and Hout 2006, Long and Ferrie 2013) suggest that social and
economic mobility in the United States is lower than many European
countries, including that of Great Britain, while at the same time the myth
of a classless society that affords opportunity for all continues to be
promulgated. Other changes in the culture, including the “hooked-up”
electronic world in which we now live, simultaneously keep parents and
children more connected and interfere with the full-bodied relationships
that are necessary for the development of productive and creative inner
lives. To this end, psychoanalytic perspectives will be offered as a
counterpoint to the increasing pressures of commodification and control.

Income Inequality and the Myth of Mobility

Thomas Piketty’s monumental work Capital in the Twenty-First Century
(2014) points to the enormous shift in income inequality in the United
States, so that the top decile share in US national income is at nearly 50
percent, the same as it was before the Wall St. Crash of 1929. Piketty says
that “this spectacular increase in inequality largely reflects an
unprecedented explosion of very elevated incomes from labor, a veritable
separation of the top managers of large firms from the rest of the
population”, which he sees partially as a function of a shift of unregulated
power to corporations and partially as a function of the rate of return on
capital significantly exceeding the growth rate of the economy, leading to
inherited wealth growing at a much greater rate than labour output and
income (2014, 24).
The United States—fond of casting itself as a classless society with
equal opportunity for all—now has (along with Great Britain) lower
intergenerational occupational mobility than Canada, Australia, Germany,
Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, or Finland. Despite continued
references to the United States as a classless society, Americans raised in
the top fifth of incomes stay in the top two-fifths, while 65 percent born in
the bottom fifth stay in the bottom two-fifths (The Pew Charitable Trusts,
n.d.). In spite of this data, the myth of the “American Dream” persists,
leading to policies that reflect the false belief in high rates of economic
mobility and that reject the need for substantial redistribution by the state.
Public opinion largely supports these policies. Long and Ferrie (2013)
state: “Public opinion surveys are consistent with these priorities and a
belief in high rates of mobility: Americans are less concerned by
inequality and are less willing to support redistribution than Europeans,
regardless of their position in the income distribution” (109).


272 Chapter Fourteen

Educational Pressures
While the social and economic factors behind the trend of decreased
economic mobility are complex, part of the problem is seen to reside in the
American educational system. International rankings of US high school
students are cause for concern, leading to such measures as the inauguration
of the “Common Core” curriculum. American fifteen-year-olds, when
compared to their international peers, currently rank thirty-first in
mathematics, twenty-fourth in science, and twenty-first in reading. They
are outranked by several East Asian countries, and to a lesser degree by
most European countries. The Common Core movement has been
criticised by teachers and parents alike, who argue against one-size-fits-all
standards, as well as against the valuing of memorising content over
critical thinking and creative work. Regardless of the Common Core’s
advantages and disadvantages, the debate over the American educational
system has led to a focus on education as the root of increased income
inequality in the United States.
The heat of this debate, which fuels anxiety about children’s futures,
affects both parents and children. Competition—especially in such urban
areas as New York City and Washington DC—for placement in both
private and public schools leads parents to prime their three-year-olds for
interviews in desirable preschools, hoping it will guarantee entrance to the
most competitive private and public charter schools. The days of living in
a “good” neighbourhood to ensure a “good” education are over for middle-
class parents. Imagine how much worse the situation is for non-privileged
parents, who must rely on an increased scarcity of neighbourhood public
schools. We anxiously rush to prepare our young children to stand up to
the competition, or despair at obtaining good quality public education,
which for many is left up to the luck of the draw. Charter schools, the new
“darlings” of New York City public education, are now competing with
neighbourhood (now known as “district”) schools. The brainchild of the
G.W. Bush era’s No Child Left Behind Act, charter schools were
inaugurated as a “public” alternative to schools that were underperforming
according to state standards, based on standardised test scores. The No
Child Left Behind Act incentivises the privatisation of the US public
education system and was concurrent with (and was used to justify) drastic
cuts in the state funding of public schools. These budget cuts attempt to
ensure the increasing failure of the public school system through gradual
replacement with charter schools. The charter school movement is
privately run, exempt from teacher unionisation, and has a goal of ending


 The New Ties that Bind: Helicopter Parenting and Surveillance 273

teachers’ unions within the school system, arguing that without unions,
they have better control over teacher performance.i
Data indicate that, nationwide, 71–75 percent of charter schools do no
better—or substantially worse—than public schools (see 2013 data from
CREDO that show charter schools’ scores compared with matched public
schools’: reading scores for charter schools were 25 percent higher, 56
percent the same, 19 percent worse; math[s] scores were 29 percent
higher, 40 percent the same, 31 percent worse). Despite criticisms of the
charter school movement, many parents and children vie for spots
regarded as desirable.
There are currently one-hundred-and-eighty-three charter schools out
of a total of one-thousand-seven-hundred public schools in New York
City, which, as the city operates a lottery system, are not sufficient to
accommodate all the students who apply, leaving many young children
with their first experience of school failure. Charter schools typically do
not afford special education accommodations, student suspension rates are
vastly greater than the average in the larger school district, and attrition
rates reportedly range from 45 percent to 52 percent at the point when
standard state testing begins (typically in third grade). Regardless of this
data, some parents see charter schools as safer and educationally superior
to neighbourhood schools. The Lottery, a 2010 documentary that follows
four families from Harlem and the Bronx, shows the tears and despair of
those who are not chosen.
In middle- and upper-class families, privilege ensures students are not
subjected to lotteries and (seeming) early failures, as charter schools have
less opportunity invade areas with large school budgets and vocal parents.
At the same time, well-funded public schools are not exempt from
pressures to perform at higher and higher levels. These more privileged
public school students are pressured to take “Advanced Placement” (AP)
courses in all subject levels, subjecting them to the further standardised
testing that AP courses require. They also take both SAT and ACT exams
for college entrance and take increasing numbers of SAT subject tests in
addition to the SAT. Some of my bright and talented adolescent patients
are working continually, socialising rarely, and getting five hours of sleep
each night; while others, equally bright and talented, retreat to their rooms
in rebellion against this pressure, playing video games long into the night.
Both strategies—working endlessly or staging a withdrawal—result in
suffering. The ethic of learning for its own sake has been replaced with
learning to achieve high test-scores, as it is seen (falsely) to guarantee
future financial and professional success. For example, a 2007 FairTest
report’s meta-analysis of the SAT I indicates that the predictive validity of


274 Chapter Fourteen

SAT scores for college success are a weak 4 percent to 12 percent

(FairTest, 2007). Despite this evidence and much more like it, the school
pressure remains.
The increased pressures of education may be seen as a symptom of a
society weakened by the privatisation and corporatisation of the public
sector, weak unionisation, fewer jobs in traditional job sectors, a move to
increased automation, globalisation, a tax system that favours corporations
and the rich, and so on. Regardless, parents (and children) feel this
anxiety. They may deny the reality, but nevertheless operate within it.
They know what they do not acknowledge—that they cannot expect their
children to do better than they did. This anxiety, reflected in the popularity
of Amy Chua’s book The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, leads to
“helicopter parenting”.

The “Tiger Mother”

Having read the reviews and heard the television commentaries, I
approached reading Amy Chua’s The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
with dread. Media publicity variously praised her ambition and drive for
her children and her “superior results” in raising her children, and vilified
her for her dogmatism, her racist and cultural stereotyping in purporting
that Chinese mothers are superior to others, the constant surveillance of
her children, and her alleged sadism. Two incidents that she recounts are
repeatedly cited in the media as evidence of child abuse. The first,
commonly referred to as the incident of the birthday card, consists of her
rejection of her four-year-old’s hastily constructed homemade birthday
card with a smiley face drawn on it. She insists that her daughter Lulu
make her another one, saying, “I don’t want this. I want a better one—one
that you’ve put some thought and effort into. I have a special box, where I
keep all my cards from you and Sophia, and this one can’t go in there”
(103). After telling Lulu that she works hard to give her extravagant
birthdays, she ends by saying: “I deserve better than this. So I reject this”
(103). The other incident commonly referenced is calling her daughter
“garbage”. I expected to be appalled—I was only reading it, after all, to
write this chapter, not out of actual curiosity and certainly not to examine
my own parenting. To my surprise (I should have known better than to
take the media at face value), it was not merely horrifying, but also
refreshingly and frighteningly honest, satirically humorous and self-
critical, raising interesting questions about the effects of culture on the
way we regard our parental roles. While certainly questioning her, I also
questioned my own cultural assumptions.


 The New Ties that Bind: Helicopter Parenting and Surveillance 275

As I read through Chua’s manifesto, it brought to bear comparisons with

my own mothering, and with the struggles of the mothers and children that I
see in my clinical work as a psychologist and psychoanalyst. Chua begins
with a list of the forbidden: never attend a sleepover, never have a
playdate, never watch TV, never play computer games, never get less than
an A+ grade (that means standard A grades are unacceptable), never not
be number one except in drama and gym, never complain about not being
in a school play, never choose your own extracurricular school activities,
never play any instrument except the piano and the violin, never not play
the piano or the violin. The mothers that I see in my practice seemingly
have the opposite anxieties: Where are the sleepovers? Why are there not
more play dates? Why is my child not involved in every extracurricular
activity? Is my child included, admired, embraced by other parents and
children? Grades are important, but self-expression, “finding oneself,” and
at the same time being accepted are equally important. Their worries may
seem to be superficial, focused on popularity, but on a deeper level there
are fears of marginalisation, of not belonging, of a lack of intimate
relationships, of loneliness. Individuality is not a particularly Chinese
cultural concept, whereas it is very much a Western one. We work hard to
get our children to separate from us, to sleep in their own beds, to be their
own individual “unique” selves, and then worry about alienation.
Although I expect that with global urbanisation and global capitalism,
things are changing, there is nevertheless a more communal, collective
cultural tradition in Asia, with an intergenerational interdependency that
fosters less anxiety about loneliness and less need to become friends with
strangers.
Chua insists that her daughters become accomplished musicians, and
starts them early. She does pay a bit of attention to their preferences, not as
an “indulgence”, but rather as a way to ensure that they will excel at the
instruments she chooses for them. She scoffs at the idea that learning
should be fun, and has no compunction about insisting that her children
practice many hours each day. She is compulsive: on vacation in Europe,
the first thing she does is to locate instruments and rooms where her
daughters can practice every day. Even when Western parents are strict,
she says, there is no comparison to Chinese mothers (translation: to her as
a mother). Western parents who insist that their children practise an hour a
day have nothing on her: “For the Chinese mother, the first hour is the
easy part. Its hours two and three that gets tough” (4). She bears no
comparison to the over-scheduling soccer mom; for her, it is schoolwork
that is important. No sports, no drama club, only A+s and musical
proficiency.


276 Chapter Fourteen

Chua gives us glimpses into her own experience growing up in her

family that reveal some of her personal dynamics. Her Chinese (by way of
the Philippines) maternal family came to the US when her mother was
two. Her father arrived as a teenager, to attend MIT. She describes her
accomplished family as always putting pressure on her to be “number
one”. Recounting an incident from eighth grade, she and her family
attended an awards ceremony where she gained a second in history.
Another student received the best all-round student award. Her father’s
response was not to congratulate her, but to insist that she never disgrace
him like that again. And she listened. And worked harder. She transfers
this competitive drive to her children, demanding hours of drilling, of
practise, standing over them until she is satisfied. In her words, “The
house became a war zone” (62). Her relentless pursuit of achievement in
her children is rationalised in terms of a moral imperative to never give up,
to never let your children give up. This, she insists, is the best way to build
self-esteem.
Culturally, shame is purportedly thought to be a motivator in the East,
whereas praise and unconditional love are purveyed as motivators in the
US. Chua maintains that Chinese parents never praise their children in
public; as I understand her, this is seen as an inappropriate public display
of overweening narcissism. Good point, I think. Do we praise our children
for their sakes, or for our own self-images? She contrasts, for example,
calling her daughter “garbage” with Western parents’ inordinate praise of
their children and their constant tiptoeing around what are felt to be
problems, while their children still feel like garbage. Chinese mothers, she
says, do not hesitate to say to their children “Fatty, lose some weight”,
while US mothers, when inwardly concerned about their daughters’
weight, outwardly say “You’re beautiful”. The strategy of praise, she
maintains, does nothing to prevent eating disorders. What interests me in
this narrative is that in her case, negative thoughts and feelings, such as
shame, criticism, and the demand to compete at higher levels, are out in
the open. When we hide our anxieties, worries, and criticisms of our
children behind false praise and reassurance, there is the impossible
expectation that they will attend to our words and not to our hidden or
unconscious anxieties. In my work with children, I have been repeatedly
assured that children do not fall for such deception. They “read” their
parents’ expectations, whether voiced or unvoiced, and look behind the
words for the “truth” of the matter. Just last week a ten-year-old boy in my
office said to his mother, “Stop trying to hide things from me. I want the
truth and nothing but the truth!” I am in no way endorsing the ruthlessness
of constant criticism, but do see the problematic for children when their


 The New Ties that Bind: Helicopter Parenting and Surveillance 277

parents attempt to hide their anxiety by saying one thing and feeling
another.ii
How do Chinese mothers get away with the demanding critical
surveillance that Chua endorses? She makes three points. First, there is no
worry about self-esteem. We assume strength, she says, not fragility, in
our children. Within the shaming, there is the insistence, and the belief,
that they can do it, and they can do it better. Implied is a confidence that
children will not break under pressure, but will be inspired to achieve.
Secondly, she says, we think our children owe their parents everything.
And thirdly, we think that we know what’s best for our children. There is
no hesitation in overriding their desires.
The truth in Chua’s narrative is that she didn’t entirely “get away” with
these strategies. In her family she was balanced by her softer and more
openly compassionate Western Jewish husband, the father of their girls,
who does not think that his children owe him everything—a father who
says that his kids didn’t choose to be born, a father who believes that once
children are brought into the world, they are their parents’ responsibility, a
father who brings his own indulgences and pleasures to his children’s
lives. Although it sounds as if Chua controlled every moment of her
daughters’ existence, their father stands in the background as a constant
presence and a softer influence.
Equally significant is the motivation for Chua in writing this book: the
rebellion of her second daughter Lulu, whose oppositionality and
insistence on her own individuality caused Chua to struggle with herself.
Paradoxically, it was the failure of her Tiger Mother strategy that led her
to write about it, not simply as self-justification, but also in satirical
parody of herself. Recognising that she is a controlling, overbearing
fanatic who never gives up her fanaticism, she doesn’t flinch when her
daughters call her “Lord Voldemort” and “insane”. Not only that, she
recognises her own insanity without being dissuaded from her methods.
Her first public conflict with Lulu was during an entrance interview, which
included a series of tests, for a competitive preschool in New York City.
When the admissions director came out of the examination room, checking
with Chua about whether Lulu could count, Chua took Lulu aside and
hissed at her, “What are you doing? This is not a joke” (35). Lulu insisted
that she only counted in her head, not out loud, and that anyway, she
didn’t want to go to this school. Chua dragged her back inside, confidant
that Lulu would “show her stuff”. Four blocks were put on the table and
Lulu was asked to count them, “Eleven, six, ten, four” she said. Chua was
beside herself but the director added four more blocks and asked Lulu to
count again. This time she said, “Six, four, one, three, zero, twelve, two,


278 Chapter Fourteen

eight” (36). Chua interrupted, telling her daughter to stop it. The
admissions director calmly intervened, understanding that Lulu liked to
find her own path, arriving at the correct answer in an unusual way. The
school accepted her. “Thank God we live in America,” Chua says, “where
no doubt because of the American Revolution rebelliousness is valued. In
China, they’d have sent Lulu to a labour camp” (37).
This was only one of Lulu’s little rebellions, mostly carried out in the
battlefield between her and her mother, but sometimes in public, where
Chua herself felt the most anxiety around her own shame. The Red Square
incident was Chua’s ostensible motivation for writing this book, the
moment where she began to come to terms with the limits of her “tiger
mothering”. On a vacation in Moscow Chua, irritated at Lulu’s continual
refusals and sniping, attempted literally to shove her demands down
Lulu’s throat. At a restaurant in Red Square, she attempted to shame Lulu
into eating caviar, which Lulu was rejecting. Hissing at Lulu to obey her,
calling her a barbarian, accusing her of acting like a rebellious American
teenager who refuses to try things, Lulu has a loud outburst, calling her
mother unloving, a terrible mother who makes her feel bad about herself, a
selfish mother who claims to do everything for her children when it is
really all about her, and ending: “I don’t want to be Chinese. Why can’t
you get that through your head? I hate the violin. I HATE my life. I HATE
you, and I HATE this family! I’m going to take this glass and smash it!”
(205). Amy challenges her to do it, and Lulu does, causing everyone in the
restaurant to view the spectacle of their struggle. In tears, Amy runs out of
the restaurant, and marking the moment of failure of her fanatical control.
After this dramatic outburst in Moscow, Amy does the Western thing,
in her own bungled Chinese way. Acceding to what she believes are
Lulu’s demands, she tells Lulu to give up the violin. Lulu refuses, but this
time her refusal is not simply a rebellion, but her truth. She loves the
violin, but doesn’t want it to be the centerpiece of her life. She continues
to play, but also takes up tennis. Swallowing her contempt for sports, Chua
does her “Chinese thing” (I see that this is not just a Chinese thing, but an
American thing) and throws herself into becoming a tennis expert to help
her daughter excel. Lulu tells her to back off, to stop controlling her, to not
“wreck” tennis for her in the way she wrecked the violin. Chua believes
that she has acceded to her daughter’s choice, but that is not the real
choice. The real choice is to have choices, to have the space to develop
one’s own desires and interests.
Why is this book a firestorm in the media? Why, with excoriating
comments online and in the media, did it remain for three months on The
New York Times’ bestseller list? Some critics have pointed to worries


 The New Ties that Bind: Helicopter Parenting and Surveillance 279

about the rise of China in the global market. Perhaps there is something to
this, particularly as it relates to the publicity given to the book by The Wall
Street Journal, whose published excerpts from the book have received
well over seven thousand comments online, the greatest number in the
history of its website.
In an afterword, Chua reports that paradoxically, the cover of the title
of the Chinese edition of her book was changed to Parenting by a Yale
Law Professor: How to Raise Kids in America and is promoted as a story
about being friends with your children, giving them “more fun and
freedom”. Should this remind us of the cultural relativity of parenting
styles? Perhaps Chua is more American and less “Chinese” than some
think. She may be the golden example of helicopter parenting, but her
significance lies in her emboldened success. The popularity of her book
resides in the way that it speaks to a larger societal anxiety, an anxiety
around the loss of upward mobility and parental fears that their children
will not only fail to do better than they did, but will fail to do as well.

French and American Models of Parenting

Pamela Druckerman’s (2013) memoir of her experience raising her
American children in Paris serves as a popular culture counterpoint to
Chua’s memoir. The culture clash she experiences as an American mother
raising her children in Paris highlights the assumptions that American
middle-class parents make about their children, in contrast to the
assumptions made by middle-class Parisians. Druckerman airs her
confusion and concern about the differences between the behaviour of her
first child and Parisian children, searching for pragmatic answers to her
worries about her mothering. Why, she asks, do French children eat
grown-up food at the dinner table, how is it that they sit through a meal
and engage in sociable conversation, while American children need special
“kid food” and can’t sit still? How is it that French children tend to sleep
through the night by six months, while her child wakes constantly?
In a conversation between the author and Vincent, a French father,
about how his infant son sleeps through the night, Vincent says, “We
believe a lot in ‘le feeling’. We guess that children understand things”
(44). His explanation is that his son understands his mother’s need to get
up early to go to the office, and intuitively responds to this need. In her
angst about why her child doesn’t sleep through the night, and her
maternal isolation—French parents just don’t seem to have the same
problems, and she has no one with whom to share her concerns—she is
given a book to read. She quotes from this book, The Child and His Sleep


280 Chapter Fourteen

by French paediatrician Hélène de Leersynder: “Sleep reveals the child

and the life of the family. To go to bed and fall asleep, to separate himself
from the parents for a few hours, the child must trust his body to keep him
alive even when he’s not in control of it. And he must be serene enough to
approach the strangeness of pensées de la nuit (thoughts that come in the
night)” (44).
Druckerman initially is unable to benefit from the father’s explanation,
or from de Leersynder’s book. She wants practical advice, not
“metatheories” or “cryptic poetry” (45). What she misses is that this
“advice” speaks to her own anxieties about the mother-child relationship.
In some measure her lack of confidence, both in herself and in her child, is
what contributes to her child’s continued demands on her. It is the parent
who contains the child’s anxieties, through a confidence that the child will
survive, thorough a belief that solitude is a place of serenity and growth,
and a belief that the mother has an ordinary right to go to work (without
having to fight for that right). The British psychoanalyst Bion (1967),
expanding on Melanie Klein’s work on the psychic development of
children, sees the parent as a container and metaboliser of the child’s
anxieties. The capacity to metabolise anxiety, which in Bion’s terms is the
ability to transform what he calls “beta elements” (the earliest bodily and
relational feelings that precede and give rise to thought) into “alpha
elements” (a sense of the confidence of survival that detoxifies unbearable
anxiety) is the mother’s role in relation to the child. This confidence that,
as a parent, you can transform anxiety into calm confidence is what the
French parents and paediatricians consulted by Druckerman seem to
possess. This is not at all a denial of the child’s inner life (as it would be if
you behaviorally “trained” your child to sleep through the night, by simply
not responding to his cries), but an acceptance that anxiety can be lived
through and transformed into confidence and enjoyment. The French
notion that “the child decides” reflects a confidence that the child is
capable of self-regulation; parents take note of babies’ “rhythms”. What is
implied is that the baby also takes note of the parents’ “rhythms”. This
implication is evident in Vincent’s explanation about his son Antoine’s
capacity to sleep through the night. As Druckerman relates, “Antoine
underst[ands] that his mother needed to wake up early to go to the office.
Vincent compares this understanding to the way ants communicate
through chemical waves that pass between their antennae” (43). Here we
have a view of the competent baby, who is attuned to its parents’ feelings
and needs as well as its own; in the best of circumstances, neither the
baby’s or the parent’s subjectivity is compromised. There is a kind of
“knowing” or emotional intelligence that is assumed to develop early on in


 The New Ties that Bind: Helicopter Parenting and Surveillance 281

children—as their parents attend to the baby’s rhythms in attempts to

know the baby, so does the baby gradually tune into the parents’ rhythms.
This kind of “knowing”, like ants communicating through chemical
waves, assumes a lively, attuned unconscious life that exists in the baby
from very early on in its life. This assumption is critical to the cultural
experience of the sort of middle-class Parisian mothering that is portrayed
(but not quite acknowledged) by Druckerman; babies are responding to
what the parents need as well as to what the baby itself needs and this
assumption continues throughout family life. A further assumption,
beginning with the ability to sleep through the night and continuing
throughout life, is that privacy and solitude are necessary for a full and
confident life, for the development of creativity, and for the ability to think
one’s own thoughts.
Druckerman continues to muse about the differences she observes
between French and American children. French babies and children wait,
and wait happily. They are neither catered to nor ignored. She sees French
children as subject to discipline and control at the same time that they are
always given choices within that structure. Wondering why French
children seem to “delay gratification” (an American term, not a French
one), she turns to the American psychologist Walter Mischel. She takes
from him the notion that delay of gratification is not a function of stoicism,
but a function of judgment, confidence and the ability to “self-distract”
(Mischel’s term). For me, self-distraction is an inadequate and misleading
term. The core issue is that when children are expected to have inner lives,
imagination, and the capacity for creative play, this expectation fosters in
them the capacity to live inside themselves without needing the constant
distractions of being spoon-fed activities, commodities, and other so-called
“goods”. “Distraction” is an external turning away from, while the more
basic issue is the capacity to use the resources of an imaginal internal life.
Druckerman’s reference to the French injunction to children to “sois sage”
(be sagacious, think, use your good judgement), which stands in contrast
to the American demand to “be good”, points to this issue. It is not simply
behaviour that the French parent is addressing, but the child’s capacity for
inner judgment. “Sois sage” therefore contrasts to the demand for “good”
behavior. This contrast highlights a significant cultural difference in
attitude and expectations; French children are expected to think and use
good judgement while American children are expected to behave. In the
first case, it is inner life that is the focus; in the second case it is external
life that is the focus. But how can we behave if we cannot think for
ourselves?


282 Chapter Fourteen

For me, the interesting issue raised by reading Chua and Druckerman
is that of the variations, on both cultural and personal levels, in the ways
that we construct our views of the child. Do children need our constant
surveillance? Do children have minds of their own?iii Are children tuned
into their parents’ needs and desires, including the parents’ unconscious
anxieties? Are children resilient or fragile? Do we need to cater to them so
they won’t break? In our catering, do we rob them of their own thoughts
and feelings, of their own ability to make choices?
The demands of a neoliberal society move us further away from the
reflective thinking that allows us (parents and children) to live more fully
and deeply, to claim our own thoughts and desires, to live through ourselves
in ways that help us resist being caught up in the commodification machine.
To reflecting on Foucault’s panopticon (1979): it is not only that society is
increasingly surveilled, but that this surveillance has infected us as parents,
persuading us that we ourselves are singularly responsible for controlling
outcomes. Cyberspace serves as one platform for this surveillance, co-
opting our sense of power while at the same time providing the illusion
that we alone have the power to achieve success, further alienating
ourselves from others and ourselves.

The Cyberspace Generation: Surveillance and Escape

Parental surveillance of children finds its reflection in the larger digital
economy. The Internet, which allows for nearly instantaneous global
communication, threatens to virtualise our relationships, our economies,
the ways in which we read and gather information, and our ways of doing
and going about our business. Those who have argued that the Internet
promotes democracy through equal access to a global voice often ignore
the function of the Internet as an ever-present panopticon, surveying and
monitoring our every movement, from what we post on Facebook to
sorting our choices into consumer profiles to tracking our physical
movements. Foucault extends Jeremy Bentham’s term panopticon to the
various forms of surveillance employed in contemporary culture.
Originally employed in Discipline and Punish (1979) as a mechanism of
discipline in the exercise of power, Foucault stresses the visibility of the
subject through invisible mechanisms; we are being watched by unseen
forces, often unaware of the surveillance to which we are being subjected.
With the advent of life in cyberspace we are in the midst of a cultural shift
that puts us on both sides of the panopticon. We watch others in virtual
space, often unaware that we ourselves are being watched. The paradox of
the cyberspace family is that digital life simultaneously provides


 The New Ties that Bind: Helicopter Parenting and Surveillance 283

surveillance and the illusion of escape. Smartphones keep parents and

children in touch with each other as never before. Wherever they are,
parents can reach their children and children can reach their parents.
Further, with the tracking devices that now exist on smartphones, parents
can actually “see” where their children are when they are away from
home. It may be argued that this is not surveillance but an “in-touch-ness”
that keeps us closer together. At the same time, these very smartphones are
employed as distractions and forms of escape. Real time, face-to-face, full-
bodied dialogue has been replaced to some extent by life in cyberspace,
with children and parents “gone missing” into their phones and computers
even (or perhaps especially) when in the company of their families.
The line of escape that smartphones and computers provides increases
the sense of alienation within the family, leading to increased surveillance.
And that line of escape is often illusory, because what may be considered
private is in fact a form of public expression more public than ever before
possible. My experience as a therapist includes numerous instances of
children, especially teenagers, being caught up in smartphone communications
that go viral, or Facebook posts that almost instantly find their way to the
child’s parents. In a previously published article (Lombardi 2012), I
provided an example of a suburban teenaged girl who posted a picture of
herself drinking at a party in the city. Her brother, who was surfing the
Internet while she was out partying, found the photo and immediately
called his mother to inform on his sister. When the girl got home, her
mother confronted her with the photo. In another example, a teenaged girl
texted a semi-naked picture of herself to her boyfriend. By the next day,
her entire high school class was the recipient of her text, which resulted in
her public humiliation. Her parents took possession of her phone. Her
initial rage at this infringement on her freedom soon gave way to gratitude
for being provided with a sphere of safety, in which she had the space to
begin to think and regain her self-possession.
What might be the psychic effects of the digital age on the current
generation? I am concerned as a psychoanalyst by the tendency to live
reflexively and on the surface. Of additional concern are lives consumed
by consumption, the preference for informational “bits” at the expense of a
thoughtful and imaginative inner life, and the sacrificing of the interiority
of private life for increasingly public displays of meaningless,
informational data. Some of that data, while masquerading as personal, is
vaporised into bit units (an Instagram photo of what I ate today, a display
of body parts, a literal record of where I’ve been today and where I’m
going next) and is stripped of thought and holistic meaning. My concern is
that, increasingly, we are living reflexively rather than reflectively, that the


284 Chapter Fourteen

interior space necessary for thoughtfulness, good judgment, and creative

living is being truncated. “Sois sage”, as the French parent might say.
To investigate this phenomenon, I conducted a small informal online
study of Internet use among undergraduate psychology students at my
university. Two areas of investigation—the lack of immersion in reading,
and boredom—are intersecting issues that affect current psychic life.
When asked how many hours a week were spent reading books, 22 percent
of the twenty-six respondents replied, “None.” I imagine that this group
must do some amount of required reading (maybe that is wishful thinking),
but apparently it is all online and never in the form of books. Three
respondents reported spending an hour or less a week reading books; the
largest group (40 percent) spent between two and ten hours a week
reading.
When asked to describe a character in a book who has affected them,
or with whom they identify, 50 percent said “none”, which is not
surprising given many respondents’ avoidance of reading altogether. Only
23 percent of the respondents chose examples from serious literature,
examples that included Jay Gatsby, Willy Loman, and Anne Frank. The
remainder chose characters from teen novels, such as Katniss Everdeen
from The Hunger Games, which had been made into movies or television
series. These results echo the concerns reported by Matt de la Pena (2012),
who remarked on the decrease in the publication of novels of gravity that
encourage self-reflection and the increase in escapist novels that are meant
to affirm us and make us feel good about ourselves. “Sad and challenging
novels are still being released, but fewer of us are investing our time in
them. Franz Kafka believed a book should wake us up with a blow to the
head. But we don’t want our novels to do that anymore. If anything, we
seek novels that will deepen our sleep” (The New York Times, 2012). The
responses of these subjects affirm de la Pena’s concerns and go further, by
suggesting that there is a lack of interest in reading altogether.
Does the lack of investment in reading, and particularly in reading
serious novels, affect our psychic development? Recent studies by Kidd
and Castano (2013) suggest that reading literary fiction promotes the
understanding of the mental state of others, a capacity that enables the
complex social relationships that characterise human societies. To employ
affective and cognitive measures based on “Theory of Mind” (Fonagy and
Target 1996): those who read literary fiction, in contrast to reading non-
fiction, popular fiction, or nothing at all, demonstrate an enhancement of
empathy. A lack of investment in the solitude required to read serious
novels, perpetuated by an infatuation with the sound bites of the cyberlife,
may affect our ability to feel deeply for the other. Neoliberal ideology,


 The New Ties that Bind: Helicopter Parenting and Surveillance 285

promoting individualism at the expense of common concerns for the

greater good, coincides with such distractions as we are encouraged to
value the increasingly manic pursuit of activity and production over the
solitude of thought.
Do our wired-up lives, promoted as increasing our connections to each
other, create the opposite effect by flooding us with bits of information
that remain on the surface and distract us from the deeper connections that
require space for thought? Virtually all my college respondents said that
they use the Internet as a way of relieving boredom or loneliness. Most did
not elaborate, but those who did stressed boredom over loneliness: “Yes,
boredom all the time. If my friends aren’t around or I don’t have any
homework to do I go on Facebook so I’m not bored”. Boredom, often a
cover for other feelings, is easier to admit than loneliness or emptiness.
Another respondent tied boredom to reading: “I don’t like reading books. I
get bored very easily”. My respondents viewed boredom as a state of mind
that demands escape, a state that they escape from most readily through
the distraction of the Internet.

Privacy and the Life of the Imagination

Adam Phillips (1993) views the capacity to be bored as a developmental
achievement. The preoccupation with one’s lack of preoccupation, he
argues, presents the opportunity for self-discovery: a potentially
transformational moment. He says, “Not exactly waiting for someone else,
he is, as it were, waiting for himself” (69). In my reworking of Phillips’
essay on boredom it is the stillness, the momentary absence of external
activity that is actually a precondition for desire. We wait, and it is in the
waiting that the possibility of self-discovery resides. Winnicott’s The
Capacity to Be Alone (1965) sets out the preconditions for the capacity to
be; the baby, secure in the foundational presence of the other, comes not
only to tolerate absence but also to discover presence in absence. It is in
this transitional space—the space between the other’s “mindful presence”
and the presence of oneself—that self-discovery and creativity happens.
But when absence does not lead to reaching through to oneself, when
one’s own mindful presence cannot be discovered, boredom sets in,
signaling a suspending animation of desire. This transitional space,
initiated in early relationships between the baby and the other, continues to
function in us as foundational to the vitality affects essential to creative
living, warding off feelings of deadness and the feeling of being “caught
up in the creativity of someone else, or of a machine” (Winnicott 1971,
65). Melanie Klein ([1946] 1975) would speak of boredom as a manic


286 Chapter Fourteen

defense, a defence against the loss of hope that comes with having been
kept waiting too long. In this case, absence does not make the heart grow
fonder: rather, it begins to erase the possibility of presence waiting just
around the corner. Boredom as a manic defense reflects the intolerability
of waiting for oneself to show up. Attention is directed elsewhere as a
distraction, filling the gap with a form of emptiness that masquerades as a
surface presence. In terms of the Internet, when I cannot be here for
myself, I reach into cyberspace as a substitute for that lack. It is then that
we are truly caught up in the machine.
Helicopter parenting and the escapist lure of the Internet each put us
under surveillance, interfering with and interrupting our capacity to find
ourselves in the solitude and privacy of our own thoughts. Our hooked-in
and hooked-up lives, purporting connectedness, may in fact impede our
capacity for intimacy with ourselves and with others, distracting us from
the possibility of creative living. The lack of solitude in family life, the
manic escape from solitude provided by the screen, foster a withdrawal of
full-bodied imaginal experience that interferes with the possibility of
creative being. Lulu Chua teaches her mother this lesson when she tells
her to back off and stop controlling her, so that she can continue to love
the violin without making it the centerpiece of her life, so that she can play
tennis and keep it as playful enjoyment. French parenting, informed by
psychoanalysis, teaches us that children (even as babies) have the capacity
to regulate themselves within a confident and attentive parental
environment that affords the space for thinking and self-discovery. Sois
sage, children; sois sage, parents.

References
Beller, E. and Hout, M. 2006. “Intergenerational Social Mobility: The
United States in Comparative Perspective.” The Future of Children
16(2): 19–36.
Bion, W. 1967. Second Thoughts: Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis.
New York: Jason Aronson.
—. 1962. Learning from Experience. New York: Jason Aronson.
Chua, A. 2011. The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. New York: Penguin
Press.
De la Pena, M. 2012. “Novels Have Become An Escape” in “Room for
Debate: Is Fiction Changing for Better or Worse?” The New York
Times, June 10. Retrieved from:
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/06/06/is-fiction-
changing-for-better-or-worse/novels-have-become-an-escape


 The New Ties that Bind: Helicopter Parenting and Surveillance 287

Druckerman, P. 2013. Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother

Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting. New York: Penguin
Books.
FairTest. 2007. “SAT I: A Faulty Instrument for Predicting College
Success.” Retrieved from:
http://www.fairtest.org/sat-i-faulty-instrument-predicting-college-
success
Fonagy, P. and Target, M. 1996. “Playing with reality: II. The
Development of Psychic Reality from a Theoretical Perspective.”
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 77(3): 459–479.
Foucault, M. 1979. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage Books.
Kidd, D. and Castano, E. 2013. “Reading Literary Fiction Improves
Theory of Mind.” Science 342(6156): 377–380. Retrieved online. DOI:
10.1126/science.1239918
Klein, M. [1946]1975. “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms” in Envy
and Gratitude, 1–24. London: Hogarth Press.
Lombardi, K. 2013. “Subjection and Subjectivity: The Child and a Mind
of One’s Own” in Psychodynamic Perspectives on Working with
Children, Families, and Schools, ed. O’Loughlin, M., 53–64. Lanham,
Maryland: Jason Aronson.
—. 2012. “Internal Space and (Dis)Connection in Cyberspace: Adolescent
Longings in a Pseudo-Connected Society” in Loneliness and Longing:
Conscious and Unconscious Aspects, eds. Willock, B., Bohm, L., and
Coleman Curtis, R., 59–67. London and New York: Routledge.
Long, J. and Ferrie, J. 2013. “Intergenerational occupational mobility in
Britain and the US since 1850.” American Economic Review 103(4):
1109–1137.
Phillips, A. 1993. On Tickling, Kissing and Being Bored: Psychonanalytic
Essays on the Unexamined Life. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Piketty, T. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
Ravitch, D. 2014. Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatisation
Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools. New York:
Vintage Books.
Sullivan, H. 1996. “Infancy: The Beginning of Interpersonal Living” in
The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry, 74–90. London: Routledge.
The Pew Charitable Trusts (n.d.) “The Ecomomic Mobilities Project.”
Retrieved from:
http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/archived-projects/economic-mobility-
project
Winnicott, D. 1971. Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock.


288 Chapter Fourteen

—. 1965. “The Capacity to Be Alone” in The Maturational Processes and

the Facilitating Environment, 29–36. New York: International
Universities Press.

Notes

i. For a fuller account of the crisis in American education brought about by the
charter school movement, see Ravitch (2014).
ii . In the psychoanalytic literature, see for example, Klein (1975 [1946]) on
parental projective identification, Sullivan (1996 [1953]) on the unconscious
transmission of anxiety, and Bion’s (1962) theory of thinking.
iii. See Lombardi (2013) for a discussion of the child and a mind of one’s own.


 CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“JUST WHAT KIND OF MOTHER ARE YOU?”:

NEOLIBERAL GUILT AND PRIVATISED
MATERNAL RESPONSIBILITY IN RECENT
DOMESTIC CRIME FICTION

RUTH CAIN

The Home as Underworld: Rewriting the Domestic

in the Neoliberal Era
I run round the house like a slave pursued by the master’s whip, trying to
find the toy or game or hair clip that will pacify her. I don’t want to see
what happens. I want to know what’s going to happen in advance… I do
my absolute best every single moment that I’m with her, and sometimes it
works and everything is fine, and other times it’s a disaster... (Hannah
2008, 149).

The fraught lives and guilty consciences of anxious and envious

middle-class mothers attract a significant female readership (Garrett
2013). Crime fiction draws its readers into social and legal realms hidden
from the mainstream, and the underside of the middle-class home is one of
these. The contemporary bourgeois home, despite its symbolic importance
as locus of comfort and identity, is a difficult and anxiety-inducing
location, hiding the passions and vices of its outwardly respectable
inhabitants from public view. In the twenty-first century women are still
perceived as its primary guardians, and thus domestic-based crime novels
focus on feminine sexual, emotional and psychological secrets. While
intimate exposure is hardly restricted to crime fiction’s women characters
and writers, explorations of the sexual and emotional lives of women are a
notable and consistent feature of this undervalued and under-examined
genre.
290 Chapter Fifteen

In this chapter, I focus on a particular type of recent literature that I

will call the “domestic thriller”. It combines certain characteristics of the
crime novel with a revealing focus on the problems and contradictions of
contemporary motherhood and family life. Sophie Hannah, Louise
Doughty, Lucie Whitehouse, Paula Daly and S.J. Watson are popular
authors of this “women’s” genre, often sold in supermarkets. The
emphasis in such novels is mostly on the intricacies of sexual or marital
relationships, but some also fictionalise motherhood and its intimate
terrors, “the tension and fear that could occur in the confined spaces of a
marriage or a home” (WHSmith 2015). I argue that, as family life and
maternal responsibility have become increasingly privatised (promoted as
a realm of private “choices” and failures), and as the possibility of
conceiving collective responsibilities for children and the social future has
receded, the domestic thriller dramatises crucial conflicts of neoliberal
maternal life. I make a case here for greater attention to this vastly popular
but mostly critically ignored genre, trivialised because of its focus on
“lowbrow”, traditionally private feminine preoccupations, such as
“relationships”, family life and motherhood.i Problematic “feminine” issues
examined in the genre include the clash between individual desire and
increased responsibility for children and home, and the incompatibility of
maternal duty with the rewards offered to the carefree (and uncaring)
consumer-citizen of the new “flexible” market economy. In a different but
connected way, the contemporary domestic crime novel performs an
established function common to “lowbrow” genres like crime and horror—
insistently revealing hypocrisies, inequalities and unacknowledged abuses to
a supposedly functional society and legal system (Clover 1993, Janisse
2012).
The home remains the symbolic repository of masculine as well as
feminine private life, even in an age where the erstwhile “domestic angel”
probably works for her own satisfaction (or to cover the costs and debts of
the late-neoliberal household). In Victorian domestic crime fiction, the
concept of the “criminal angel”, her saintly demeanour concealing
unspeakable things, dramatised the uneasy “relations between respectability,
privacy and surveillance” in the bourgeois household and the “anomalous
relationship of the home to the world of public responsibility” (Trodd
1989, 3–4). Gothic and later “sensation” novels (such as Wilkie Collins’
The Woman in White, 1860; Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne, 1861 and
Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, 1862) demonstrated an
industrialising, urbanising society’s “trend to domestication of crime,
secrets and illicit sexuality” (Hughes 2002). They concern domestic
intrigue, deception and oppression, in which female characters are often
 “Just What Kind of Mother Are You?” 291

implicated and class and gender transgressions are frequent (Saxey 2010,
Hughes 2002). The sensation novel deals in mystery and uncertainty, but
the source of the fear and threat is human, usually within the “safe” home
itself. Its themes remain relevant to the complexes of familial and personal
responsibility associated with the vast and unforgiving agglomeration of
economic and social forces and influences that we know, in short, as
neoliberalism. While neoliberalism is associated with various processes of
privatisation, marketisation, the expansion of corporate power, and the
diversion of state resources into the service of international finance
(Harvey 2007), it also represents complex demands and influences on the
individual (Miller and Rose 2008, Rose 1999, Brown and Baker 2013).
There is “no politics without fantasy” (de Lauretis 1999, 313) and
popular literature ranks alongside film and television as an undervalued
source and reflection of political and cultural fantasies (303). Christopher
Breu (2005), writing about masculinity in “hard-boiled” crime fiction,
notes the particular importance of popular fiction and culture to
constructions of gender and sexuality. Writers on the Gothic (traditional
and modern) and horror fiction and film note how such popular forms can
illuminate and alter perceptions of gender difference and inequality
(Wallace and Smith 2009, Becker 1996). Such literature may reproduce
the clichés of dominant gender norms (Garrett 2013), but it can also
become a vehicle for otherwise forbidden fantasies of “gendered
transgression” as the sensation novel was for a Victorian society troubled
by intimations of criminality and deviance (Breu 2005, 27; Clover 1993).
And what greater transgression than the crimes and/or guilty secrets of the
erstwhile “angel in the house”?

The Privatised Mother: New Narratives of Guilt

The good, “responsible”, “flexible” neoliberal citizen withdraws from
dependence on the state and is submissive to new technocracies of
surveillance (Miller and Rose 2008, Rose 1999). Commentators have also
noted the “happiness imperative” of neoliberalism: the demand for
flexibility and entrepreneurialism commands cheerful obedience to the
demands of the labour market (Ehrenreich 2010). The expression of
unhappiness is regularly interpreted as evidence of personal failure. Thus
the neoliberal citizen is encouraged to see herself as a freely choosing
individual dealing independently with the consequences of life decisions
such as becoming a mother (see e.g. Quiney 2007, Allen and Osgood
2009). Writers who complain directly about being a mother (particularly a
relatively affluent Western one) are frequently personally attacked as self-
292 Chapter Fifteen

obsessed “whiners” (Quiney 2007). The domestic thriller thus expresses an

increasingly pathologised maternal ambivalence, enhanced by intensive
neoliberal parenting and privatised, isolated motherhood (Cain,
forthcoming). The crime thriller’s interest in moral ambiguity and the
social determinants of guilt allow imaginative exploration of the neoliberal
mother as “guilty”, both in her own and others’ eyes. As I will argue,
however, such works also subtly problematize the social work of mother
blaming, just as the sensation novel worked to undermine the guilt of its
anti-heroines (Braddon 1862, Wood 1861).
The domestic thriller reflects the personal and psychological impact of
neoliberalism on mothers. Women have disproportionately suffered (in
terms of employment, income and personal opportunity) from neoliberal
fragmentation and privatisation of the Western state’s educational,
administrative and medical institutions, in which they (and ethnic minority
citizens of both sexes) are overrepresented as employees and first-instance
users (Karamessini and Rubery 2013, Jensen 2012). Nonetheless, women
are seen by some feminist commentators as neoliberalism’s “ideal
subjects” (Gill 2008a and 2008b, McRobbie 2009) in the sense that the
disciplinary apparatus of neoliberal law, medicine and media focuses
heavily on feminine and maternal responsibilities. These include
requirements to consume appropriately by buying the right products and
services and dressing correctly, or to conserve public funds by having
“well-planned” children, to take care of their own and their families’
physical health, and to bring up (the right kind of) productive, non-
disruptive children (Cain, forthcoming). New neoliberal maternal
responsibilities are directly legally imposed in the context of a couple’s
separation (Wallbank 2007, Cain 2011). As already noted, women also
face gendered requirements to appear contented with their choices,
presenting their lives as contextless (Allen and Osgood 2009).ii With the
gradual withdrawal of state guarantees of decent education, health and
social care in Western countries such as the UK, Australia and Canada, an
often dubious “market logic” has been applied to state institutions, many
of which have been sold off to private companies at discounted rates since
the 1980s (Rhodes 1994). As a result, accountability for “personal
failures” such as poverty, ill health and unhappiness, particularly in the
case of children, has shifted, to land—unforgivingly—upon the parent.
Despite the apparent gender-neutrality of neoliberal regulatory and
disciplinary messages, this is a thoroughly gendered issue (Wallbank
2007, Gillies 2005, Cain 2011). Where inadequate nurture and discipline
or “wrong choices” are detected, the parent found wanting is usually the
mother, still considered to be primarily responsible for navigating the new
 “Just What Kind of Mother Are You?” 293

landscape of educational and other childrearing “choices” and the

problem-solver of family difficulties (Power 2010, Wilkins 2014, Cain
2013).

Middle-Class Femininity and the Complexities

of Hegemonic Mothering
The intensified demands of neoliberal-mothering culture have thus brought
with them expanded opportunities for maternal “failure” and mother
blaming. This tends to land most heavily on poor, working-class and
socially marginal mothers, who are the objects of the most intense
surveillance, sanctioning and punishment (Holt 2008, Gillies 2005).
Middle-class mothers experience their own (more rarefied and less directly
punitive, but nonetheless relentless) forms of (self-)surveillance (Rose
1999). Simultaneously, motherhood for many women represents the end of
participation in the debt-fuelled post-1980s consumption boom. Many
women, charged with being both “main carer” and earner/consumer,
succumb to pressures to retreat into a secondary-earner role in underpaid
part-time work, which leaves them economically disadvantaged. Exhaustion,
financial and time poverty have thus become dominant themes in the
popular and journalistic literature on contemporary motherhood. Sophie
Hannah, in a novel (analysed in detail, below) about maternal anger,
disappointment, and the desire to escape, describes the situation concisely:
“[…] I start each day with a list of between thirty and forty things I need to
do. As I blast my way through the hours between six in the morning and
ten at night, the list goes round and round in my head, each item beginning
with a verb that exhausts me: ring, invoice, fax, order, book, arrange, buy,
make, prepare, send… ” (Hannah 2008, 23).
Previously I noted that the cultural impact of postnatal disappointment
and exhaustion, combined with the post-1960s impulse toward personal
openness, encouraged valorisation of the experiences of previously
marginalised and silenced groups (see Quiney 2007). These groups came
to include relatively affluent mothers expressing dismay and shock at the
profound split between their pre- and post-childbirth lives, following years
of a relatively “ungendered” existence, usually spent living independently
and in skilled, paid work. iii In the 1990s in particular, certain women
began writing about their shock at the restriction and conformity of
contemporary motherhood (Cusk 2001, Wolf 2001, Warner 2005). The
maternal “misery memoir”, exemplified by Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work
(2001), occupied a curious section of the middle-to-highbrow market
dealing with low-status “women’s issues” (generally considered to be
294 Chapter Fifteen

beneath “serious” writers). Despite the furious backlash against “misery

lit” and “victim culture” (see e.g. Furedi 2007), the impulse to personal
confession and the opening up of traumatised, wounded and depressed
souls in public culture continues apace (Luckhurst 2003). This creates an
intriguing problem for constructions of the successful neoliberal subject.
The good neoliberal citizen is expected to accept restrictions imposed on
her by the expansion of market logic, the retreat of the state and the
imposition of near-total private responsibility and yet, the culture of
emotional exposure simultaneously presents the traumatised and
victimised subject as an object for consumption. In short, “misery lit”
sells. The cultural impulse to confess and testify to misery also diffuses
pressure to manifest the good neoliberal citizen’s bland display of
satisfaction with the status quo.iv

Postfeminist Victimology and the New Anti-Heroines

In Victorian domestic crime and sensation fiction the dependent, yet
sacred, mistress of the house became the alluring and dangerous “criminal
angel” (Trodd 1989). This figure is epitomised in that murderous mirage
of domesticity, Lady Audley (Braddon 1862). The sexual and moral
virtues prized by the Victorian public are harder to define in contemporary
neoliberalism particularly since the deregulation (both financial and
sexual/personal) of the 1960s onwards, in which “freedom to choose” (e.g.
to profit and consume) became perhaps the sovereign social and political
value. Despite the pervasive language of freedom, neoliberalism remains
crucially coercive: the citizen remains subject to legal, cultural and
personal discipline and expectation (Brown and Baker 2013), alongside
the imperative to triumph economically at almost any cost. When “greed is
good” and personal satisfaction and profit are paramount, other moral
standards become flexible. Accordingly, feminine morality, always subject
to higher expectations than the masculine equivalent, has become a focus
of anxiety in neoliberal-era literature. Feminine moral ambiguity in crime
literature has developed alongside the rise of neoliberal individualism and
the exposure of personal trauma and victimisation in memoir and fiction.
Note for example the huge popularity of the criminal, morally
ambivalent/amoral, grimly accomplished anti-heroine in Gone Girl (Flynn
2013) and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Larsson 2008) and the
ambivalent mother of malevolent offspring in We Need to Talk About
Kevin (Shriver 2010; also see Garrett 2014). Gone Girl viciously satirises
the conventions of mainstream crime and horror, in which the woman is
the traditional victim (Amy, the scheming, picture-perfect anti-heroine,
 “Just What Kind of Mother Are You?” 295

strongly recalls Lady Audley)v, as do several of Sophie Hannah’s characters.

Such work presents a view of “feminine” behaviour that many feminists
might find difficult to stomach. The problematization of neoliberalism’s
contradictory demands, hypocritical moralising and empty values
implicates women perhaps even more than men in duplicity, manipulation
and even violence, particularly when this involves mimicry of
stereotypical feminine behaviours such as emotional appeal and the victim
pose.
Mothers in the domestic thriller genre range from the flawed but
ultimately virtuous, to the downright abusive, malignant and destructive.
In the case of the novels by Daly (2013) and Hannah (2006, 2008, 2010)
examined below, maternal guilt and the potential for maternal abuse or
madness lie at the heart of a plot in which the “truth” is often itself
ambivalent, even after the detective has supposedly revealed it. Comparisons
with Gothic fiction (made explicitly below in relation to Hannah) are
inescapable, since the domestic thriller genre deals with the same
dilemmas of feminine subjectivity and embodiment in societies that
oppress and deny female expression and sexuality. The domestic thriller
replaces the Gothic castle with the sinister gleam of comfortable homes
concealing hidden horrors and the labyrinth with a mass of evidential and
psychological complexity. They also address—albeit in symbolic,
metaphoric terms only—the forces currently arrayed against female
understanding of the self as a social and gendered being. Later Gothic and
Victorian writing, including the sensation novel, problematizes the
misogynistic stereotype of feminine moral turpitude and weakness by
dramatising the peril and oppression its virtuous heroines have to face.
While the Gothic and sensation novel helped to reveal the abuse of women
and girls in “respectable” homes, it also sometimes obscured the capacity
of women themselves to commit acts of violence, selfishness and cruelty
(Kohlke 2012).
Simultaneous exposure of feminine suffering/victimisation and feminine
wrongdoing is a particular feature of contemporary domestic thrillers. In
Hannah’s The Point of Rescue (2008) and A Room Swept White (2010),
women are victimised, murdered and assaulted, but also directly
implicated in murder and victimisation; feminine capacity for violence is
implicit. The “heroine” of the novel experiences a horrendous form of
reverse wish fulfilment, in which her desire to temporarily escape the
insanity of life as a working mother leads to a truly horrible “punishment”.
The expression of maternal dissatisfaction is portrayed as both inevitable
and highly dangerous for the mother. Hannah’s work depicts women lost
among treacherous and elusive characters, unstable identities, and words
296 Chapter Fifteen

that offer only twisted and mysterious significations: a neoliberal Gothic

labyrinth. For example, the satnav in Lasting Damage (2011) shows an
incorrect address as “Home”. The misidentified “Home” exemplifies
Hannah’s use of signifiers of domesticity which turn rogue, miss their
referent: in an echo of Lacanian conceptions of the exclusion of “the
woman” (Lacan 1982) from signification, language is crucially
disrupted—home is not what or where it seems to be. Hannah’s
protagonists negotiate a domestic version of the Lacanian Real: repressed
and unrepresentable terrors, always proximate, but buried too deep for
understanding until the process of detection rips the traumatic truth to
light. Her fiction dramatises the obscure machinations of a Symbolic order
that excludes women from the rational meaning of language, but also
brings them into dangerous proximity with the Real. The Gothic Real
granted women a painful affinity with trauma, secrets, and the unpalatable
truths that lie behind misleading words; the adventures of the Gothic
heroine provide access to a deeper form of truth, one to which she,
embodying the abjected and rejected feminine, has privileged access
(Ballaster 1996). The message of Gothic and later crime and horror fiction
is often that those who deem themselves to be securely located in a
meaningful Symbolic order are those furthest from the real (“Real”) truth,
which is generally better understood by the marginal and unprivileged:
non-white people, poor people, children and women (Clover 1993). Crime
and horror have always been peculiarly effective at laying bare the
constructedness of social forms and the unreliability of accepted truths.
When it comes to neoliberal mothering, they have developed a sinister
resonance all their own.

Anti-Feminist Backlash and Neoliberal Maternal

Ambivalence: Paula Daly’s Just What Kind
of Mother Are You?
The domestic thriller deals with women’s own struggles with the
nightmare-figure of the Bad Mother, and is particularly good at articulating
the supposedly unspeakable feelings of maternal ambivalence—the
frequently denied mixture of intense love and hatred for the child that
motherhood may provoke. Roszika Parker has commented (2005) that the
denial of split maternal feelings and of the possibility of the coexistence of
love and hate (or good and bad) in the sanctified Western mother is a
social and political as well as a personal issue; the denial is collective.
Mother must be all good or all bad. UK family justice provides frequent
examples of this pervasive splitting process. In court cases regarding
 “Just What Kind of Mother Are You?” 297

custody and residence of children after separation, vi value-judgements

based on current definitions of gender norms are never far away. Thus the
law pronounces that (biological) mothers are still “special” vii but also
“implacably hostile”, “sinister”, “overindulgent”, viii or worse (Wallbank
2007, Cain 2011). The neoliberal bad mother is both overcontrolling and
overindulgent (Cain 2011, 2013, forthcoming). This is a constellation of
maternal misdeeds that the domestic thriller confronts head-on: from a
psychopathically controlling grandmother, determined to use any means to
subvert a residence order that has deprived her of access to her grandchild
(Hannah 2006), to career women torn apart by conflictual desires for
maternal perfection and personal freedom (Hannah 2008, Daly 2013), it is
full of ineffective, anxious or downright toxic maternal figures.
In the era of total private responsibility, the neoliberal bad mother
blends the traditional image of the weak/monstrous female with newer
caricatures of the emasculating and entitled “feminist”, enemy of men and
families, freshly demonised following recent developments in post-1980s
backlash politics. The phenomenon of the “fathers’ rights” movement
encodes a complex set of social movements (Collier 2009, Collier and
Sheldon 2006). It is, as Richard Collier notes, a multifaceted product of
gradual social change and altered familial roles but at its fringes it includes
groups whose configurations of family justice and maternal “privilege”
take on aggressive and misogynistic overtones. Activists in “men’s rights”
groups (such as A Voice for Men and Fathers4Justice) tend to assume (and
condemn) the existence of a “feminised” family justice system that favours
mothers (Dragiewicz 2011). In Britain, the new Section 1 (2A) of The
Children Act 1989 has attempted to tackle what has been perceived by
many as the “unfair” dominance of women in family litigation, by
requiring the court to presume in every private law case brought before it
that a child’s welfare requires the involvement of both parents. This
striking legal displacement of women from what was assumed to be an
apparently unquestioned priority in childrearing practice points to an acute
cultural ambivalence about the role of women in a society openly geared
toward individual gain, consumption and the accumulation of personal
assets.
I have already suggested that crime fiction is an excellent vehicle for
the unravelling of this cultural ambivalence about neoliberal mothering.
There is a particular (and neglected) openness in the crime genre to the
stories and subjectivities of unusual and transgressive women. Paula
Daly’s bestselling 2013 novel Just What Kind of Mother Are You? directly
confronts many of the unfair dilemmas of “responsible” neoliberal
motherhood, as she dramatises the dilemma of an overburdened and
298 Chapter Fifteen

exhausted woman who forgets to pick up her thirteen-year-old daughter’s

friend for a sleepover. The friend disappears, and she is blamed for her
“incompetence” in forgetting the play date. Daly maps the undercurrents
through which personal dislike and blame, including sexual and other
jealousies, can become encoded as (implicitly unfair) judgements about
mothering. Anxiety about maternal imperfection and the concentration of
maternal responsibilities for the private lives of children creates a toxic
situation whereby a mother can be indicted for the slightest perceived
flaw. Daly’s novel is full of semi-political commentary on the unfairness
of social standards for women and mothers (as demonstrated by the
opening quote of this chapter, where she indicts herself for “moaning”)
and particularly the demand that intense effort and organisation manifest
as effortless, feminine selflessness—the affluent transcendence of the
neoliberal angel in the house.
Daly uses an unsubtle, but typical, method of valorising her anti-
/heroine’s moral worth and point of view, setting her against cold and
judgemental local mothers who condemn her for being careless and
chaotic, and link her general failings as a “perfect” mother to the
abduction of her daughter’s friend. The class dimension of “perfect”
motherhood is also frequently emphasised: the heroine works in an animal
shelter and is patronised by richer stay-at-home mothers who inhabit
houses full of such material indicators of class as Farrow and Ball
paintwork and fluffy towels. The heroine exacts an early revenge over one
of them by having sex with her husband in their sumptuous bathroom at a
drunken dinner party; while this clearly validates her superior
attractiveness, she also indicts herself of immorality and being a bad
wife—as well as (later) a bad mother. The particularly vicious hatred of
the local “alpha mother” is later revealed to lie in her sexual jealousy of
the heroine.
Thus, the heroine’s eventual moral justification and the reader’s
reassurance of her superior attractiveness, kindness and loving nature are a
clear form of authorial revenge against more conformist women, who
would claim for themselves the ground of maternal and feminine
perfection by denigrating the flawed (yet alluring and genuine) heroine.
Wish fulfilment is also granted to readers who may compare themselves
negatively with richer and more beautiful mothers. The “rich and
beautiful”, ostensibly leisured and devoted mother as object of envy
evokes not only any real life “alpha” mothers the unfortunate reader has
encountered, but also the media trope of the celebrity mother (feted
weekly in magazines such as OK and Hello!) who poses in her
professionally decorated home, talking about how motherhood has
 “Just What Kind of Mother Are You?” 299

changed her life and how she couldn’t love her well-dressed offspring
more. This trope of media-perfect motherhood is to the fore in Daly’s
description of two of the affluent mothers: “I found Kate and Alexa by the
Aga, tasting and stirring, both wearing similar outfits of pale linen, both
wearing minimal makeup, both with their hair pinned up loosely, as if they
were in a Nivea or a Neutrogena commercial” (2013, 65). These women’s
slick, marketable image quickly turns out to be a fake, as they end the
night in a dreadful row.
In Just What Kind of Mother Are You? a flawed, imperfect mother is a
heroine precisely because she fails and/or refuses to live the neoliberal lie
of “perfect” family life. The cultural contradictions of womanhood
debated in domestic thrillers like Daly’s are precipitated by truly terrifying
dramas and losses such as violence, murder or kidnapping—demonstrating,
perhaps, that it is only in extremity that hegemonic neoliberal values can
be questioned. The “real” domestic (anti-)heroine achieves her own kind
of victory, but her brand of moral superiority is one foreign to the
conservative-neoliberal paradigm of private competence, control and
competition. Since the flawed-but-genuine mother triumphs over the
uptight “alpha”, novels like Daly’s risk substituting another model of
competitive superiority for that of the neoliberal norm. The chaotic,
imperfect mother is sexier, more genuinely wanted and loved: she
triumphs adorably, in the terminology of popular fictional and media
stereotypes of middle-class mothering, as both a “yummy” and a
“slummy” mummy (Williams, 2006; Gibson, 2008b; see also Garrett
2013). Daly’s novel, despite its subversive murmurings about maternal
overwork and excessive privatised responsibility, ends up reproducing
dominant competitive and hierarchical social rankings for women.

Sophie Hannah: Domestic Neoliberal Gothic

and the Guilty/Ambivalent Maternal
The crime novels of Sophie Hannah, perhaps the best-known and
bestselling author of domestic thrillers in the UK, take a more subtle and
nuanced approach to feminine neoliberal dilemmas. Hannah probably
qualifies for “middlebrow” status, being a published poet. Nonetheless, her
prolific crime novel output is marketed in “lowbrow” outlets such as
supermarkets and is often advertised in terms directly designed to appeal
to a distinctly maternal market. Her first novel, Little Face (2006), bore
the cover tagline: “it’s every mother’s nightmare”. It retraced a traditional
horror theme, the switching of a newborn baby and implicated maternal
possessiveness, a child custody dispute, and grandparents’ rights in the
300 Chapter Fifteen

mystery. Her later novels deploy a range of harassed, mentally unstable,

failed and angry maternal characters, from a working mother whose
diaries reveal a dark well of maternal ambivalence and rage (The Point of
Rescue, 2008) to a disturbing fictional version of the Munchausen’s
syndrome by proxy murder prosecutions which occurred in the 1990s in
Britain and Australia (A Room Swept White, 2010).ix For Hannah as well
as Daly, “bad” mothers are modern-day Lady Audleys: self-sacrificing,
awesomely practical “earth mother” types who turn out to be deceptive
murderesses (2012, 2006). Given the subject matter of A Room Swept
White and the unflinching portrayal of maternal rage in The Point of
Rescue, Hannah is well acquainted with the concept and possibly the
literature of maternal ambivalence, and is concerned to expose the
mythology of perfected neoliberal motherhood throughout her work. The
Point of Rescue starts with a mother and child, found dead together in a
suburban home. Neither the murder scene, nor the family home in which
the murder occurs, is what they seem to be at first (or even second) glance.
A gothically labyrinthine plot (which I am keen not to spoil for future
readers) makes secure identification and comprehension of the nature of
the crime and its victims impossible, until a shocking final “reveal”.
Throughout the book, the Gothic motif of extreme and usually hidden
feminine emotions, erupting in the echoing isolation of the home, is
central. What appear to be the dead mother’s diary entries are found on a
computer. The entries present perhaps the most brutal outpouring of
maternal resentment in current fiction:

I couldn’t comfort Lucy anymore because I couldn’t think of her as a

scared child—the screams were too much like a weapon […] She could
ruin my evening, and she knew it. She can ruin my whole life if she wants
to, whereas I can’t ruin hers […] I don’t want her to be unhappy. I don’t
want her to have a horrible mother, or to be abandoned, or to be beaten, so
I’m trapped: she can make me suffer as much as she wants and I can’t
retaliate in kind […] Once she has made me angry, I can only be kind like
this when she’s reached the point of total despair and all the fight has gone
out of her. Anything less and it’s hard for me to see her as deserving of
sympathy, this well-fed, beloved child who has everything a girl of her age
could want—a secure home, an expensive education, nice clothes, every
sort of toy, book and DVD, friends, foreign holidays—and who is still, in
spite of it all, complaining and crying ( Hannah 2008, 39–40).

This incantation of rage adds several late-neoliberal twists to the theory

of maternal ambivalence offered by Parker (2005): overwork outside the
home, focus on material affluence, the sense of victimhood despite
outward success, and the longing for a past life of free time and choice.
 “Just What Kind of Mother Are You?” 301

There is considerable black humour, too, in what appears to be a clear

reference to recent cultural critiques of motherhood: “[…] because of an
article I’d read on the train yesterday, I said, “There’s a ‘conspiracy of
silence’ about what motherhood is really like. No one tells you the truth”.
‘Conspiracy of silence!’ Mum wailed. ‘All you ever do is tell me how
awful your life’s been since you had Lucy. I wish there was a conspiracy
of silence! I’d be a lot happier’” (Hannah 2008, 253).
The deployment of the traditional motif of the pragmatic and all-seeing
detective, forging the way through the chaos of the Real to interpret
symbols meaningfully, occurs throughout Hannah’s novels. The detective,
however, takes the dual form of a highly unusual couple, DSS Sam
Waterhouse and Charlotte (Charlie) Zailer. Hannah thus uses a
misleadingly “standard” generic style, that of the detective-led crime series
(“Culver Valley Crime”), true to the unnoticed non-conformity of so much
fiction targeted at “non-mainstream” audiences. A few more examples will
demonstrate this. Firstly, the startling (and characteristically late and
unforeseen) revelation, through a complex web of translation and
misidentification, that the shocking maternal diaries thought to belong to
Geraldine Bretherick are in fact the work of another woman, translated by
Geraldine. Charlie notes that there is a liveliness and passion to the
English prose which perhaps she would not have expected: “Perhaps
Geraldine was […] sick of being the perfect wife and mother… she used
the opportunity of translating the diary to develop a bit of an alter ego.
She’d been given licence to speak in the voice of a bad girl, a convenient
vehicle for expressing thoughts that would be utterly forbidden if she’d
said them as herself… ” (455).
It is worth bearing in mind that the diaries express in no uncertain
terms the desire to harm and abuse the child:

I have never hit her. Not because I disapprove of hitting children […] but
because sometimes I want to hit Lucy so much and I know I would have to
stop almost as soon as I started, so what would be the point? […] In an
ideal world, parents would be able to give their children a good, satisfying
kicking—a really thorough, cathartic battering—then snap their fingers and
have the effects of their violence disappear. Also, it would be good if
children, while being beaten, didn’t feel pain; then there would be no need
for guilt (335).

Hannah here perhaps allows the reader to identify with and even
indulge in the forbidden emotions of maternal hatred and rage. As the plot
twists, the diary text itself is not what it appears to be, so that (without
giving too much of the plot away) the text emerges from a foreign
302 Chapter Fifteen

language and a misidentified author. It is as if this “toxic” text, so raw and

potentially damaging, must be hidden and distanced through translation
and misidentification. Anne Snitow comments on the fear and guilt
aroused by the expression of maternal anger: “if we’re angry, in backlash
times like these it's easy for feminism’s opponents to insist that anger at
oppression is really anger at children or at mothers […] making women
feel that being angry at the present state of mothering will poison the well
of life” (1992, 42).
In The Point of Rescue, the true author of the diaries is revealed to have
been murdered. The sentiments of maternal ambivalence are, it seems,
truly too dangerous for words. Diaries, like domestic fiction, are “a
particularly gendered narrative site” (Cunliffe 2011, 135) and the use of an
intimate address from a hidden, “real” self is crucial in its engagement of
our ambivalent sympathy with the narrator. Hannah, who is clearly
acquainted with the recent legal history of mothers’ accused of murdering
their babies, may have had a further specific comparison to make here.
Whether deliberate or not, parallels with the diaries of Kathleen Follbigg,
used to convict her of the murder of her daughter, are striking.
As Cunliffe’s 2011 analysis of the case makes clear, Folbigg’s diaries
are very far from the hate- and rage-filled content of The Point of Rescue.
Cunliffe notes that they mostly read to her “like the meditations of a
woman who has absorbed Western society’s standard messages about
femininity and motherhood” (2011, 136), as Folbigg worries about her
weight, her husband’s “roving eye” and his refusal to do his share of
childcare and housework.x Nonetheless, her occasional proclamations of
dissatisfaction and frustration with her children, and her wishes to be able
to go to the gym more often, were deployed as prosecution evidence
against her. The conviction mainly rested on some unsettling diary entries,
suggesting (but never confirming) direct responsibility on Folbigg’s part
for the deaths of the children. These included such disturbing statements
as: “[w]ith Sarah all I wanted was her to shut up. And one day she did […]
I know I was short tempered and cruel sometimes to her & she left. With a
bit of help”; and “[Laura is] a fairly good natured baby—thank goodness,
it has saved her from the fate of her siblings. I think she was warned”
(140). In her trial testimony, Folbigg explained these diary entries in terms
of an overwhelming sense that as the childrens’ mother she must be
ultimately responsible for their deaths, since in the absence of any other
explanation, she could not help but feel that there must have been
something she had failed to do to save them (142). Thus, like Geraldine’s
diary in The Point of Rescue, Folbigg’s testimony echoes neoliberal
demands on mothers to see themselves as the literal be-all-and-end-all of
 “Just What Kind of Mother Are You?” 303

the child’s life. If maternal private responsibility is total, then unexplained

child deaths can always be “explained” by reference to maternal flaws, as
they were in the Sally Clark and Angela Cannings cases (Hannah 2010,
Raitt and Zeedyk 2000).
In A Room Swept White, as in the Folbigg case, no clear conclusion as
to maternal guilt or innocence can be reached. Nonetheless, it is clear from
Raitt and Zeedyk and Cunliffe’s probing analyses of the Clark, Cannings
and Follbigg cases that all admissions of maternal ambivalence, or
anything indicating any sense of responsibility or guilt, can and will be
formed into legal “evidence” against the mother. It is as if to be legally
unimpeachable, mothers must never admit to any moments of
dissatisfaction, guilt or unhappiness. They must be “all good”. In The
Point of Rescue, it is initially and incorrectly assumed that Geraldine has
deliberately killed her daughter, and the diaries initially seem to confirm
this. The truth, when unraveled, is rather different.

The New “Criminal Angel” and the Horrors

of the Neoliberal Real
The replication of the confused and always-partial testimony of
maternal ambivalence in that of a barely accessible Symbolic, expressed in
mysterious snatches of allusive and confusing language, is apparent in
Hannah’s later novel Kind of Cruel (2012). The narrator finds herself
inexplicably under arrest after, under hypnosis, she utters the apparently
meaningless words “kind, cruel, kind of cruel”. The phrase, whose exact
significance remains mysterious throughout most of the novel, nonetheless
immediately and directly expresses the ambivalent feelings and actions of
mothers in most of Hannah’s work, and thus has a signification deeper and
more disturbing than its surface meaning. The secret of ambivalent
feelings for the beloved, the cruelty that will always coexist with loving
kindness in spite of all strivings for maternal perfection, emerges from the
Real to disrupt the Symbolic—like the ghostly intrusions of the Gothic. In
a more nuanced way than Daly, Hannah shows her readers that the
mythology of feminine perfection is fake. This point is hardly a new one.
However, the Real here is one of updated, recognisably neoliberal
anxieties and unpalatable truths: that maternal standards are unrealistic,
exhausting, unrewarding, a front designed only to convince others that
women are “succeeding”; and that in a society geared to producers and
consumers, those without caring responsibilities are probably having a lot
more fun, and fewer regrets, than many parents would wish to
contemplate. In Kind of Cruel, the criminal angel literally hides in plain
304 Chapter Fifteen

sight, in a family home which serves as a metaphor for the façade of

sacrificial perfection that the murderous mother upholds. Geraldine in The
Point of Rescue can only confide in her diary, as her own mother will not
listen:

I’ve often thought I ought to volunteer (not that I’ve got the time) to
counsel infertile women. […] Give me an hour or two and I could persuade
them how lucky they are. Has anyone ever told them, for example, that for
a mother to be with her child or children in the company of childfree
women is the worst kind of torture? It’s like being at the best party in the
world, but being forced to stand on a chair in the middle of the room with a
noose round your neck and your hands tied behind your back. Around you
everyone is sipping champagne and having a wild old time. You can see
their fun, smell it, taste it, and you can even try to have a bit of fun yourself
as long as you make sure not to lose your balance. As long as no one
knocks your chair (Hannah 2008, 208).

I have tried here to arouse some critical interest in this undervalued

work, which I believe to be of importance to students of femininity in
neoliberal times and the ways in which literary traditions such as those of
the Gothic and the traditional detective-led investigative novel are being
reinterpreted in work directly aimed at a maternal market. Critics of
contemporary mothering culture have already had to account for the
growing willingness of women to publicly express ambivalence about
motherhood and children, and to deal with two contradictory neoliberal
impulses: the push to “marketise” the self through intimate “therapeutic”
(and dramatic) revelations, versus the imperative to maintain the façade of
success and happiness (Quiney 2007, Cain, forthcoming). Maternal
expressions of ambivalence and guilt in both the fictional and real texts are
difficult to interpret and pin down, yet also damning, demonstrating the
unspeakable and socially dangerous nature of such feelings. In Hannah’s
work as a whole, words obfuscate and confuse. The maternal diaries in
The Point of Rescue, attributed to the wrong mother and subtly
mistranslated, disturbingly replicate the real-life confusion and denial
attaching to maternal confessions of imperfect behaviour and feelings.
Feminist cultural and legal scholarship has largely shown itself unwilling
to deal with the forensic evidence of gendered types of abuse committed
by women, or with the other “shadow sides” of intensive neoliberal
motherhood such as rage, the desire to escape from children and family
life, and the desire to exact revenge or wield control in specifically
gendered ways.xi If feminist studies leaves this gap open, those resonances
of the contemporary female Gothic, which encompass the unwelcome and
antisocial emotions and affects of motherhood, will be expressed, at worst,
 “Just What Kind of Mother Are You?” 305

in the gruesome caricatures of “monster-mothers” favoured by extreme

sections of the mens’ and fathers’ rights movements. Publicised maternal
“failures” are still used as ways to indict women of the old maternal
crimes of weakness, overindulgence, neglect, selfishness, and the rest—
failings to which the paternal/masculine principle is still presented as the
answer (Wallbank 2007, Cain 2011, Dragiewicz 2011). Fiction of the kind
I have begun to survey here has an important cultural role in articulating
these tensions. As critics of modern genre writing such as Annesley
(1998), Breu (2005) and Garrett (2014, 2013) have outlined, such work
lays bare the unlovely undersides of dominant socio-economic and legal
fantasies and realities. In so doing, it has its own formative effects on
social and cultural discourse. In an era of ever more tightly privatised
personal and parental responsibility, the interrogations of moral ambiguity
and delinquent subjects which the crime genre has traditionally
foregrounded make it crucial to the dissection of the new maternal guilt
and blame cultures. Stories of the shadow side of neoliberal maternity are
both political and reflexive; they make the unspeakable aspects of our
mythologies of femininity and maternity talk back. To paraphrase Fiona
Gibson’s “Slummy Mummy”, a culture’s “dirty laundry” may “quite
literally, blow up in its face” (Gibson 2008a, back cover).

References
Allen, K. and Osgood, J. 2009. “Young Women Negotiating Maternal
Subjectivities: the Significance of Social Class.” Studies in the
Maternal 1(2): 1–17.
Annesley, J. 1998. Blank Fictions: Culture, Consumerism and the
Contemporary American Novel. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ballaster, R. 1996. “Wild Nights and Buried Letters: The Gothic
Unconscious of Feminist Criticism” in Modern Gothic: A Reader, eds.
Sage, V. and Lloyd Smith, A., 58–70. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
Becker, S. 1996. “Postmodern Feminine Horror Fictions” in Modern
Gothic: A Reader, eds. Sage, V. and Lloyd Smith, A., 71–80.
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Bingham, J. 2014. “Mother Loses Custody Battle over ‘Permissive’
Parenting Style.” The Daily Telegraph, February 17.
Braddon, M.E.1862. Lady Audley’s Secret. London: William Tinsley.
Breu, C. 2005. Hard-Boiled Masculinities. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
306 Chapter Fifteen

Brown, B.J. and Baker, B. 2013. Responsible Citizens: Individuals, Health

and Policy under Neoliberalism. London: Anthem Press.
Cain, R. (Forthcoming). Privatised Mothers: Confession, Anxiety and
Neoliberal Parenting Culture. New York and London: Routledge.
—. 2013. “‘This Growing Genetic Disaster’: Obesogenic Mothers, the
Obesity ‘Epidemic’ and the Persistence of Eugenics.” Studies in the
Maternal 5(2): 1–24.
—. 2011. “The Court of Motherhood: Affect, Alienation and Redefinitions
of Responsible Parenting” in Regulating Family Responsibilities, eds.
Bridgman, J., Keating, H. and Lind, C., 67–90. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Clover, C. 1993. Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern
Horror Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Collier, R. S. 2009. “The Fathers’ Rights Movement, Law Reform, and the
New Politics of Fatherhood: Some Reflections on the UK Experience.”
University of Florida Journal of Law and Public Policy 20(1): 65–99.
Collier, R. and Sheldon, S. (eds.) 2006. Fathers’ Rights Activism and Law
Reform in Comparative Perspective. London: Hart.
Collins, W.W. 1860. The Woman in White. London: Sampson Low.
Coward, R. 2014. “Journalism Ethics and Confessional Journalism.” Blog
entry, June 6. Retrieved from: http://www.roscoward.com/journalism-
ethics-confessional-journalism/
Creed, B. 1993. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis.
London: Routledge.
Cunliffe, E. 2011. Murder, Medicine and Motherhood. London: Hart.
Cusk, R. 2001. A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother. London:
HarperCollins.
Daly, P. 2013. Just What Kind of Mother Are You? London: Corgi.
Dragiewicz, M. 2011. Equality with a Vengeance: Men's Rights Groups,
Battered Women, and Antifeminist Backlash. Lebanon, OH:
Northeastern University Press.
Ehrenreich, B. 2010. Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled
America and the World. London: Granta.
Fisher, M. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? London:
Zero.
Flynn, G. 2013. Gone Girl. London: Weidenfield and Nicholson.
Furedi, F. 2007. “An Emotional Striptease.” The Spiked Review of Books,
May 17. Retrieved from: http://www.spiked-online.com/review_of_
books/article/3353#.VN_DefmsWog
Garrett, R. 2013. “Novels and Children: ‘Mum’s’ Lit and the Public
Mother/Author”. Studies in the Maternal, 5(2): 1–28.
 “Just What Kind of Mother Are You?” 307

—. 2014. “Lionel Shriver’s (We Need to Talk About) Kevin: The

Monstrous Child as Feminist and Anti-American Allegory” in
Women’s Fiction and Post-/11 Contexts, eds. Childs, P., Colebrook, C.
and Groes, S., 107–124. Lanham, MA and London: Lexington.
Gibson, F. 2008a. Mummy Said the F-Word. London: Hodder and
Stoughton.
—. 2008b. The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy. London: Hodder and
Stoughton.
Gill, R. 2008a. “Culture and Subjectivity in Neoliberal and Postfeminist
Times.” Subjectivity 25(1): 432–445.
—. 2008b. “Empowerment/Sexism: Figuring Female Sexual Agency in
Contemporary Advertising.” Feminism & Psychology 18(1): 35–60.
Gillies, V. 2005. “Raising the ‘Meritocracy’: Parenting and the
Individualization of Social Class.” Sociology 39 (5): 835–853.
Gustafson, D.L. (ed.) 2005. Unbecoming Mothers: The Social Production
of Maternal Absence. New York: Routledge.
Hannah, S. 2012. Kind of Cruel. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
—. 2011. Lasting Damage. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
—. 2010. A Room Swept White. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
—. 2008. The Point of Rescue. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Harris, P. 2007. “Kate McCann: ‘Madeleine Cried 18 Hours a Day’.” The
Daily Mail, September 18. Retrieved from:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-482379/Kate-McCann-
Madeleine-cried-18-hours-day.html.
Harvey, D. 2007. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: OUP.
Hays, S. 1996. The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. London: Yale
University Press.
Holt, A. 2008. “Room for Resistance? Parenting Orders, Disciplinary
Power and the Production of the ‘Bad Parent’” in ASBO Nation: The
Criminalisation of Nuisance, ed. Squires, P., 203–222. Bristol: Polity.
Hughes, W. 2002. “The Sensation Novel” in A Companion to the
Victorian Novel, eds. Brantlinger. P. and Thesing, W., 260–78.
London: John Wiley and Sons.
Janisse, K-L. 2012. House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical
Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films.
New York: Fab Press.
Jensen, T. 2012. “Tough Love in Tough Times.” Studies in the Maternal
4(2): 1–26.
Karamessini, M, and Rubery, J. 2013. Women and Austerity: The
Economic Crisis and the Future for Gender Equality. London:
Routledge.
308 Chapter Fifteen

Kohlke, M-L. 2012. “Fantasies of Self-Abjection” in Neo-Victorian

Gothic: Horror, Violence and Degeneration in the Re-Imagined
Nineteenth Century, eds. Kohlke, M-L. and Gutleben, C., 221.
Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Mitchell, J. and Rose, J. 1982. “God and the Jouissance of the Woman” in
Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne: Feminine Sexuality, 137–48.
Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Larsson, S. 2008. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. London: Quercus.
Luckhurst, R. 2003. “Traumaculture.” New Formations 50(1): 28–47.
McRobbie, A. 2009. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and
Social Change. London: Sage.
Meyer, C. L. and Oberman, M. 2001. Mothers Who Kill Their Children:
Inside the Minds of Moms from Susan Smith to the “Prom Mom.” New
York and London: New York University Press.
Miller, P. and Rose, N. 2008. Governing the Present: Administering
Social, Economic and Personal Life. Cambridge: Polity.
Munt, S.R. 1994. Murder by the Book? Feminism and the Crime Novel.
London and New York: Routledge.
Motz, A. 2000. The Psychology of Female Violence: Crimes against the
Body. London: Karnac.
Parker, R. 2005. Torn in Two: The Experience of Maternal Ambivalence
(rev. ed.). London: Virago.
Pearson, A. 2003. I Don’t Know How She Does It. London: Vintage.
Power, S. 2010. “Markets and Misogyny: Educational Research on
Educational Choice.” British Journal of Educational Studies 54(2):
175–188.
Rose, N. 1999. Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self.
London: Free Association Books.
Quiney (Cain) R. 2007. “Confessions of the New Capitalist Mother:
Twenty-First-Century Writing on the Traumas of Motherhood.”
Women: A Cultural Review 18(1): 19–40.
Radcliffe, A. [1794]1980. The Mysteries of Udolpho. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Raitt, F. E., and Zeedyk, M. S. 2000. The Implicit Relation of Psychology
and Law: Women and Syndrome Evidence. London: Routledge.
Rhodes, R.A.W. 1994. “The Hollowing Out of the State: The Changing
Nature of the Public Service in Britain.” The Political Quarterly 65(2):
138–151.
Ruskin, J. [1864]1905. “Of Queen’s Gardens” in The Works of John
Ruskin, Vol. XVIII, eds. Cook, E.T. and Wedderburn, A. London:
Allen.
 “Just What Kind of Mother Are You?” 309

Saxey, E. 2010. “The Maid, the Master, Her Ghost and His Monster: Alias
Grace and Mary Reilly” in Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian
Fiction: Possessing the Past, eds. Arias, R. and Pulham, P., 58–84.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Snitow, A. 1992. “Feminism and Motherhood: An American Reading.”
Feminist Review 40(1): 32–51.
Shriver, L. 2010. We Need to Talk About Kevin. London: Serpent’s Tail.
Trodd, A. 1989. Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel. Basingstoke:
Macmillan.
Wallace, D, and Smith, A. 2009. Female Gothic: New Directions.
Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wallbank J. 2007. “Getting Tough on Mothers: Regulating Contact and
Residence.” Feminist Legal Studies 15(2): 189–222.
Warner, J. 2005. Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety.
London: Riverhead.
Weldon, E. 2000. Mother, Madonna, Whore: The Idealisation and
Denigration of Motherhood. London: Karnac.
WHSmith. 2015. “Domestic Noir Books Every Gone Girl Fan Should
Read.” Blog on the WHSmith website. Retrieved from:
http://blog.whsmith.co.uk/domestic-noir-books-every-gone-girl-fan-
should-read/
Wilkins, A. 2013. “Affective Labour and Neoliberal Fantasies: The
Gendered and Moral Economy of School Choice in England” in
Mothering in the Age of Neoliberalism, ed. Vandenbeld Giles, M.,
237–54. Bradford, ON: Demeter Press.
Williams, P. 2006. The Rise and Fall of a Yummy Mummy. London:
Sphere.
Wolf, N. 2001. Misconceptions: Truth, Lies and the Unexpected on the
Journey to Motherhood. London: Chatto and Windus.
Wood, Mrs H. 1861. East Lynne. London: Bentley.

Notes

i. For instance, Ros Ballaster writes of the hidden political references of the Gothic
classic, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho ([1794]1980): “[t]he spectre
that haunts Mysteries of Udolpho is the possibility that the Gothic sense of female
terror may be a recognition that in the pursuit of politico-material power women
are not more than exchange tokens between men; the “hidden” supernatural and
sexual causes which the text puts into play may be nothing more than
displacements or smokescreens which provide the Gothic heroine with an illusory
sense of the possibility of a political agency or significance from which she is, in
310 Chapter Fifteen


reality, excluded” (1996, 60–61). On the critical dismissal of texts that foreground
the personal, emotional and domestic, see: Garrett (2013) and Quiney (2007) on
maternal confessional memoir, Coward (2010) on confessional journalism, Clover
(1993) on horror and Kier-La Janisse (2012) on women in horror and exploitation
film.
ii . It may be argued that women and other marginal subjects face particular
pressures to make their lives appear responsible and freely chosen precisely
because they are less well-placed to benefit from neoliberal market deregulation
and consumerist emphasis on the carefree individual: see e.g. Jensen (2012) on
sociocultural demands on women in the context of austerity politics.
iii. My thanks to the editors of this volume for clarifying this point.
iv. “Misery literature”, like any popular genre, has a broad range—which it is
beyond my scope to outline here (see e.g. Furedi 2007, Quiney 2007)—including
sickness, addiction and imprisonment, etc. By no means are all of these subversive,
as some undoubtedly work to reinstate conventional neoliberal narratives of private
responsibility and self-management, but all display the impulse to expose and
examine suffering.
v. For example, Amy in Gone Girl is a “perfect” woman (and a marketable product
in herself—made that way by the parents who turned her into “Amazing Amy”, a
popular storybook heroine in their bestselling series of childrens’ books) who
manipulates popular stereotypes and narratives of femininity, victimhood and
romantic attachment to achieve her own ends.
vi. Custody and residence are now termed “child arrangements”, following judicial
and governmental efforts to remove the privilege assumed to accrue to mothers as
the usual “resident” parents and a move toward more “neutral” language in matters
pertaining to child residence, aimed at quieting the complaints of fathers’ rights
campaigners. The quotation is from Mostyn, J. in Re AR (A Child: Relocation)
[2010] EWHC 1346 (Fam), para. 52. For child arrangements orders and other
changes intended to equalise the supposedly unfair playing field of child residence
and contact after separation and divorce, see the Children and Families Act 2014
Section 12 and Schedule 2.
vii. Lord Scott of Foscote in In Re G (Children) (FG) [2006] UKHL 43, para. 3.
viii. See e.g. the recent case of RS v SS [2013] EWHC B33 (Fam), reported in The
Daily Telegraph as: “Mother loses custody battle over ‘permissive’ parenting
style” with the subheading “High Court rules that mother who left boys to play on
Xboxes while she napped or used her iPad, and was more like a ‘friend’ than a
parent, ‘significantly failed’ them” (Bingham 2014).
ix. For detailed analysis of famous British cases involving suspected Munchausen’s
syndrome in cases of repeated Sudden Infant Death, including the murder
convictions of Sally Clark and Angela Cannings (subsequently overturned
following the discrediting of the evidence of medical expert Roy Meadows), see
Raitt and Zeedyk, 2000. The similar Australian case of Kathleen Follbigg, who
was convicted in large part on the evidence of her ex-partner and some ambivalent
diary entries, and remains in prison, is analysed in Emma Cunliffe’s Murder,
Motherhood and Medicine (2011).
 “Just What Kind of Mother Are You?” 311


x. As noted by Cunliffe (2011, 138), the diaries of Kate McCann became “a central
focus of the Portuguese police investigation” (see further Harris 2007). 
xi. There is a relative dearth of critical work on maternal cruelty and violence
toward children and, in particular, on mothers who choose to become non-resident
parents or otherwise refuse to mother full time (Gustafson 2005). On maternal
abuse of children see e.g. Motz 2000, Weldon 2000; on infanticide and filicide see
e.g. Meyer and Oberman 2001.
 THE PSYCHIC LIFE
OF NEOLIBERAL FAMILIES
 CHAPTER SIXTEEN

THE END OF ALICE, NOT THE END

OF THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX

ERICA D. GALIOTO

Like the rest of A.M. Homes’ observant, bold, and shocking fiction, The
End of Alice (1996) exposes and challenges neoliberalism’s abandonment
of explicit borders between the private and public spheres. In this
discomfiting novel, Homes features an epistolary correspondence between
middle-aged Chappy, a death row inmate for child rape and murder, and
an unnamed nineteen-year-old female who seeks his advice as she seduces
Matthew, her twelve-year-old babysitting charge. As readers question the
origin of these wayward desires, as well as the unusual mentorship
between Chappy and his pen pal, we learn that Chappy’s mother sexually
abused him in the 1950s during neoliberalism’s first emergence as a
political philosophy, and, in contrast, his equally paedophiliac and plotting
female counterpart enjoys a carefree 1980s childhood when neoliberalism
reemerges after twenty years of decline. Whereas Chappy’s childhood
trauma reinforces early neoliberal fears about the dangers of an absent
father and cannibalising mother, his pen pal’s desires appear to have no
distinct antecedent other than our current neoliberal “traditional” family
and its imbrication in the excess of consumerist society. By exposing the
ubiquitous and dark effects of the post-Oedipal family dynamics
championed by neoliberalism, Homes prompts readers to think critically
about the interdependency of our most formative relationships and how
those relationships often reflect societal beliefs about the family, the
individual, and the economy. As Lacan maintains in Seminar XVII and I
will argue here, the Oedipus complex remains a powerful determinant of
human subjectivity, but it needs to be understood in revised form: not
through the lens of the parasitic mother or laissez-faire father, but through
the necessity of the simultaneous installation of lack and enjoyment that
only comes through a family structure—and any family structure at that—
where prohibition opens a pathway to appropriate desire.
 The End of Alice, Not the End of the Oedipus Complex 315

My argument proceeds in three parts. First, I detail the differences

between Chappy’s 1950s childhood and his pen pal’s 1980s upbringing.
While Chappy’s domestic sphere exists as a realm apart from the family’s
public interactions, his pen pal’s home life reflects neoliberal penetration
into the private sphere. Despite this crucial difference, both Chappy and
his pen pal (who will also be referred to as “the correspondent” and “the
girl” throughout this chapter) endure repetitive trauma during their early
years. Psychoanalytically speaking, trauma may be defined as an intense
experience for which an individual can neither be prepared nor offer an
adequate response and which has long-lasting psychical effects that either
shatter existing subjectivity or prevent stable subjectivity from cohering.
For Chappy, his sexual traumatisation at the hands of his mother validates
the post-war fear of mother/son eroticism popularised through the time
period’s wide acceptance of the Freudian view of parent/child relationships.
His 1950s “too-close” mother, however, stands in sharp contrast to his pen
pal’s 1980s “too-far” father, though their effects are strikingly similar. For
the girl, her lack of strong psychical borders enacts its own repetitive
trauma, preventing the coalescence of a stable subjectivity that relies on
prohibition for its formation.
From this foundation, I move to an exploration of the Oedipus complex
and assert that whether the Oedipus complex is over-proximal (Chappy) or
ignored entirely (his pen pal), it still has the power to direct sexual desire,
psychological symptoms, and expressions of aggression on both conscious
and unconscious levels. Both Chappy and the girl are examples of the
Oedipus complex gone awry. Rather than organising desire through the
three-part triangular system that engages prohibition to open a pathway to
acceptable desire, the Oedipus complex is represented in two traumatic
forms that have the same effect. Finally, I conclude by illustrating how
neoliberalism’s current post-Oedipal model of family dynamics, represented
through the female pen pal, ignores the intersubjective aspect of human
psychic development and thus eliminates the required shame from human
representation and interaction. Chappy, his pen pal—and Homes herself,
as she reaches out to the readers—engage shame as an affect, as they
attempt to reinitiate the intersubjectivity that neoliberalism denies in its
support of self-fashioning identity and demotion of societal authority. By
representing neoliberalism’s infiltration of the family, the negative effects
of post-Oedipal family dynamics, and the necessity of shame in our
intersubjective constitutions, The End of Alice stands as a potent challenge
to the dark underside of neoliberalism in its current incarnation.
316 Chapter Sixteen

“His Father’s Castle is Intact”:

Neoliberalism and the Family
When neoliberalism first introduces its economic principles in the early
post-war period of the late 1940s those principles compete with several
value systems and have boundaries that set them apart from other spheres
of operation. Initially, the family is assigned one such place of separation,
where different values are operative and relational need and support
protects kinship systems from the harsh competition of the outside world.
When neoliberalism reemerges in the 1980s, however, its reincarnation
penetrates the domestic sphere and offers no segregation between public
and private values. For example, in a contemporary neoliberal framework,
market values are now identical to family values, the family is no longer a
protected sphere apart from the market, and need and support are
antithetical to the desiring neoliberal subject. Neoliberalism’s insertion
into the family has thus altered psychic functioning and its resulting
subjectivities. Homes’ depiction of neoliberalism’s invasion portrays these
alterations effectively, but, more importantly, The End of Alice also provides
challenges to neoliberalism’s penetration of the family both through the
effects of the unnamed correspondent’s perverse acts and through the
author’s intentional removal of “the invisible scrim that separates us”, i.e.
the indoctrinated neoliberal readers, from the reprehensible behaviors
detailed therein (Homes 1996, 186). By highlighting the different
upbringings of Chappy and the correspondent, Homes illustrates the shift
from the family as a protected sphere with boundaries against the outside
world to its current unbounded state of fluidity with the ideological and
economic principles of neoliberalism.
In its forced adoption of the free-market fundamentalism that drives
neoliberalism, the family now reflects similar values such as exchange,
competition, and consumerism. In total, the eclipse of family values by
neoliberal values has forced pressures on individuals to be enterprising
selves within the domestic space, competing with others to attain more and
viewing relatedness as equal exchanges of goods. Routine production,
individual competition, and emphasis on goods, “the very props of the
charade”, dominate the public external sphere as well as the previously
private domestic space (Homes 1996, 21). Portraying this equal reflection
of work and home, Homes describes the nameless girl’s home life: “The
routine all too familiar. The men work in the city, the city is far away.
They get up early, their wives get up with them. While they shower, shave,
and dress, the wives make coffee, breakfast. He comes down, she feeds
 The End of Alice, Not the End of the Oedipus Complex 317

him, he leaves. She eats the leftovers, showers, and begins again when it is
time to wake the children” (163).
That the correspondent “has taken home economics” conveys an
additional layer of meaning in the context of neoliberalism (92). Not only
does this reference indicate that she has been instructed in the domestic
tasks of cooking, cleaning, and caretaking, but it also means that she has
been properly schooled in the neoliberal economics of viewing homes as
corporations. As her father and Matthew’s father travel to Wall Street to
trade on the free market, so too are she and her conquest expected to be
enterprising subjects within the home. Both fathers—the college-age girl’s
and the middle-school boy’s—are oblivious to the current enterprise: the
girl’s grooming of Matthew to submit to her eventual sexual demands.
By replacing family values with market values, the family similarly
becomes an unbound, unprotected site of exchange, competition, and
consumerism. Just as the correspondent’s mother attempts to make her
into a competitive female rival through the trappings of consumer excess
like clothing, makeup, accessories, and cosmetic alterations of hair and
nails, Matthew and his father “seem to be in competition with each other,
vying for something the boy has yet to figure out. The father is intent,
well-focused on pulling the rug out from under if only to taunt, to tease, to
trip the young one up” (Homes 1996, 91). This blatant yet ambiguous
competition focuses on acquisition, as it does in the economic sphere;
thus, unrestrained consumerism becomes the vehicle for displaying such
competition. The more stuff the individuals acquire, the more enterprising,
and therefore the more successful. In this framework, symbols of spending
take on an almost religious dimension, and so it is the perfect setting for
the girl to seek out her next victim: “She can be found in amusement
arcades and shopping malls where the fed-up, frustrated parents of these
creatures deposit their offspring, as though this modern structure, this
architecture of commerce and commercial intercourse, this building itself,
were a well-trained babysitter” (18).
And it is in one of these “modern structures” where the girl,
“mesmerised by the consumption” of “gastronomic gluttony”, offers to
buy twelve-and-a-half-year-old Matthew’s time as a tennis partner (54).
This “purchase” bears the trace of neoliberalism’s invasion of the family
and its consequence of turning individuals into goods. The enterprising
subject focused on the maximisation of her own self-interest, such as our
female correspondent, relates to others on the basis of exchange, not
relationality. In this model, recognition comes through financial
transaction, insofar as her mother buys her, so too does she buy him. She
pays Matthew to play tennis with her, and his mother likewise pays him to
318 Chapter Sixteen

pay the college girl for that playtime, which he never does. The boy,
doubly “deposited”, becomes the consumer good bought and acquired and
symbolises the family as an enterprising market dominated by the same
values of deregulation.
When the family reflects society mimetically in terms of neoliberalism’s
core values, the view of subjectivity shifts dramatically. Pre- and anti-
neoliberal values suggest that individuals are shaped in kinship structures
that are intersubjective, rely on dependence and care, include strong social
bonds, and direct desire through the installation of prohibition and lack.
Neoliberalism rejects each of these relational understandings of psychic
functioning and replaces them with their opposites. Thus, neoliberalism
shifts from this relational model and exchanges it for one where
individuals are viewed as autonomous and individualistic, antithetical to
dependence and vulnerability, marked by weak social bonds, and caught in
a repetitive drive loop where lack is denied. As will be described further in
the next section, psychoanalysis understands desire differently from drive.
In desire, subjects pursue the filling of an absence that is only ever
eclipsed temporarily bringing the brief satisfaction of jouissance, and in
drive, subjects follow a repetitive circuit of acquisition in an attempt to
stave off the absence that would allow access to pleasure. Both lack and
sociality are prerequisites for the joussiance championed by psychoanalysis
and denied by neoliberalism. Highlighting the dichotomy between the
intersubjective subject and the neoliberal self-reliant subject, Michael
Rustin argues that when “maximization of individual economic interests is
the best means to advance the well-being of all—[it] rejects the idea that
humans are essentially social beings, for whom belonging to entities larger
than the self is essential to identity and wellbeing” (Rustin 2014, 145).
As he shows, this denial of relational intersubjective dependence has
contributed to the continued erosion of social bonds, the objectification of
individuals, the emptiness of family life, the absence of needed psychic
limits, and the removal of empathy from interpersonal encounters. In the
words of Lynne Layton, “Subjects are dissuaded from introspecting […]
and thus foster narcissistic states and forms of relating” (Layton 2014,
165). Raised in such an environment, Homes’ correspondent reflects the
creation of a “self” who “learns to survive and even prosper in a world in
which relations with objects cannot be depended on, adopting strategies of
prudent self-reliance to cope with what is felt to be at root an
untrustworthy and unfriendly world” (Rustin 2014, 152).
I would like to go one step farther, however, and argue that in addition
to reflecting this new desperate neoliberal subject, she also, more
importantly, represents a challenge to the prevailing system. By extension,
 The End of Alice, Not the End of the Oedipus Complex 319

we, Homes’ neoliberal readers, are encouraged to challenge the system as

well. To put it bluntly, this dark underside of neoliberalism causes
negative psychic effects that may result in perverse desires, traumatisation
of others, and extreme demands for external authority. Not surprisingly,
the correction of these negative psychic effects come in the form of
reinstating all that neoliberalism aims to deny, namely: intersubjectivity,
lack, prohibition, and shame. In the prolonged correspondence between
Chappy and his pen pal and in the frequent direct addresses to the reader
Homes employs throughout The End of Alice, these explicit challenges to
neoliberalism are mounted.
Since the neoliberal framework relies on the suppression of relational
needs and social interdependence, proponents of the philosophy support
the containment and removal of those individuals who are deemed
dangerous to the system due to their representation of need or assistance.
Therefore, extreme measures are taken to distance enterprising neoliberal
subjects from the humiliated, shamed, or vulnerable other in an effort to
eschew identification, empathy, or even contact. Prisons may be viewed as
neoliberal sites of separation and disgust. On the one hand, prisons remove
the undesired elements from the population, but on the other hand, they
also create environments of dependency. Doubly disgusting, prisons serve
as holding pens of need and house what Jodi Dean describes as the
“criminal fantasy identity” in neoliberal belief. She writes: “The criminal,
in other words, is less a person than the image standing in for a horrifying,
unbearable, contingent event. Injustice is what happens to the victim, who
is unjustly deprived of opportunity, life, and jouissance. The criminal is
imagined as the monstrous instrument of deprivation” (Dean 2008, 66).
Chappy, Homes’ incarcerated child rapist and murderer and the
correspondent’s epistolary mentor, certainly fits this description of a
“horrifying, unbearable, contingent event”, repulsive for his prior actions
and current dependent state. But Homes does not allow her readers the
safe neoliberal distance and hierarchy demanded by the philosophy.
Rather, she intentionally collapses that desired distance, prompting an
uncomfortable proximity between the neoliberal reader and this
“monstrous instrument of deprivation”. If the girl questions: “What makes
you different from everyone else?” (Homes 1996, 167) and “Am I the same
as you?” (169), and she is raised in the same type of neoliberal family
structure currently being propagated, then readers are also invited to pause
and reflect on these same queries and the central one, “What makes a man
become a man become a murderer?” (192). Through the girl’s self-
questioning, the reader asks the same question of her or himself—what
makes Chappy different from me? Am I the same as Chappy? As the
320 Chapter Sixteen

nineteen-year-old girl? By dismantling the central hierarchy of neoliberal

philosophy, Homes aims to push her readers to states of discomfort that
may be used to challenge our prevailing social structure.
Though we might be more comfortable with “the World Book, a nice
quiet encyclopedia”, we are encouraged to contemplate the varying paths
Chappy and the correspondent have followed to reach their criminal
identities (Homes 1996, 99). Chappy’s sexual trauma provides one cause,
while the girl’s antecedent is not as clear, despite the fact that he
maintains, “the synchronicity is terrifying” (173). By “synchronizing”
Chappy and his pen pal so explicitly, Homes seems to be suggesting that
Chappy’s sexual traumatisation by his mother is, in fact, similar to
neoliberalism’s preferred family dynamic. In both instances, children
repetitively experience events that shatter their burgeoning subjectivities
and cause negative psychic effects. To emphasise Chappy’s position—the
one Homes wants her neoliberal readers to consider—he indeed points his
finger at suburban vacuity as the offending event: “The streets are empty,
a stage set deserted, a diorama. Nothing proves this is real. All of it could
be a dream. Everything is so thoroughly familiar that were we—that is, all
of us; me, you-reader, and the girl—were we to go blind, we would be
able to continue anyway, we’d know how to get there and back, the route
is etched in our memory” (173).
In Chappy’s view, suburbia is the prison complete—though it’s not felt
as such, due to its superficial props—and that is the danger. He has been
put away because he threatens the system and must be contained and
removed, though he is intent on collapsing the distance between his penal
incarceration and our neoliberal one: “And is it really so different in here
than it is out there with you?”(183). If Chappy is correct, and the girl’s
neoliberal childhood may be considered traumatic in a similar way to
Chappy’s experience of sexual abuse, then our neoliberal society is to
blame for imprisoning us in a paradigm that stymies psychic development.
Chappy’s prison is merely the microcosm for the one we “freely” enjoy in
the outside world.

“Is Freud Still Part of The Program?”:

Post-Oedipal Family Dynamics
A widely acknowledged shift from neoliberalism’s first emergence in the
late 1940s to its recent explosion in and since the 1980s concerns the role
of authority within ideological social structures and its application to
private family dynamics. On the one hand, Chappy is a product of
Freudian fears related to a parasitic mother with no strong father to
 The End of Alice, Not the End of the Oedipus Complex 321

interrupt the pressures of incestuous desires, and on the other hand, the
female correspondent is a product of an overly permissive laissez-faire
family structure. In neither case does the Oedipal triangle function
appropriately. Derived from Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus, the play in
which Oedipus learns that he was cursed to kill his father and sleep with
his mother, the Oedipus complex has been used to describe the
psychoanalytic processes of attachment, separation, identification, and
desire since Freud first coined the term during his own self-analysis. In its
present-day, nearly universal application to family dynamics, the Oedipus
complex now describes how a child moves from complete attachment to
the mother or mother figure to separation from the mother when the third
term, or outside desire, calls the mother or mother figure’s attention away
from the child, thereby prohibiting the all-consuming desire of completion
flowing between mother and child. Called the “Law-of-the-Father” even
though the third term is not always a paternal figure, the interruption of
this symbiotic bond causes the child to be castrated and produces the lack,
or absence, that will cause him or her to desire future objects. Whether the
child ultimately comes to identify with the mother or mother figure or,
instead, to desire her, the resolution of this complex continues to structure
the unconscious through puberty and beyond. The child’s reconciliation of
the love for the mother or mother figure and hostility toward the third term
becomes an immutable anchor of psychic life.
For Chappy, absence of the third authoritative term of the father
permits his mother’s desire to collapse onto him with no prohibition; for
the teenage girl, absence of any prohibition on desire prevents the
formation of a triangle to coalesce. Chappy suffers because his father dies
in 1945 and is thus not able to incarnate the Law-of-the-Father, and the
girl suffers because her father no longer views the Law-of-the-Father as a
role he should incarnate. This obvious shift in Oedipal dynamics—from a
necessity to a superfluity—also reflects the major alteration of neoliberalism’s
second appearance on the economic scene, primarily in terms of its
insertion into family life. As Steger and Roy put it: “Changing the
‘paternalistic’ relationship between state and society to one based on a
‘social partnership’ among individuals heralds what we now term the
‘post-Oedipal era’” (2010, 68). The Oedipus complex’s original paternalism
has morphed into its outright rejection in the form of permissiveness and
this permissiveness has resulted in several effects operative in society at
large, and reflected in The End of Alice.
The following illustration reveals how in its removal of the
paternalistic relationship between state and society, neoliberal post-
Oedipal family dynamics only achieve anti-paternal relationships between
322 Chapter Sixteen

parents and children through a collapse of the father figure, like the
collapse of the big Other in society. The conglomeration of the numerous
individuals—as well as culture at large—thought to uphold the Law,
functions primarily to regulate individual psychic life. Existing as a
microcosm of the big Other, the family has the power to aid in the
regulation of a subject’s relation to authority as well as to that subject’s
relation to his or her own identity. Due to neoliberalism’s desire to
simultaneously demote the authority of the big Other and its representation
in the third term of the Oedipus complex, the big Other no longer has the
power and order it once had to confer identity, and so the subject is always
uncertain about his or her place and constantly trying to define himself or
herself, as readers see with Chappy’s pen pal.
Lacan wrote more than fifty years ago in Seminar XVII (particularly in
the “Beyond the Oedipus Complex” section) of his fear that capitalism’s
economic goals would negatively impact the symbolic functioning of the
father as the necessary master signifier for language use and desire
regulation, and indeed his concern was prescient. For Lacan, in order for
the father to operate structurally in terms of the paternal function, he must
protect the child from the mother’s “crocodile” desire (Lacan 2007, 112)
and, more importantly, he must “be castrated” himself (121). He must
have endured the original loss of his own Oedipus complex and been left
with a lack that propelled him to pursue the fulfillment of his own desire.
Surprisingly, Lacan even promotes the father function beyond that
privileged dyadic coalescence with the mother and explains, “the father is
love, the first thing to be loved in this world is the father” (100). Hence,
for the father to appropriately serve his function, he must stand in as the
master signifier—the third term, as mentioned previously—that, “not only
induces, but determines castration” (89). Though he must assert his law,
maintain his desire, and erect a prohibition, the father eventually is shown
to be lacking—or castrated—through the child’s psychic killing of him. As
the ultimate repository of the child’s intense hostility, this parricide then
establishes a place in language and in desire for the child. Through this
primary identification and then separation from the father, the child
establishes the conditions for his or her own experience of jouissance, or
the enjoyment of a pleasure that directly corresponds to the subject’s
original separation from the mother or mother figure into his or her own
lacking or split being. A limit—the father’s own enjoyment—is
demarcated and creates space beyond, producing the potential for the
child’s own pleasure. Importantly, this child “only obtains jouissance by
insisting to the point of producing the loss whereby surplus jouissance
takes body” and this loss only forms in language and in subjectivity
 The End of Alice, Not the End of the Oedipus Complex 323

through the revelation of the father’s own impotence, castration, and even
death: the point at which his necessary authority is exposed as lacking, but
still signifies structurally in the way that it is believed to be true (124). It
should be noted that neoliberalism aims to remove this appearance of truth
with the revelation of utter falsehood. For Lacan, for the third term to
function properly, he must know “nothing about the truth” but believe
himself to be powerful and stable; while for neoliberalism, obliterating the
third term is a necessity that only occurs when his power is blatantly
revealed to be inconsistent and false (130).
Thus, for Lacanian psychoanalysis, the father is neither wholly
omnipotent nor entirely emasculated. He must believe in his own
authority, but remain unaware of his impotent truth; he must stay powerful
enough for the child to kill him psychically, but still barricade something
significant that the child wants; he must erect prohibition, even as he lacks.
This simultaneity of excess and lack—or fullness and emptiness or
knowledge and ignorance or strength and weakness—speaks to the
subjective constitution made possible through the Oedipus complex, yet is
waning due to the prevalent post-Oedipal structure. To put it simply, the
neoliberal post-Oedipal family structure has made the father’s psychic
death a moot point: there is no longer any father to kill, because there is no
paternal authority and no prohibition. Since neoliberalism calls for the
simultaneous demotion of the big Other and the father within the family,
there are no longer any “small others” (representatives of cultural law)
who stand in for that big Other in the private sector of the home. Instead of
the prohibition that regulates desire through access to jouissance, we have
the decline of paternal symbolic authority that returns through capitalism’s
superegoic command to enjoy. Now there is no prohibition, just
permissiveness, so enjoyment is commanded and consumption is required.
The absence of limits within these intersubjective structures has affected
individual desire, identity, and relationality, and Lacanian psychoanalysis
brings out the incommensurability between desire, satisfaction, and lack in
relation to a culture of supposed need, empty satisfaction, and hyperbolic
excess. As psychoanalysis maintains, and neoliberalism adamantly refuses,
lack is a precursor to authentic enjoyment.
The neoliberal autonomous individualist subject, dominated by self-
instrumentalisation, has no limits, structure, or lack, and as such, fails to
develop in psychoanalytically appropriate ways. As Slavoj Žižek explains
in his article “Whither Oedipus”, “a father is no longer perceived as one’s
Ego Ideal, the (more or less failed, inadequate) bearer of symbolic
authority, but as one’s ideal ego, imaginary competitor—with the result
that subjects never really ‘grow up’ […] ” (Žižek 1999, 334). Viewed as
324 Chapter Sixteen

an equivocal peer-competitor, rather than a hierarchised authority figure,

the post-Oedipal father fails to reflect and install the castration that occurs
concomitantly with lack as the pathway to appropriate desire. Instead, he
falsely portrays neoliberal “self-fashioning individuality” as the route to
connection in the social realm (360). However, undermining the necessity
of lack for individual subjectivity has had unintended effects. Without that
necessary lack, neoliberal subjects often fetishise the disavowal of lack, to
get it into the scene—staging new forms of domination and subjection to
literalise missing psychic practices.
Universalising these individual and collective effects, theorists such as
Lynne Layton have argued: “the traumatic reality of intensified vulnerability
[…] has resulted in massive disavowal supported by a fetish structure”
(Layton 2014, 171). This means that neoliberal practices that refuse to
acknowledge lack as a central feature of postmodern life have contributed
to a generalised perversion, the psychic structure that tends to form in
individuals when their relationship to absence is disavowed. As Freud
argues, perversion contributes to a fetish-based personal economy of
desire, where a fetish stands in for necessary lack but covers over it at the
same time and must be present for an individual to consummate his or her
desire. Since neoliberal subjects are deprived of limits and their attendant
castration as a pathway to desire and jouissance, perverts aim to stage their
own fantasies through their use of the fetish, their unique attempt to make
lack visible. When Freud writes: “the fetish itself has become the vehicle
both of denying and asseverating the fact of castration”, he asserts the
pervert’s central relationship to lack: he or she demands its centrality
while simultaneously disowning it (Freud 1963, 208). The pervert’s
disavowal of lack manifests through the fetish, as he or she structures
elaborate rules and limits in relation to the fetish object, scenario, or bodily
practice with the intent of bringing the otherwise absent law into existence.
Without the intersubjectivity of a properly functioning Oedipus complex
that installs prohibition and desire, neoliberal perverts use fetishes to both
acknowledge and deny the importance of psychic lack.
The End of Alice’s Matthew and his molester—Chappy’s pen pal—
blatantly reveal their own twinned fetish structures through scabs, the
amalgamation of dead cells that slough off as healthy skin regenerates.
Matthew literally harvests his own scabs as abject waste, the necessary by-
product of his continuing evolution, while the girl eats a pulsing scab
mingled with fresh red blood right off his leg: “She works her teeth back
and forth over the lump of flesh, the piece of their boy between her
bicuspids” (Homes 1996, 102). In both cases, we see the staging of lack,
the simultaneous revealing and concealing of absence as a necessity of
 The End of Alice, Not the End of the Oedipus Complex 325

individual subjectivity (Matthew) and intersubjective relationality (the

correspondent). Since Homes leads readers to assume that neither
Matthew’s nor the pen pal’s father enacts the necessary paternal function
of the Oedipus complex, both Matthew and the pen pal enact bodily
practices that aim to serve the same function as the psychically necessary
Law-of-the Father. By creating his own bodily lack, Matthew is attempting
psychic castration, just as the pen pal encounters and even consumes his
lack in her own attempt to confront and conceal loss. Matthew retains
small bits of himself as reminders of what covered the holes in his skin on
their way to rejuvenation, and the girl ingests the scabs in an effort to more
completely cannibalise and incorporate her desired object. That both
Matthew and the girl locate the fetish in the skin is also significant; both
intimate to the self and extimate to others, the skin functions in the same
way as psychic lack. It opens both in and out, produces expendable
remainders, and provides the landscape for jouissance. It both prohibits
and provides contact, a limit an individual wants to transcend.
For both Chappy and the girl, domination of an other becomes another
way to fulfill an oppressive need for the domination and subjection
missing from the new post-Oedipal family dynamic. Whereas the Oedipus
complex plays out these dominations and subjections psychically, the
perverse post-Oedipal structure propels these sadomasochistic behaviors
physically and literally, as individuals throb for a limit and incarnation of a
law that does not exist. These new forms of subjectivity usher new
subject/object relations and alter sexual practices. In our neoliberal era, sex
too is consumptive, non-relational, and subject to commodification. In
particular its hierarchical norms often redeploy social and economic power
structures. Rather than the skillful rearticulation of imbalanced power
differentials, neoliberal sex practices often reinscribe the same gender
differences. Their attachment to domination portrays an anxious fear of
castration and the illusion of omnipotence, and their absence of limits and
repetition of dominance inserts the same selfish, self-protective greed of
the boardroom in the bedroom. Chappy and the girl both exercise these
sadomasochistic practices in the form of sexual coercion and abuse
perpetrated on minors. Homes describes their desires as unbound and
unknown, unable to signify linguistically, and accessible only when tinged
with discomfort, loss, or outright hurt. “Because they cannot admit it,
cannot even name what it is they desire, their fearful craving encourages
them to consume the contents of the cabinets, to sit at the table gorging
themselves until they are in pain” (Homes 1996, 138). Each perpetrator
also delights in his or her own subjection, a Mobius strip of inverted
dominance. Chappy finds himself pleased to be taken and seduced by
326 Chapter Sixteen

Alice’s “addled understanding of adult desire” (223) and the correspondent

enjoys when Matthew “rid[es] her as though she’s unbroken, his wild
mare” (139). In their twinned drives to reassert paternal authority, Chappy
and the girl aim to find a limit that will reinstate a law by carving out a
foundational lack that may not be transgressed. They are hoping to affect a
crash that will restart the system by making their own boundaries when
before there were none. By “transcending the limits of skin”, they—like
most neoliberal subjects who have been negatively affected by the
ubiquitous erosion of the big Other and its familial representative—
paradoxically hope to return more firmly anchored in their bodies and
subjectivities (233).
While The End of Alice provides evidence of two effects to neoliberalism’s
post-Oedipal removal of paternal authority through the fetishism of
perversion and sadomasochistic sex practices, it also aptly portrays one
other solution to the deliberate disavowal of lack in present-day society,
and that is the Lacanian drive circuit, the endless repetition of circuity
aiming to install a lack that has never been permitted. Unlike desire, which
leads subjects to pursue the filling of an absence that is only ever eclipsed
temporarily to bring the brief satisfaction of jouissance, the Lacanian drive
circuit describes the refusal of lack that pushes subjects to follow an
unending cycle of acquisition. Though drive supposedly leads subjects to
consumption and completion, its effects are often rendered shallow and
empty rather than enjoyable. Jodi Dean relates neoliberal capitalism to the
endless drive that enslaves contemporary subjects as they desperately
follow “patterns and loops” in a failed effort to inculcate the necessary
lack (Dean 2013, 151). As opposed to desire, which functions in relation
to a lost object made absent through the intervention of law, drive makes
loss itself an object. In the absence of paternalism and its commensurate
prohibition, desire fails to function, since there is nothing to want when
everything is permitted; therefore, the drive becomes a consuming force,
pushing subjects to encircle a lack that has been eternally disavowed. As
Dean explains, “Drive, then, is the force of loss. For example, capitalism
expresses this force of loss as an absence of competition or limits” (130).
And so, the drive manifests as the constant, repetitive, push for more and
circulates around a hidden absence; it reproduces that hidden absence and
fails to fully bring that absence into light. Encircling loss but not
engendering it produces the failure that allows the only access to pleasure
available within the neoliberal framework.
Subjects locate enjoyment in the multiple little failures that render
absence present, if only for a brief encounter. Referencing Žižek, Dean
notes that: “drive is that which propels the whole capitalist machinery, it is
 The End of Alice, Not the End of the Oedipus Complex 327

the impersonal compulsion to engage in the endless circular movement of

expanded self-reproduction” (Dean 2013, 139). Though the drive continuously
fails in its central endeavour to provide a subject with a permanent and
definitive satisfaction of enjoyment, its sheer force highlights society’s
desperate need for the appropriate constellation of absence, prohibition,
and intersubjectivity within the psyches of individuals constructed through
neoliberalism’s infiltration of the family. Intent on removing lack, failure,
and inconsistency from daily life, conscious identities, and relational
exchanges, neoliberalism forces a drive economy that pulses for those
necessary irregularities. The correspondent desires these irregularities and
seems to ascertain that her access to more may only come through the
acknowledgement of less. She and her mother have a conversation that
illustrates this paradox: “‘nothing ever seems to be enough for you’, the
mother says. ‘Whatever it is, it’s not enough. What do you want?’ ‘More. I
want more. Didn’t you ever want more?’ ‘What more is there? I have a
beautiful home, filled with beautiful things. A husband, a daughter who could
be beautiful is she wanted to be. What else is there?’” (Homes 1996, 177).
The more that the daughter wants here is actually less, the lack missing
from her economy, pushing her to experience what Žižek refers to as “this
failure of the symbolic fiction [that] induces the subject to cling
increasingly to imaginary simulacra, to the sensual spectacles which
bombard us today from all sides” (Žižek 1999, 369). The girl’s suicide
attempt, especially, struggles to make lack present through her own self-
removal and admission that “it’s equally pointless to die as not to die”
(Homes 1996, 180). Caught in drive rather than desire, neoliberal subjects
are desperate to install a needed gap—the gap that neoliberalism refuses,
the gap that the correspondent attempts to install as a revolutionary act, the
gap that readers are pushed to encounter when they read. It is only through
the encounter with neoliberalism’s refused lack that space opens to the
more of jouissance. Privation—not getting satisfaction—paradoxically
brings access to an excess of pleasure, rather than the ineffectual
consumption played out in a repetitive loop of dissatisfaction. Ironically,
the capitalist demand for “More!” actually stymies the enjoyment that can
only be experienced through the acceptance of “less”.

“No, I Don’t Want Her to See That”:

Shame and Intersubjectivity
Though neoliberalism’s post-Oedipal family dynamics have resulted in
several negative psychic effects, it would be a mistake to take these effects
and argue that society needs, instead, a reassertion of absolute paternal
328 Chapter Sixteen

authority combined with unwavering gender roles and a firm heterosexist

matrix. Rather than merely reinstating the unquestioned paternal power of
an earlier era, Homes provides us with a female figure left to deal with the
collapse of the father figure on her own. If we view the pen pal as an
exemplar of a revolutionary act, it would be through the lens of shame, the
central affect Lacan predicted would be missing from the intersubjective
dynamic if the Oedipal triangle ever collapsed due to capitalism’s
demotion of paternal authority. Indeed, in our present-day neoliberal
shamelessness, it certainly seems that inculcating shame as a necessary by-
product of refused intersubjectivity would be revolutionary. As he
concludes the “Beyond the Oedipus Complex” section in Seminar XVII,
Lacan aligns shame with the required installation of lack through the
Oedipal “system” that is presently missing in society today: “I would like
to point out to them that production is one essential point of the system—
the production of shame” (Lacan 2007, 190). On this point, Lacan and
neoliberalism severely oppose one another. Shame occurs due to
intersubjectivity, the simultaneous experience of being subject and object
in any encounter, following the primary identification of early childhood
and repeating through the myriad secondary identifications that follow. It
is the simultaneous experience of seeing and being seen: the mutual
recognition that relies on intersubjective dependence to take shape. Like
the paradoxical overlap of prohibition and enjoyment, shame marks the
point at which a subject desires to expose him—or herself, at the same
time as he or she is aware of the necessity of hiding. The affect of shame is
felt here, when the individual desires a cover that is always ineffectual;
shame relies on the insertion of this boundary or limit, a demarcation
between self and other that is also permeable. This acknowledgement of an
other, who looks and recognises, stems from the fluid seeing-and-being-
seen that builds individual subjectivity and relationality between self and
other.
As Lacan feared, neoliberalism’s removal of dependence, relationality,
authority, and prohibition has also removed this central psychic affect.
There is no longer any shame because there is no Other to look back; in
other words, “the Other who could be looking has disappeared” (Miller
2006, 15). For those following Lacan, like Jacques-Alain Miller and Paul
Verhaeghe, the removal of shame from our psychic economies has also
crippled our ability to relate to others and to relate to ourselves. Without
the “bearing witness” that shame depends upon, bonds between
individuals who once verified each other’s existences no longer form. That
need to both cover and expose has been warped. Absolute permissiveness
combined with consumer excess and uncastrated fathers has led to the
 The End of Alice, Not the End of the Oedipus Complex 329

open display of shamelessness through incredible and often appalling

behaviors desperately attempting to reinstall shame into our daily lives. As
opposed to our neoliberal shamelessness, “in a Lacanian reading, the
position of the father is one of shame, and it is precisely this position that
has become so rare. Shame, because he must represent a master signifier in
the full consciousness that this is impossible” (Verhaeghe 2006, 47). Once
again, our post-Oedipal era has stymied psychic functioning by rendering
the role of authority in society and in the family useless. Hence,
individuals have no shame and disregard the potential for external
judgment that comes with the important affect. Everything is shown, but
nothing is transgressive; everyone is “friends,” but no one is interdependent;
everyone has it all, but no one is satisfied.
Operating both within the novel’s plot and outside the bounds of the
book as she reaches out to the readers, Homes continuously plays with
shame as a potential solution to the problem of weak social relations in the
correspondent’s attempts to bring the law into existence. Multiple times
throughout The End of Alice, we see the college student engaging in
troubling encounters of seeing-and-being-seen, where limits are transgressed
in blatant ways intent on bringing shame into her intersubjective social
dynamics. In two of these central cases, the correspondent finds herself in
the position of voyeur opposite Matthew’s parents. In one, she envisions
Matthew’s dad in his son’s bed “masturbating between Matt’s Batman
sheets” (Homes 1996,176), and in the other, she imagines his mother
watching Matthew and she “doing it” in “the backseat of his mother’s
Volvo” (171). “The girl wanted a reaction, but there was nothing,
absolutely nothing” (171). In both cases, Matthew’s father and Matthew’s
mother lack shame; though they meet the gaze of the teenage girl either in
the midst of their own perverse sexual behaviours or, appallingly, while
she is sexually abusing their young son, they feel no shame. They don’t
feel caught in the act and frantically try to cover themselves or interrupt
the unthinkable; they merely shut their eyes and return to their oblivion.
Chappy, too, frequently envisions voyeurs, sometimes the correspondent
herself and sometimes the readers, watching him during difficult acts:
watching him as he is raped in prison, watching him as he rapes and kills
little girls, watching him watch the correspondent as she pursues Matthew.
Often though, he pulls back, “No, I don’t want her to see that […] Too
embarrassing […] I’ve gone too far, trespassed” (Homes 1996, 78). In
Chappy, readers are exposed to his drive to be seen doing the unthinkable,
his drive to be seen being seen, his drive to interchange the subject and
object positions. But in his withdrawal of that seeing and ultimate demise,
we see his often-futile attempt to reassert laws, prohibitions, and limits; we
330 Chapter Sixteen

see his failed attempt to incorporate shame into the dynamic. Readers, too,
are pushed to that place of shame, where we experience to discomfort of
wanting to see and not see, wanting to be seen and not be seen. If we can
feel shame, then we are intersubjective and on our way to shedding the
shackles of neoliberal “freedom”.
Though there appears to be some hope for the neoliberal reader shaken
by Homes, the outcome for the correspondent seems bleak. Admirably, the
pen pal does attempt an intersubjective dynamic with Chappy that includes
mutual exposure, concealment, and even shame, but her neoliberal parents
eventually send her to Europe where she has no language other than that
she writes in her journal, and sleeps with a blind man who can’t see her.
Desperately pushing her back in her repetitive drive loop, her mother
charges her to “Enjoy [her]self” (Homes 1996, 246). Severing her
epistolary contact, banishing her to a foreign country, and interrupting her
relationship with Matthew without punishing her, the college girl’s parents
remove her intersubjective opportunities, exploration of shame production,
and request for prohibition. In essence, the girl’s parents remove her so
they don’t have to see, so they don’t have to enter into a shame-based
intersubjective dynamic with the daughter desperate for connection, care,
and limits: “Your father accidentally opened one of those letters […] I
don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into, I’m not sure I want to
know”, reveals her mother (247). The correspondent’s demand for a
rearticulated Oedipus complex through extreme transgression and even
attempted suicide is too much for her family, so they merely repeat what
caused the original psychic chaos: denial of care, reassertion of
individuality, and removal and containment. Once again, consumerism,
unboundedness, and permissiveness—the free market mapped onto the
family—win out over the firm laws and boundaries demanded by the girl.
And so, the end leads us back to the beginning and to the same
repetitive drive circuit reinforced by and relied upon under neoliberalism’s
ideology and preferred family structure. Lack, authority, intersubjectivity,
and shame are all required for the psychic functioning upheld by
psychoanalysis, yet these are the same traits opposed by neoliberalism. If
The End of Alice inspires readers to feel shame as Homes intends, then
perhaps there is still hope to challenge the system through revolutionary
acts that result in shame and by looking back when we are confronted by
those shame-inducing acts. It seems that until we look back and embrace
the simultaneity of lack and excess, of subject and object, of limit and
beyond, we will continue to be trapped within our shameless neoliberal
freedom—the capitalist, suburban prison of perversion exposed by
Chappy:
 The End of Alice, Not the End of the Oedipus Complex 331

I think of you, your picket fences, flower beds, holly bushes, your life
measured by the alarm clock’s tick, the car-pool rotation. You claim to be
a prisoner, but until you suffer the anxiety raised by the uselessness of
decision, of desire, you are free […] You long to break out but comfort
yourself with the structure you rebel against […] Argument could be made,
could be won, saying that by having nothing, no actual object, I have
everything […] Am I being too presumptuous, claiming to know who you
are, when just as easily you could be someone else, a bum, or someone
surprisingly like me? (Homes 1996, 72–3)

We are “surprisingly like” Chappy: though we have everything, we have

no true desire; though we have no lack, we still want more. Until lack is
once again accepted as the foundation for postmodern intersubjective
existence through the rearticulation of a twenty-first century Oedipus
complex, we will all be prisoners to neoliberalism’s warping of psychic
life.

References
Clemens, J. and Grigg, R. (eds.) 2006. SIC 6: Jacques Lacan and the
Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Dean, J. 2013. “Complexity as Capture: Neoliberalism and the Loop of the
Drive.” New Formations 80–81: 138–54.
—. 2008. “Enjoying Neoliberalism.” Cultural Politics 4(1): 47–72.
Freud, S. 1963. “Fetishism” in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love,
trans. Strachey, J, 204–209. New York: Simon & Schuster Inc.
Homes, A.M. 1996. The End of Alice. New York: Scribner.
Lacan, J. 2007. Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (1969–
1970), ed. Miller, J-A., trans. Grigg, R. New York: Norton.
Layton, L. 2014. “Editor’s Introduction to Special Section on the
Psychosocial Effects of Neoliberalism, Part II.” Psychoanalysis,
Culture & Society 19(2):140–144.
Miller, J-A. 2006. “On Shame” in SIC 6: Jacques Lacan and the Other
Side of Psychoanalysis, eds. Clemens, J. and Grigg, R., 11–28.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Rustin, M. 2014. “Belonging to Oneself Alone: The Spirit of
Neoliberalism.” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 19(2):145–60.
Steger, M. B. and Roy, R.K. (eds.). 2010. Neoliberalism: A Very Short
Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Verhaeghe, P. 2006. “Enjoyment and Impossibility: Lacan’s Revision of
the Oedipus Complex” in SIC 6: Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of
332 Chapter Sixteen

Psychoanalysis, eds. Clemens, J. and Grigg, R., 29–49. Durham, NC:

Duke University Press.
Žižek, S. 1999. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political
Ontology. London and New York: Verso.
 CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“WESTERN CIVILISATION
MUST BE DEFENDED”:
NEOLIBERAL VALUES
IN TEENAGE LITERATURE

ANGIE VOELA

Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief (2005) is typical teenage fantasy
fiction: growing up, having an adventure and saving the world while at it.
Written in the wake of the Harry Potter series’ global success, the book
focuses on young Percy, a difficult teenager who is one day told that his
biological father is the Olympian god Poseidon. Percy is tasked with a
dangerous mission: to find and return Zeus’s master bolt, averting a war
among the gods and more importantly, preventing the bolt from falling
into the hands of the insurgent Titan Kronos, the deposed father of the
Olympians. He sets out to achieve his mission with the help of two friends
after a short training at Camp Half-Blood, the secret training grounds of
demigod children like himself, born of the union of an Olympian and a
mortal parent.
The book conveys an explicit political message: Western civilization,
the roots of which lie in Greek civilization, needs to be protected (Riordan
2005, 72). This can only be achieved by maintaining the status quo and
reinforcing the hegemony of the Olympians, who now live in the United
States. The political message echoes post-9/11 concerns about US national
security as well as neoliberal discourses about American superiority,
which is represented as the “natural” continuation of the golden age of
Athens.
The seriousness of the threat affects the son’s development: while
growing up normally means growing out of the shadow of the father, the
new situation necessitates giving priority to doing the father’s bidding.
The patriotic family-focused narrative is redolent with a military ethos and
334 Chapter Seventeen

a quasi-religious devotion one might not instantly associate with the more
individualistic form of neoliberalism. And although it does not openly
contradict the neoliberal values of individuality and independence, it does
represent (as I will argue below) a shift in the way family and the authority
of the father are represented in popular culture.
Family lends itself to neoliberal ideology and often serves as a
“familiar” allegory of the latter. In Hollywood cinema, for instance, it is
possible to discern the basic family drama, that is, variations of the
Oedipal scenario, behind a wide range of plots (Žižek 2008). In all cases,
family is equated to dominant ideology, and ideology to family. This
simplistic equation is important, precisely to the extent that it is simplistic,
that is, seeking to establish analogies that obscure and “explain away”
(rather than elucidate) the tensions under the surface of ideology.
An area of interest in this respect is the emotional economy of the
father-son dyad (Percy and Poseidon), and, by extension, of all demigod
children to their immortal parents. There is something extremely harsh
beneath the surface of this entertaining teenage fiction. Consider this: an
army of young warriors is perpetually training, each of them waiting to be
assigned a mission which will allow them to prove their merit. In the
meantime, they languish in Camp Half-Blood, forgotten and unloved by
their immortal parents who have no time for them. Poseidon and the
Olympians may need the help of their offspring but remain aloof, cold and
indifferent. Even by postmodern standards and the noticeable “dark turn”
in teenage fiction (Johnson 2011), there is something amiss in this cold
indifference. What is the point of such emotional destitution in a culture
that has traditionally invested heavily in parental love and the emotional
well-being of its children? Is this just cruel “realism” and an indication of
what needs to be endured for the sake of (neoliberal) Western civilisation?
What kind of individual and what kind of family does this new formation
envisage, and why?
Neoliberalism is usually defined as the expansion of economic
thinking in all spheres of human activity, including the family, with
emphasis on individualism, maximised competition, the suffusion of
economic rationality through both the state and individuals (Brown 2003),
and practices of extending and disseminating market-driven policies to all
institutions and forms of social action (Brown 2003). Neoliberalism is not
one coherent programme of action. It is all or some of the following:
aggregation of ideas, discursive formation, governmental policy-making,
overarching ideology, a hegemonic project, and assemblage of techniques
and technologies for the formation of subjects. In that sense, argues
Gilbert, it might be better to think of neoliberalism not as a wholly
 Neoliberal Values in Teenage Literature 335

uniform and concrete doctrine but as enabling certain behaviours and not
others (Gilbert 2003, 7). Alternatively, we can think of neoliberalism as an
abstract machine (8) with tendencies and vectors that make certain
outcomes probable, while others less so (21).
Neoliberalism promulgates the discourse that it is a self-evident and
inevitable state of affairs, the only alternative (Giroux 2005). As a public
pedagogy it refutes its own specificity and promotes a transhistorical
“common sense”. Neoliberalism is essentially antithetical to democratic
values (13). It promotes adherence to ritualised forms of behaviour in which
individuals are obliged, or persuaded to engage—without challenging
“norms”—by potentiating the inhibition of collective and democratic
solutions to problems (21). All these tendencies are reflected in Percy
Jackson, legitimised and justified by the state of emergency, which arises
from imminent danger to mankind.
The individualistic conception of human selfhood is central to
neoliberalism (Gilbert 2013, 11). The neoliberal individual is both an ideal
locus of sovereignty and a site of governmental intervention. It has been
argued that neoliberalism aims to secure consent and generate political
inertia by enabling the experience of precarity and individualised
impotence to be experienced as “normal” and inevitable (Brown 2003, 15).
At the same time, the individual is seen as a rational, calculating unit,
looking after their own needs. Moral responsibility is equated to rational
action. “Mismanaged” life meets with disapproval (15). Despite being
forged by rigid biopolitical processes, the individual is seen as a “free”
subject, with their own agency. Self-care and the ability to provide for
one’s own needs are considered paramount (Brown 2006, 694). However,
the alliance of the political and ontological aspects of neoliberalism is not
unproblematic. In their interstices, as we shall see below, we can glimpse
the coercive power of neoliberalism and its adverse effects on individuals.
Another interesting contemporary phenomenon is the alliance of
neoliberalism with neoconservativism and religion (Giroux 2005, 14). This
alliance, argues Brown, “has inadvertently prepared the ground for
profoundly anti-democratic political ideas and practices to take root in the
culture and subject” (Brown 2006, 702). Neoconservativism is well
exemplified by the political rationality of the George W. Bush
administration in the US which was seen by many as uneven and
opportunistically religious (Brown 2006, 696), characterised by a desire
for a strong state, rejection of the vulgarity of mass culture, a return to
older forms of family life and the restoration of private virtue and public
spirit. Posing as guardians of a potentially vanishing past and present and
drawing on religiously interpellated citizenry “submissive to hierarchy and
336 Chapter Seventeen

authority and largely indifferent to deliberation and reasoning” (701), the

alliance of neoliberalism and neoconservativism has been successful in
displacing democratic values by promoting “a civic religion that links
family form, consumer practices, political passivity and patriotism” (701).
This link between family, political passivity and patriotism is important in
the present reading of Percy Jackson. In fact, the question of how “a
governance model of self-interest can marry or jostle against support for
governance modelled on church authority and a normative social fabric of
self-sacrifice and long-term filial loyalty” (692) lies at the heart of my
inquiry.
Below, I examine the production of the young individual and the
father-son relationship typical of a neoliberal project imbued with
conservative and religious tendencies. It might be worth stating the
obvious at this point: Percy Jackson and his young readers are already
neoliberal subjects. What lies in front of them, in the form of fiction, is a
proposal for a new way of life based on the father-god’s command and
desire. We will examine the tropes through which ideological manipulation
(Brown 2006, 703) is effected: the defamiliarisation of ideology via myth
and fantasy; the preference for declarative truth and common sense, as
opposed to deliberation; the cultivation of loyalty, fealty and filial
devotion as opposed to critical thinking; and the suppression of doubt and
ambivalence.
My main argument is that at present American popular culture is in the
process of inventing a new myth for its young readers, equivalent to the
one we encounter in literature for adults; one that fictionalises the
significance of neoliberal ideology and chimes with the threat of terror.
The latter is the other modern myth, the Protean deus ex machina that
threatens the possibility of a good life (Jones and Smith 2010, Dittmer
2005, Lopez 2008). On the surface, Percy Jackson might be an
entertaining account of how to cope with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity
Disorder (ADHD) and with growing up without a father, but beneath the
surface it promotes a fanatical and undemocratic view of the world. In its
pages, instead of encountering a simple variation of the coming-of-age
adventure, the reader discovers that the burden of neoliberalism-
neoconservativism falls on the shoulders of a young man; the whole
edifice of ideology becomes the individual’s tragic lot. We will explore
this tragic fate by focusing on select moments, moments of
incomprehension and aporia colonised by the neoliberal discourse (Bleiker
2003, 444).
My reading of Percy Jackson is primarily psychoanalytic and looks at
the gradual becoming of the dedicated son, both Percy and his evil
 Neoliberal Values in Teenage Literature 337

counterpart, Luke, a character I shall introduce in due course. A detailed

emplacement of the work in the context of American children’s literature
is beyond the scope of the present chapter. But since my argument
concerns ideologically induced shifts of the basic family-Oedipal
narrative, I would like to outline the some basic values of American
children’s literature of the past, such as the preoccupation with children’s
feelings and the freedom to see life as one chooses (Griswold 1993, 234).
For a long time the ur-story was that children must overthrow their parents
and become independent. Of central interest was the advocacy of “positive
thinking” and the child’s own wish for independence and responsibility. A
staple element of plot was the emotional upheaval, especially when
encountering a villain who was not a parent but a parental figure—a
grandfather, aunt, uncle or persecutor outside family (12). American
children’s literature also reflects a range of political and ideological
elements. It is argued that several classic children’s books were imbued
with the effort to define the American “soul”. In Huckleberry Finn and
Tarzan, for instance, we come across the theme of natural as opposed to
inherited nobility, at a time when Middle America was undergoing a
revision of its collective self-image and acquiring a sense of legitimacy via
new myths (Lerer 2009, 101) that echoed the tenets of republicanism as
well as the anxiety of a country keen to define itself as “parentless”,
Adamic and ahistorical. In Huckleberry Finn, for instance, the story of the
son’s emancipation was played against the background of an absent father
and the reader was left wondering when the father would return. Post-9/11
and in a global market of children’s best sellers which often play only lip
service to the values of independent selfhood (Zipes 2001, Nicholajeva
2008), the waiting is over: the father has returned.
It has been suggested that neoliberalism should be read as
“dreamwork” (Hall cited in Brown, 2006, 693) due to the similarities
between the hiatuses in its logic and the logical contradictions present in
the manifest content of the dream. Žižek suggests that we should think of
the dreamwork of ideology as the very gap between its latent and manifest
content (Žižek 2008, 73). The manifest content of the dream, what we
actually see when dreaming, is often absurd and represents a distorted
version of an idea or wish, known as the latent content. In classical
Freudian dream analysis the latent meaning of the dream can be accessed
by tracing a sequence of distortions that leads from latent truth to manifest
absurdity. The two main mechanisms responsible for these distortions are
displacement (one word or signifier for another) and condensation (one
signifier for many, based on some similarity) (Laplanche and Pontalis
1998, 121–123). In Lacan, who fuses Freudian analysis with Saussure’s
338 Chapter Seventeen

account of signification, displacement and condensation are renamed

metonymy and metaphor (Lemaire 1991). Below I endeavour to explore
elements of the dream logic of neoliberalism. I do not pursue an
exhaustive dream analysis but I do follow the distortions, displacements
and re-placements that obfuscate the destructive aspects of
neoliberalism/neoconservativism and purport to make it a “simple truth”
for kids. Additionally, I propose that we should also be thinking of
neoliberalism as a machine that dreams, indulging in its own reveries and
desires.
My reading of Percy Jackson follows the typical stages of the hero’s
journey as discussed by Campbell (1999) in The Hero with the Thousand
Faces. The ur-story told by Campbell is the young man’s journey towards
independence and individuation in the myths of almost all civilizations. I
do not draw on Campbell as the definitive source on comparative
mythology but as the product of a school of thought, which accepts
psychic independence as the cornerstone of selfhood and employs the
psychoanalytic idiom in order to make the case. In that sense, Campbell’s
classic work can operate as a yardstick for the present shifts and
deviations.

The Call to Adventure

Percy is a troubled kid. He has dyslexia and ADHD and attends, in his
own words, a school for “mental-case kids” (Riordan 2005, 2). Percy is
trouble-prone and feels he always gets blamed for everything at school.
His best friend is Grover, who is “scrawny” and uses crutches. Adventure
begins during a museum visit, organised by Mr Brunner the wheelchair-
bound history teacher. In an empty museum hall one of the teachers, Mrs
Dodds, transforms into a Fury from Hell and attacks Percy, demanding
that he hands back something he does not possess. Percy thinks he has
finally lost his mind but Mr Brunner and Grover, whose true identity is yet
to be revealed, explain that this is not the case. They inform him that he is
a demigod. None of this makes sense to him but things move fast—Percy
is in danger. Grover escorts him back home in New York, and his mother
Sally takes him away to a beach house in Montauk. Grover returns in the
middle of the night, instructing Sally to drive them to Camp Half-Blood.
On the way there a Minotaur attacks them. Percy and Grover make it to
the camp but Sally is captured by the monster and imprisoned alive in the
Underworld (Hades).
This is how Percy is introduced into the domain of the father, the
magically protected camp for demigod children. In terms of adolescent
 Neoliberal Values in Teenage Literature 339

fiction, Percy is a typical hero, an ordinary boy facing huge danger

(O’Keefe 2003). In historical terms, the sudden outbreak of danger and the
traumatic loss of the mother chime with the events of 9/11. In
mythological terms, the entry into the domain of the father chimes with the
hero’s call to adventure and the passage through the first threshold
(Campbell 1993, 77) during which the young man must relinquish his
infantile attachment to the parents and proceed to a more profound
experience that will eventually help him gain a new perspective on time,
universality and eternity (92).
In the neoliberal context of the novel, the stages of the classic hero’s
quest are replicated but their ideological content deviates significantly
from the relinquishing of infantile investments. In Camp Half-Blood Percy
is introduced to an entirely new logic. Mr Brunner, who is now a centaur
teacher called Chiron, and Grover, who is now a satyr and Percy’s
personal protector, facilitate his induction. Dyslexia and ADHD are
explained as battle reflexes and having seen too much, rather than too
little. Being “nobody”, Percy’s lifelong complain, is replaced by “you are
a Half-Blood” (Riordan 2005, 88) then by being “a demigod” and finally a
“hero” (94).
The camp is run like a military establishment with a strict hierarchical
organisation, complete with a council of elders and a daily training regime.
It is a panorama of healthy and fit young Americans who entertain
themselves with gladiator fights (competitiveness is a key neoliberal
value) as well as computer games. These Spartan boys and girls, like
Captain America and other popular fiction heroes, are not in the service of
the State but of an independent entity, something that gives them greater
flexibility of movement and a wider mandate (Dittmer 2005). However,
these children languish in the camp, neglected by their divine parents,
forever waiting for a sign of recognition that often never comes or a quest
that is systematically denied. They do believe in their parents but, as one
of them puts it, “once you start believing in them, it does not get easier”
(Riordan 2005, 100).
Percy’s induction into the mythical world continues with Mr D
(Dionysus) who explains that the Greek gods are pretty much alive
(Riordan 2005, 67). Science is dismissed for its lack of perspective: “What
will people think of your science two thousand years from now? If you
were a god, how would you like being called a myth? Someday people
would call you a myth, just created to explain how little boys can get over
losing their mothers” (68–69).
Chiron explains that although the Olympians’ home used to be Mount
Olympus in Ancient Greece the palace moves with the gods. Right now
340 Chapter Seventeen

the gods live in America, “with the heart of the West” (Riordan 2005, 72).
“Come now, Percy. What you call ‘Western civilization’. Do you think it’s
just an abstract concept? No, it’s a living force. A collective consciousness
that has burned bright for thousands of years. The gods are part of it. You
might even say they are the source of it, or at least, they are tied so tightly
to it that they couldn’t possibly fade, not unless all of Western civilisation
were obliterated” (ibid.). And shortly afterwards: “Like it or not—and
believe me, plenty of people were not very fond of Rome, either—
America is now the heart of the flame. It is the great power of the West.
And so Olympus is here. And we are here” (73).
Neoliberal ideology, argues Brown, is declarative, a truth “from the
gut” (2006, 707) that draws on the indisputable evidence of the senses—
ironically of a child that always misinterprets reality due to AHDT. As
scientific objectivity is being dismissed, the young individual is urged to
offer himself as the “living proof” of the mythical world. This is rather
different from the willing suspension of disbelief necessary when entering
the world of literature or science fiction (Ammon 2014). The question “Are
you a myth?” does not simply invite the young individual to accept the
possibilities of the magical universe but to subscribe to the incontrovertible
logic of neoliberal/neoconservative authority. “Myth” stands for “tradition”.
In neoconservative doctrine the authority of tradition is unambiguous,
guiding moral judgement and education. Neither the educator nor the
educated needs to know why (Furrow 2009). This displacement/substitution
of signifiers—myth for tradition—presents itself as a powerful alternative,
which, unlike “lame” science, could give meaning to a young man’s
world, holding together experience and ideology. And this is the way in
which the marginalised teenager is invited into the fold of the “powerful
elite”. Do we need to add that this seduction of the weak bears great
resemblance to the first step of an indoctrination into a less-than-
democratic political system? In children’s literature moral development is
usually attained gradually, and completed at the end of an adventure.
Moral development leads to autonomous ethics and the ability to negotiate
conflicting models restoring cognitive equilibrium (Kohlberg cited in
Grimes 2002, 195 and 204). In Percy Jackson there is a shift from moral
development to absolute moral judgement and tradition. The standard
processed is reversed, with moral choices being blindly made at the very
beginning.
 Neoliberal Values in Teenage Literature 341

A Journey in the Shadow of the Father:

Doubt and Verticality
While Percy is trying to get accustomed to camp life and to being
Poseidon’s son, crisis erupts: the bolt of Zeus is reported stolen and Percy
is suspected of being the thief. Although the accusation is absurd, he is
tasked with finding the bolt, which is rumoured to be in the Underworld,
and return it to Olympus. Grover and Annabeth, daughter of Athena (the
goddess of wisdom), will accompany him. Percy feels strongly ambivalent
towards his father: “Emotions rolled around me like bits of glass in a
kaleidoscope. I didn’t know whether to feel resentful or grateful or happy
or angry. Poseidon had ignored me for twelve years. Now suddenly he
needed me” (Riordan 2005, 145).
Crisis, upon which neoliberalism thrives, muffles the adolescent’s
ambivalence towards the father and drives the plot onwards. The
superiority of the Olympian cause chimes with American exceptionalism
and a fantasy of a “higher father” who permits the use of violence in order
to bring freedom and democracy to the world (Loewy 2014, 221). Central
to exceptionalism is a narrative that obscures trauma with images that run
back to the past (211). In Percy Jackson the immediate trauma of losing
the mother is quickly superseded by the more important task of restoring
the bolt (phallus) to the father. The love for the mother, typical of the
infant and the younger child, is sidestepped and marginalised: “mother” is
substituted by “father”. Yet the question “what is a father?”, the other side
of “what am I?” and an integral part of the dissolution of the Oedipus
complex, are deferred.
The theme of post-9/11 anxiety over national security is palpable in the
novel. The language resonates with the metaphorical language of the time.
Donald Rumsfeld, for instance, spoke of “burglars” threatening national
security (Bleiker 2003, 432)—which chimes with the thief of the bolt, in
our case—and president Bush claimed that he represented the “new” world
order as opposed to the terrorists, who represented the “old”. Again, we
find an uncanny parallel in Poseidon and Zeus as representatives of the
new order, and Kronos as the representative of the old. Yet, the Bush
administration was also seen as weak, and Bush himself as a human father
in need of support (Benziman 2013, Parish 2013). This theme is also
clearly echoed in the novel, in the apparent inability of the mighty
Olympians to take the situation in their own hands, due to restrictions in
stepping into each other’s territory. Human agency is therefore needed for
propping up the weak/powerful father, himself a locus of contradiction.
Neoliberal individuality requires bypassing the conundrums of power and
342 Chapter Seventeen

not asking questions about its emotional, ethical and moral complexity.
This is crucial for the political and ethical case made by the novel. The
sudden return of the father with the new crisis prepares the way for the son
to become, as we shall see in the next section, an instrument of His
(father’s) divine command, a typical trope of religious fundamentalism.
For Campbell, the hero’s quest takes a young man into “the crooked
lanes of one’s spiritual labyrinth” (1993, 101), in a landscape full of
symbolic figures. Dangers and ordeals allow the hero to dissolve and
transcend the infantile images of his personal past (ibid.). The ordeal
deepens the challenge of the previous stage of putting the ego to death
(109), on the way to achieving an autonomous self. In Percy Jackson two
new variations are weaved into the hero’s quest. Both concern the father:
dealing with doubts or ambivalence about the father, and forming an
exclusive relationship with the reticent Poseidon. Both are examined
below.
In world myth, doubt is usually feminine. An integral part of the hero’s
ordeal concerns facing a female, usually a goddess, who is either a
temptress or a source of knowledge (Campbell, 1993, 161). In Percy
Jackson the female adversary is a source of danger and doubt. At different
points of his journey the Furies, the Fates and the chimera, all of who are
female emissaries of the evil Kronos, persecute Percy. Danger and doubt
are not only feminised but also orientalised. This is best represented by
Auntie Em, the formidable Medusa, whom Percy and his companions
encounter in her Garden Emporium, a neglected business with a garden
full of human-like statues. In Greek myth, Medusa’s gaze petrifies anyone
who looks into her eyes. Perseus, Percy’s ancient namesake, beheaded
Medusa. Auntie Em is described as a Middle Eastern woman with a
Middle Eastern accent, a full body gown and veil (Riordan 2005, 172) and
eyes that glinted behind a curtain of black gauze. Medusa ask Percy: “Do
you really want to help the gods; do you know what awaits you […] do not
be a pawn of the Olympians” (180). Like another Odysseus pinned to the
mast, the young hero must resist the sirens of doubt, Medusa’s soft voice,
the female monsters’ snarling questions and the disembodied whispers in
his recurring dreams. Another simple equation creeps into the narrative:
doubt (about the neoliberal Olympians) comes from evil, and evil comes
from doubt. Doubt must be eliminated—as must evil.
The word “pawn”, central to doubt, recurs in the novel and is one of
the most resonant signifiers. “Pawn” implies lack of free will. For Lacan,
the son’s libidinal economy revolves around the question “what am I?”,
that is, what kind of fundamental signifier determines my relation to being
(Lacan 1993, 170). “Pawn” suggests being part of someone else’s libidinal
 Neoliberal Values in Teenage Literature 343

economy, rather than one’s own. It spells psychic servitude and brings to
the fore the antinomies of the contemporary American culture that
demands both individuality and compliance with neoliberal and
conservative collective ideals.
Being a “pawn” acquires renewed significance when Percy finds
himself in the tele-presence of gods. Lured to their death in an abandoned
amusement park by Ares, god of war, Percy, Annabeth and Grover must
survive by organising their escape. They soon realise that there are
cameras everywhere transmitting live images of their predicament to
Olympus for the entertainment of the gods. When they finally manage to
escape, Percy looks at the cameras and yells: “Show’s over!” (Riordan
2005, 241).
One cannot fail to notice that being exposed to the gaze of the gods
chimes with the religious and conservative “God is watching over us”
(Furrow 2009, 52). However, this is not the Christian God of love. Being
under the gaze of the indifferent Olympians, for whom the difference
between life and death is superfluous, implies that serving their cause goes
hand in hand with a masochistic offering of oneself to the enjoyment
(jouissance) of the father(s). Such a self-effacing emotional economy,
which refuses to recognise the son as a person, renders him a superfluous
object / abject. Moreover, and in line with the psychology of the religious
fanatic, the young man’s attempt to gain the favour of the father
constitutes a woeful and desperate bid for the father’s love through the
annihilation of the self (Stein, 2010). This masochistic abandonment in the
hands of an indifferent god spells nothing progressive—as in Campbell’s
reading of myth—but connects the sacrifice of one’s life with being
“nobody”, a state Percy knows only too well.
Surprisingly, it is in this context of reduced selfhood that communion
with the father is finally established. We could describe it as a vertical
relationship with the father. In St Louis, on the Gateway Arch, Percy is
attacked by a chimera (Riordan 2005, 207). He jumps into the polluted
river to save himself and retrieve his sword. Fearing he is about to meet
his death, he prays: “Father help me” (211), and survives the fall intact. He
thanks Poseidon but, again, receives no response and thinks, “Why did he
save me?”. But then he adds: “The more I thought, the more ashamed I felt
[…] thank you, Father” (215).
The hero’s second birth, from water, is another integral part of
universal myth, and typical of the hero’s exceptional nature (Rank 2015).
But something quite different occurs in the Percy Jackson story—the son’s
immersion in the vast body of the father emulates intrauterine existence,
substituting male for female birth. The half-animal protector (Grover) and
344 Chapter Seventeen

the female helper (Annabeth) are excluded from such an experience.

Conservative hierarchies are reaffirmed: god over humans, man over
woman, and humans over animals. The vertical communion with the father
is repeated at several crucial times: for instance, when Percy plunges into
the dirty ocean or when voices tell him to have faith in the father. Unlike
the experience in the amusement park, this solitary self-surrender is joyous
and sweet (see also Stein 2010, 24). The son seems to have now come to
terms with the father’s aloofness and greatness.
I would like to argue that the emotional frustration, the rejection of all
“soft” or feminine characteristics and the ensuing submission to the
indifferent father, engender a fanatic son willing to do anything in the
name of the father. The obvious separation of the good Percy from the evil
Luke at the end of the novel means that the most extreme consequences of
this devotion are clearly denied. Yet, it is Percy’s gradual transformation
and his induction to the inflexible, loveless father, not Luke’s, that we
witness. Stein (2010) discusses the characteristics of the religious fanatic
with reference to religious terrorism. I do not suggest that Percy Jackson
advocates religious terrorism. I do suggest, however, that in proportion to
the perceived threat to US national security and the neoliberal post-9/11
discourses, the novel is subtended by a phantasy—or a dream—of an
American clan of warriors every bit as Spartan as their fanatic (oriental)
counterparts.
Stein argues that religious fanaticism pivots on the figure of a strong
father-god, whom she rightly calls “mythopoetic” (2010, 86) because of
his regressive qualities. The fanatic son learns to adhere to this punitive,
indifferent and brutal God who loves those who kill (23). In Percy Jackson
this figure has an equivalent: the father who loves those that do their job
efficiently but does not care about his sons. When love is thwarted, it turns
into masochistic submission (38). Devotion to such a father creates a
mesmerised, mechanised mind (31) reinforced through “moments of total
alienation from the outer world” (28) and experiences of “disjointed
mystical, religious feelings and vague awe” (Kohut cited in Stein, 2010,
31), like Percy’s immersion in the water and marvelling at Poseidon’s
greatness. The desperate search for approval from such a harsh superegoic
father might end “in abject tones suffused with shame and self-loathing”,
fear (rather than desire), enthrallment and compliance (2010, 85).
The vertical relationship with the father-god is potent. While horizontal
relations with siblings and peers encourage plurality and difference—Stein
actually uses the term “democratic horizontal sensibility” (2010, 86) —
verticality reinforces binaristic thinking and oppression and, in turn,
“engenders vertical desire” (56) or a vertical mystical homoeros, a state of
 Neoliberal Values in Teenage Literature 345

merger, abjection (41) and self-abnegating disposition coextensive with

adopting the father as a rigid superego or ego-ideal. This abandonment, I
would argue, is being cultivated all along Percy’s journey to the
Underworld, and becomes a major technology of the neoliberal young self,
regularised by Poseidon’s secretive and random appearance at moments of
crisis.

Descent to Hades, Ascent to Olympus and the Phallus

The final stage of the quest takes Percy to the Underworld, the kingdom of
Hades, and then to Olympus. In the underworld we come across the most
explicit comparison of Hades to “evil” leaders: “The Lord of the Dead
resembled pictures I’d seen of Adolph Hitler, or Napoleon, or the terrorist
leaders who direct suicide bombers. Hades had the same intense eyes, the
same kind of mesmerizing, evil charisma” (Riordan 2005, 309).
Yet “true evil”—the favourite “excess” of neoconservative discourses
—does not have a face and lies deep in Hades, in the bottomless pit of the
Tartarus. Percy hears a deep whisper, a muttering, evil voice coming from
the Tartarus. The voice is said to be older than ancient Greece and to have
powerful magical properties. It howls with frustration when Percy escapes
with the bolt (Riordan 2005, 306). This evil is Kronos; the father of the
Olympians who, according to the myth, swallowed his children alive,
fearing that one of them would one day depose him. He did not escape this
fate. Zeus survived and, with the help of his brothers and sisters, confined
Kronos to Tartarus for eternity.
The hero’s ascencion to Olympus to return the bolt to Zeus is an
opportunity to meet the father in person. The Olympians are grateful to
Percy for his services but remain aloof and reserved. The father is cold and
inaccessible. Although Percy craves Poseidon’s love he muses: “I wasn’t
sure what I saw in his face. There was no clear sign of love or approval.
Nothing to encourage me […] he did not know what to make of me”
(Riordan 2005, 341). And then: “I was glad Poseidon was so distant. If
he’d tried to apologise, or told me he loved me, or even smile, it would’ve
felt fake. Like a human dad making some lame excuse for not being
around” (342).
Poseidon recognises Percy as his son and promises to free Sally from
Hades but has no tender words for his offspring. He calls Percy his
“wrongdoing” (Riordan 2005, 341) and adds: “Still, I am sorry you were
born, child. I have brought you a hero’s fate, and a hero’s fate is never
happy. It is never anything but tragic”. Percy tries not to feel hurt and
mutters “I don’t mind, Father” (346).
346 Chapter Seventeen

The final part of the adventure, the hero’s return from his journey, is
played out in the camp, where Percy is given a warm welcome. The real
thief, Luke, must now be revealed. Luke is another disenchanted, rejected
child that has turned against the father. He is a “nihilist” who speaks the
language of doubt: “Didn’t you realize how useless all is? All the
heroics—being pawns of the gods. They should’ve been overthrown
thousands of years ago, but they’ve hung on, thanks to us” (Riordan 2005,
365). This son owes no allegiance to the Olympians: “Their precious
‘Western civilization’ is a disease, Percy. It is killing the world. The only
way to stop it is to burn it to the ground, start over with something more
honest” (365). Luke admits helping Kronos rise out of Tartarus, and even
when Percy shouts: “He [Kronos] is brainwashing you” (366), Luke
replies: “All gods know how to do is replay their past […] I wanted to pull
Olympus down stone by stone. Olympians are so arrogant […] There is a
new golden age coming” (367).
Brainwashed or pawn? Not being “a pawn” means accepting Olympian
reason and rejecting Kronos. Percy’s rationality echoes the neoliberal
principle that individuals are responsible for their choices, including the
choice of evil. The neoliberal individual sees itself as a “decision unit”
(Elliott 2009) especially when confronted with binaries like freedom and
unfreedom, good and evil. The difference between instrumentality and
reason matters little. All that matters is the use of means to an end (2009,
354). By the same token, the powerlessness of the ones that falls by the
sideway, like Luke, is their fault and there is no compassion for such an
individual. Campbell argues that the ascent to Heaven (apotheosis), the
pinnacle of the hero’s journey, coincides with the atonement with the
father. Atonement concerns both father and son and is the final step in the
process of maturity. The father is no longer the ogre or the persecutor
(1999, 129). The punitive superego, the sin or the repressed id is
abandoned (130). The rivalry with the father for the mastery of the
universe ends (136), but only a son who has been effectually purged of all
infantile traits can be entrusted. Twice born, he has become himself the
father (137). Campbell sees this end as attaining a state of love and
expanded cosmic wisdom.
In the case of Percy Jackson no such final step takes place. The ascent
to Olympus serves the father’s desire to the very end and does not allow
the son to take the place of the father. The happy ending is effected by the
separation of the good Percy from the evil Luke and the good Olympians
from the evil Kronos. The similarities between the two children and their
parents are overlooked, as is the fact that the new order necessitates a
libidinal economy which carries traces of different stages of psycho-sexual
 Neoliberal Values in Teenage Literature 347

development in a state of flux: elements of the Oedipus complex (rivalry,

ambivalence, love for the mother), together with characteristics of
regression to previous states of development (dependence, sadistic and
masochistic impulses, phallic adherence). In mythological terms, natural
genealogical progression is suspended: Zeus and Poseidon can and must
kill father Kronos, or, once again, confine him to Tartarus; their own sons,
however, must not kill them. In that sense, the Oedipal scenario is
suspended. In the Oedipal scenario the (symbolic) death of the father is
always necessary (Gunn 2008). The ensuing guilt allows the child to
access his own desire. It installs the law of the father as a healthy and
flexible, rather than harsh and punitive superego. This Oedipal guilt, notes
Lacan in an oblique reference to apotheosis, is the “inverted ladder” via
which we reach the law of desire (Lacan 1992, 324).
The regressive nature of the father-son relationship is further represented
by the importance of propping up the latter’s potency/impotence. Another
similarity is occulted: Kronos is weak and needs to the bolt (phallus) to
rise from the pit. The Olympians are mighty but also need the phallus.
Both are powerless and need their sons to act on their behalf. The archaic
phallic father, argues Stein, poses as both “the phallus for his son” (2010,
52) and the one who “begets the son from the phallus” (93). In clinical
terms, the “omnipotent” father is a variation of the weak puppet-like father
who needs to be resuscitated with sacrifices in order to function as
protector (94). This conflation of power and powerlessness is, in my view,
central to the game of neoliberalism. It lies at the heart of the son’s
emotional frustration and the excessive independence of the Olympians
who need nothing—read: everything—from their sons and daughters. But
what does it take for the child to realise that without the phallus the
ferocious father is nothing? With fear, appeal to common sense, self-
sufficiency and the threat of violence, the Olympians veil their castration
and maintain their authority by preventing access to that self-evident piece
of knowledge. These are typical totalitarian operations promulgated in the
novel as necessary measures because of the present state of emergency.
Splitting good from evil has important political implications. It
separates the lawful use of violence by the sovereign or the state from its
lawless, obscene supplement (Žižek, 2008, 27), represented here by Luke
and Kronos. For Agamben (2014) the awareness of the separation of the
lawful from the lawless use of violence lies at the heart of Western
democracy, since Western democracy is founded on the very dialectic
between two antithetical elements: nomos (legal right) and anomy (pure
violence). As long as these elements remain separated, argues Agamben
(2014), their dialectic works, but when they tend toward a reciprocal
348 Chapter Seventeen

indetermination and a fusion into a unique power with two sides, when the
state of emergency becomes the rule, the political system transforms into
an apparatus of death. This is exactly the problem we encounter in Percy
Jackson: the increasing convergence of nomos and anomy at a state of
emergency, and the dramatic similarity between the opposite sides.
But, one might argue, is this not precisely the point at which an
individual is called to exercise their own judgment and see for themselves
the merit of a just cause? In order to answer this question let us be
reminded of the coercive way in which Percy’s perspective is created (“are
you a myth?”) before being asked to fight for the cause of the Olympians.
Let us also be reminded that the success of the dreamwork of ideology lies
in the very gap between its manifest and its latent content (Žižek 2008). In
the present novel this is the difference between seeing and not seeing. It is
summed up in a powerful symbolic moment: in Hades, Percy hears the
chilling voice of Kronos and comes very close to actually seeing him in
the pit of Tartarus. But at that very moment he turns his gaze away. I
would like to propose that the decision not to see for oneself or to not see
at all constitutes an abdication of judgement and the taking up of a
position of deliberate blindness. Seeing for oneself (e.g. the obviousness
of the Olympian cause) is cultivated throughout the novel. But blindness
and turning a blind eye is actually the real name of the game. At the heart
of the matter lies, not representation or witnessing, but absence. The split
between good and evil, or orderly world and chaos, existence and nothing,
us and them, is predicated on blindness. It is this crucial difference
between seeing, not seeing, and believing that is always transformed into
blind faith. In that sense, neither one’s senses nor rationality or difference
are relevant to the logic of Olympian power. This is, in fact, exemplary
dreamwork.
Such an implosion of difference is, of course, perilous. It does not only
threaten democracy as an institution founded on symbolic difference and
the dialectical separation-negotiation of meaning, but undermines
difference as the very principle that guarantees sanity, paving the way to
psychotic fusion and sameness. The lack of separation exemplified in
“seeing” and “not seeing” actually undermines the possibility of making
sense of the world.

Neoliberalism for Children

Neoliberalism is mythical in nature: it bids to be accepted as a story
foretold, with no room for surprises and nothing new to expect (Fischer
2009, 6). But as such, it exposes its repetitive and regressive nature.
 Neoliberal Values in Teenage Literature 349

Neoliberalism places the individual at the centre of its concerns and its
public pedagogy (as hero, demigod, champion of the good cause) but
actually effects the individual’s annihilation (as nobody, plaything of the
gods, expendable mortal). Neoliberalism sets up a series of dream-like
transpositions: myth for rationality, myth for tradition; pawn for free
subject and dedicated servant for independent son; fervent believer and
mesmerised soldier; one who has supressed all healthy ambivalence and
doubt, for rational thinker; potent for impotent father; and lastly, seeing for
not seeing. These transpositions, along with the ever-growing similarities
between opposite sides (Kronos and the Olympians) leave little room for
genuine difference. Instead, they create scope for manipulation.
Neoliberalism is manipulative, aiming to establish, along with
neoconservativism, “a normative social fabric of self-sacrifice and long-
term filial loyalty” (Brown 2006, 692). Yet, the incessant manipulation of
the key signifiers of politics, family, religion and culture, best exemplified
in the Percy Jackson novel by the resonant “pawn”, provides an
inadequate answer to the core question of subjectivity: “what am I?”, or, as
Lacan puts it, what do I represent in the field of symbolic relations, in the
nexus of meaning and in the field of the father’s desire? A “father” for
Lacan is always a “dead father”—a purely symbolic position, which
allows the child to take its place in the world (Gunn 2008, 8). Being
allocated the signifier “nothing” or the “father’s mistake” does not bode
well for the young subject. In that sense, subjectivity under neoliberalism/
neoconservativism is rather tragic—not simply predicated on lack or
forged in the “school of hard knocks” so beloved of the neocon Spartan
mentality, but blighted by the annihilation of the possibility of an
identification with the father. Individuation, together with ambivalence,
makes us flexible and essentially human.
It might be argued that this contemporary aberration is neoconservative,
rather than neoliberal. But should we try to reinstitute such a distance
between the two political fields after witnessing their collusion? Let us
then propose instead that in their existing alliance, neoliberalism dreams a
neoconservative dream, and contemplates a neoconservative phantasy—
namely, an army of dutiful, deindividualised servants—that contradicts
manifest neoliberal democratic principles. In that context, the desire for
the strong father chimes with a desire for a protective figure, a return to
Western supremacy and its superiority to “barbaric” civilizations,
represented here by the female-orientalised monsters and Kronos. A
pseudo-historical claim is born with, and reinforced by, the creation of a
“family” of warriors ready to defend the law of the father. However, this
army of fanatics is nothing but a regression, the primordial horde (see
350 Chapter Seventeen

Stein 2010), the undifferentiated group of envious sons living under the
reign of the dominant father. Neoliberalism dreams of its own barbaric
counterpart: the very medieval Other it denounces in contemporary Middle
Eastern cultures, with the accusation that they cultivate a “vassal
mentality” (Berzins and Cullen 2003). Dreaming is wish fulfilment
(Laplance and Pontalis 1998, 483): neoliberalism dreams of holding on to
power. In their reverie, its subjects concoct (nostalgia-based) plans for de-
democratization, hoping to save self and family through the revival of the
myth of noble origins and the renewal of American-Adamic narratives.
Neoliberalism is not rational but ritualistic. Baudrillard (2004, 95)
notes that we no longer have rituals for curbing authority and power, like
the periodically killing of the king. Nor do we have rituals for re-enacting
the foundational violence of the state. Yet a new ritual seems to emerging
in teen novels: evil returns periodically and, therefore, the “good gods”
demand the periodic shedding of blood that could keep evil away. Now the
regulatory sacrifice of the king falls on the shoulders of the common man.
In return, the common man, in his free will, in his desire to please the
father, dreams of the end of his freedom (Baudrillard 2004, 51). He does
not create history, he just concatenates myth and legend in a banal
narrative (Baudrillard, 2004, 54). He is not free, but subject to “objective
conditions” (Baudrillard 2004, 56), part of a circuit of superior forces and
a constant peripeteia (or serialised adventure in teen literature) pivoting on
the tremendous will of the father.
“What is in it for me?” he might ask, like the good entrepreneur he was
taught to be. Nothing! Blind faith is what you buy into and your consent is
being manufactured and already determined for you—ahead of you, as an
always and already impossible choice.

References
Agamben, G. 2014. “Thought is the Courage of Hopelessness: an
Interview with Philosopher Giorgio Agamben.” Verso Books website,
June 17. Retrieved from:
http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1612-thought-is-the-courage-of-
hopelessness-an-interview-with-philosopher-giorgio-agamben
Ammon, L. 2014. “Where We Have Gone Before: Star Trek into and out
of Darkness.” Implicit Religion 17 (4): 379–393.
Baudrillard, J. 2004. Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Hamilton
Grant, I. London: Sage Publications.
Benziman, G. 2013. “Author, Father, President: Paul Auster’s Figures of
Invisibility.” Canadian Review of American Studies 43(3): 462–479.
 Neoliberal Values in Teenage Literature 351

Berzins, C. and Cullen, P. 2003. “Terrorism and Neo-Medievalism.” Civil

Wars 6(2): 8–23.
Bleiker, R. 2003. “Aestheticizing Terrorism: Alternative Approaches to 11
September.” Australian Journal of Politics and History 49(3): 430–
445.
Brown, W. 2006. “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservativism,
and De-Democratization.” Political Theory 34(6): 690–714.
—. 2003. “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy.” Theory and
Event 7(1). Retrieved online. DOI:10.1353/tae.2003.0022
Campbell, J. 1993. The Hero with the Thousand Faces. London: Fontana
Press.
Dittmer, J. 2005. “Captain America’s Empire: Reflections on Identity,
Popular Culture, and Post-9/11 Geopolitics.” Annals of the Association
of American Geographers 95(3): 626–643.
Elliott, J. 2009. “The Return of the Referent in Recent North American
Fiction: Neoliberalism and Narratives of Extreme Oppression.” Novel:
A Forum on Fiction 42(2): 349–354.
Fisher, M. 2009. Capitalist Realism, Is There No Alternative? Winchester:
Zero Books
Furrow, D. 2009. Revising the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in
America. NY: Prometheus Books.
Gilbert, J. 2013. “What Kind of Thing is Neoliberalism.” New Formations
80–81: 7–22.
Giroux, H. 2005. “The Error of Neoliberalism: Rethinking the
Significance of Cultural Politics.” College Literature 32(1): 1–19.
Griswold, J. 1993. Audacious Kids: Coming of Age in America’s Classic
Children’s Books. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gunn, J, 2008. “Father Trouble: Staging Sovereignty in Spielberg’s War of
the Worlds.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 25(1): 1–27.
Grimes, K. 2002. “Harry Potter: Fairy-Tale Prince, Real Boy and
Archetypical Hero” in The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter:
Perspectives on a Literary Phenomenon, ed. Whited, L., 89–122.
Columbia: University of Missouri Press
Johnson, M. 2011. “Yes, Teenage Fiction Can Be Dark: But It Shows That
Teenagers Are Not Alone.” The Guardian, June 8. Retrieved from:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/jun/08/teen-fiction-
dark-young-adult
Jones, D.M. and Smith M.L.R. 2010. “Terror and the Liberal Conscience:
Political Fiction and Jihad—The Novel Response to 9/11.” Studies in
Conflict and Terrorism 33(10): 933–948.
352 Chapter Seventeen

Lacan, J. 1992. Écrits: A Selection, trans. Sheridan, A. London:

Tavistock/Routledge.
—. 1993. The Psychoses. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III 1955–
1956, trans. Grigg, R. London: Routledge.
Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J-B.1998. The Language of Psychoanalysis.
London: Karnac Books.
Lazzarato, M. 2011. The Making of the Indebted Man. Cambridge Mass:
MIT Press/Semiotext(e).
Lemaire, A. 1991. Jacques Lacan. London: Routledge.
Lerer, S. 2009. Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to
Harry Potter. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Lopez, A. 2008. “‘Everybody Else Just Living their Lives’: 9/11, Race and
the New Postglobal Literature.” Patterns of Prejudice 42(4–5): 509–
529.
Loewy, M. 2014. “Lunar Park: From Ashes to Ashes.” European Journal
of American Culture 33(3): 209–222.
Nikolajeva, M. 2008. “Harry Potter and the Secrets of Children’s
Literature.” Critical Perspectives on Harry Potter, ed. Heilman, E.,
225–242. London: Routledge.
O’Keefe, D. 2003. Readers in Wonderland: The Liberating Worlds of
Fantasy Fiction from Dorothy to Harry Potter. London: Continuum
Press.
Parish, M.J. 2012. “9/11 and the Limitations of the Man’s Man
Construction of Masculinity in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man.” Critique
53(3): 185–200.
Rank, O. 2015. The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, trans. Richter, G. NY:
John Hopkins University Press.
Riordan, R. 2005. Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. London: Puffin
Books.
Stein, R. 2010. For Love of the Father: A Psychoanalytic Study of
Religious Terrorism. Stanford: Sanford University Press.
Zipes, J. 2001. Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children’s
Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter. NY: Routledge.
Žižek, S. 2008. In Defence of Lost Causes. London: Verso Press.
 CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

WHAT’S AWESOME?
COERCIVE ELEMENTS AND THE THREAT
OF CHILD SACRIFICE IN THE LEGO MOVIE

LOUIS ROTHSCHILD

In the end, Icarus was not so much a dangling man (Oates 2005), but a
dead boy encumbered if not suffocated by his father’s idealised
technological innovation. Although he had no fear of flying, we might say
that Icarus could not manage to successfully utilise the fragile space of his
inherited wings in a direction of continued separation and individuation
(Mitchell 1986). i Had his father Daedalus been able to moderate his
technocratic pride (cf., Foucault [1965] 1988) a different outcome might
well have been managed. My concern in this chapter extends beyond the
physicality of child survival, toward a shared capacity to envisage a
developing and mutually affirming relationship between a child and a
parent. Through analysis of The Lego Movie (dirs. Lord and Miller 2014)
the goal of this chapter is to situate contemporary parental blindness in
order to foster a perception that aids flourishing.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, blindness has Oedipal implications,
which is to say, relational ramifications that revolve around the manner in
which a child’s creative and destructive tendencies are, or are not, situated
and transformed within an evolving social network. My reading is
informed by Donald Winnicott’s ([1971] 2005) idea of a “Z dimension”,
comprised of a moment or moments in which a chronic lack of parental
recognition alters the developmental trajectory of a child. It is through
such a tragic inheritance of unachieved recognition that Oedipus commits
incest and murder prior to symbolically blinding himself at the end of
Sophocles’ play (cf., Mullahy 1953). The first crime, then, is not murder
or incest, but an annihilation of being, derived from a negligence or failure
on behalf of a parent to mindfully bear witness to a relationship in a
manner that facilitates mutuality. Sophocles’ caution in regard to the ease
354 Chapter Eighteen

and danger of the turning of a blind eye and the subsequent denial of
blindness is thematically renewed in The Lego Movie. Through analysis of
this film, I will show that it is the denial of blindness, which is to also say
a denial of a child’s emotional needs, that is a major risk of neoliberalism.
The popularity of The Lego Movie serves to simultaneously illustrate both
the pedestrian qualities of denied blindness and an awareness of threats to
successful parenting found in a progressively atomised, global, and
technocratic society.

Another Brick in The Wall

The Lego Movie is a mostly animated film marketed to children. The
animated characters are Lego minifigures, which populate the structures
and sets found in the Lego line of toys. The story follows a popular and
therefore recognisable plot in which a nefarious governmental/corporate
regime (headed by a man named Business) seeks to destroy the world with
his weapon “The Kragle”. It is up to marginalised rebels to save the day
with the help of their reluctant messiah Emmet, who might be able to
successfully wield a weapon that looks like a red Lego brick and is called
the “Piece of Resistance” in order to disable The Kragle. The Kragle is
actually a tube of Krazy Glue used by the evil Lego minifigure Lord
Business to immobilise other Lego minifigures in their environments. It is
this stasis or immobility that is considered to be the end of the world, and
the Piece of Resistance is actually the tube of glue’s cap, an artifact
capable of stopping the relentless use of glue. The rebels seek to prevent
stasis and restore a capacity for creativity. As the story reaches its
conclusion, the viewer finds that the animated story exists within a story
not of plastic toys, but of human flesh and blood. Simply, The Kragle and
The Piece of Resistance have been created through a child’s imaginative
play with his father’s extensive Lego collection. We further find that this
particular play has been an attempt to make sense of the father’s rigidity—
that extends to the use of Lego toys. Only the father is to use Lego in this
home, and he does so in a rote manner, without an active imagination. The
film then is an individualistic and heroic fantasy quest of rebellious
trespass, aimed to ascertain and repair a damaged world. Immobilised
Lego pieces represent an end of a world threatened by the destructive
potential of a father’s narcissistic and relentless need for order within the
family home. Adding to the climax, the boy’s transgressive and hidden
play is interrupted by the arrival of his actual father, who is able to not
only see but to eventually tolerate seeing his own error (or madness), as
reflected in his son’s disruption.
 What’s Awesome? The Lego Movie 355

The Lego Movie opens within the wildness of the son’s fantasy play:
the villain, Business, makes a proclamation that any hope of redemption is
simply a product of fantasy, or a joke. Following this, the viewer is
transported eight-and-a-half years into the future where Emmet, the
unsuspecting protagonist, who is a construction worker minifigure, is
introduced. His characterisation emphasises his rather dim-witted adherence
to his conventional, banal lifestyle. For Emmet, banality includes simplistic
and technocratic self-help material entitled, “Instructions: How to Fit in,
Have Everyone Like You, and Always Be Happy”. This illustrates a naive
assumption that everything has already been written down, so that there is
nothing new to discover (Dorfman 2010), and the idea that knowledge and
happiness may diverge in an unfree society (Jacoby 1975). Denial is part
and parcel of this relentlessly positive environment where Emmet
contemplates the violent propagandistic instruction that what is found to
be “weird” should be blown up, while a song whose predominate lyric is:
“everything is awesome” plays in the background. Old neighbourhoods are
razed and by extension history is demolished by Emmet and his fellow
construction workers, in order to begin construction on new and taller
buildings. The viewer of the film is shown that all workers are being
monitored, and also finds that the same song continues to play for the
entire workday. As Emmet comes close to a critical thought, such as
wondering about the recommendation to blow up what is weird, he falls
into a dark hole and begins a trip through a proverbial looking glass.
Unbeknownst to him, he has found what underground (revolutionary)
master Lego builders call the Piece of Resistance. Due to his decision to
touch this thing that appears different, the glue cap becomes a burden
magically affixed to his back. Curiosity is shown to be precarious, and the
Piece of Resistance now explicitly marks Emmet as different.
Unlike the child whose play with these figures is the film’s narrative
starting point, Emmet is unable to hide his marking, and this is both
dangerous and interesting. The Piece of Resistance is being sought by
members of the underground movement—who believe that whoever it
becomes affixed to is messianic (referred to as: “The Special”)—and by
the regime that wishes to possess the Piece of Resistance, so that there can
be no resistance to oppressive immobility. Tension mounts as members of
the government’s police find him first and promptly interrogate him with
questions such as: “Why are you doing this three days before President
Business uses The Kragle to end the world?” For Emmet, any knowledge
of creative difference (much less knowledge of destructive politics)
appears dissociated or simply absent. Emmet’s interrogator utilises the
threat of melting his plastic body to instill panic, and this playful torture of
356 Chapter Eighteen

a plastic figure is illustrative of the sort of thinking found in a child’s

attempt to master anxiety in identification with an aggressor (Freud [1937]
1966). But before melting can occur, a female member of the underground,
Wyldstyle, rescues Emmet from captivity, and manages to escape with
him and the attached Piece of Resistance.
As Wyldstyle and Emmet escape, Wyldstyle begins to notice that
Emmet has no knowledge that other Lego worlds exist, and that he wishes
to rigidly follow all of the circumscribed rules that are contextually
sensitive to the Lego world that his construction figure self fits into. He
addresses her shock with the statement: “I never have any ideas”. Emmet’s
and the viewer’s education begins through Wyldstyle’s narrative. She
explains that Lord Business, who, unbeknownst to the revolutionaries, is
actually the alter ego of President Business, stole The Kragle to erect walls
in order to prevent Lego worlds from mixing, so as to maintain the sense
of separation that Emmet has internalised and finds normal. Less than
satisfied with his walls, the President/Lord Business plans to create order
through complete immobility. This plan amounts to a wish to annihilate
difference so as to negate autonomy and creativity. Such rigid social
policy may be compared to symptoms of psychopathy in that each
attempts to destroy or vanquish what is frustrating in a relentless and
perverse quest for satisfaction through frustration intolerance. The
preference for isolation over curiosity may be found in the increasing
rigidity of both anti-democratic social policies and sociopathic rage when
such orientations are challenged by the presence of difference.
Paternal destructiveness is found to be potent in the fantasy play of this
film. The brute force of Lord Business’ aggressive desire corresponds with
what has been considered a central component of nationalism: the wish for
exclusivity and stasis is one in which fluctuation is disavowed on one side
of a dichotomy where a revolutionary desire for perpetual disruption is a
counterphobic opposite (Zukauskaite 2014). As the film illustrates, the
pursuit of immobility is dangerous, if not psychotic, in its wish-fulfilling
attempt to deny any dependency on fluctuating relationships across both
micro interpersonal and macro social spheres.
Consistent with such an understanding of the danger of a rigidity that
does not value, much less tolerate appropriate tension, the theological
philosopher Levinas ([1968] 1990) warns that the law is not enough. In
order to be balanced, the law must be connected to an ethical source that
he referred to as “vital meaning”. In Levinas, this other component of civic
and relational life is a translation of the Hebrew word Aggadah which
refers to mystical and philosophical texts that instruct through implicit
meaning and paradox. The idea that the law need be challenged by a
 What’s Awesome? The Lego Movie 357

manner of thinking that renders the law not rigid and dichotomised, but
flexible and humane, is not easily seen, much less valued, in contemporary
and western technocratic and neoliberal contexts. From a psychoanalytic
perspective, the danger of disconnection between the law and Aggadah is a
split-off intellect that does not value or defensively disavows difference
and paradox and by extension creativity itself (cf., Winnicott [1971] 2005,
cited in Ghent 1992). The idiom “to be dead right” captures the problem
of the psychology of omnipotent hubris shared by Lord Business and
neoliberalism. Emmet’s character embodies the downside or collateral
damage of this violence when he says that he never has any ideas.
Following Arendt’s (1958) critique of Enlightenment objectivity, there
remains a continued need to address the repudiation of knowledge as
limited and embodied. Such repudiation results in an idealisation of know-
how and a devaluation of creative thought and difference in locations
ranging from the individual psyche to social groups. This fractured
relationship between know-how and creativity is demonstrated in The
Lego Movie and thereby illustrates a continued need to situate humane
thinking pace thinkers such as Levinas and Arendt within relational life.
Immobilisation (the destructive effect of violence), is nowadays found
across neighbourhoods in both psychic annihilation and physical murder.
Differences of degree and kind exist; as, for example, psychic murder may
be survived while physical annihilation cannot. Yet, the effects of each
may be dissociated and repeated. Tuning into a traumatised relational
ground, be it between parent and child or between citizens in varied
neighbourhoods and social positions, is the sort of witnessing required to
begin to associate to what is dissociated.
Returning to the narrative of the children’s movie, we find that through
the boy’s effort to articulate what he sees through play, Wyldstyle and
Emmet have ventured through Lego worlds such as the Wild West in order
to find and assemble other master builders like Wyldstyle who have
managed to retain possession of and cultivate, not only ethical engagement
but with it, creativity. In a clever move on the part of the filmmakers, an
assembly of well-known superhero and fantasy hero Lego figures (ranging
from Superman to Gandalf) are introduced as the revolutionary underground
members (the master builders) that could help stop Lord Business. Their
assembly takes place in Cloud Cuckoo Land, a place of “no rules, no
bedtimes, and no negativity”. Like the Neverland of Peter Pan (Barrie
[1911] 2000), Cloud Cuckoo Land may be understood as a strange
counterpoint that could potentially work like the Aggadah. As is the case
with the Neverland, this fantasyland is imagined to be split-off from the
dominant culture through traumatic fracture (cf., Yeoman 1998). What is
358 Chapter Eighteen

left is an idealised and timeless play space. This idealised place is

interrupted by Lord Business’ police force that has placed a tracking
device on Emmet and subsequently manage to arrest most of the
revolutionary master builders. Once again Emmet and Wyldstyle escape.
Wyldstyle shows Emmet (who is falling in love with her) that one “builds
as they go”. Yet, haphazard building does not go far enough. The main
point of this film is that it matters how one cultivates creative capacities.
Emmet perceiving himself as helpless, wonders aloud how he can trust
his instincts if they are terrible. This quality of self-reproach is a sign of a
psychology of emptiness and further demonstrates the deadliness of
passivity. In such a mental state, one does not consciously possess
schematic structures that would allow one to tolerate, much less enjoy a
creative encounter with the unknown (Schachtel [1959] 2001). This
absence of the structures necessary for a creative autonomy is the violence
that is the heart of the film. Wyldstyle’s presence allows Emmet to begin
to notice that his self-reproach is a state of mind, in which he treats
himself as a thing, and that this is a case of mistaken identity as he is
actually alive. However, his new found interest that could aid development
of the schematic structures that make autonomy possible is threatened
when he begins to suffer another crisis: Emmet is overwhelmed by a sense
of being inept when he meets Wyldstyle’s boyfriend Batman, who has
saved them from Lord Business’ police. Feelings of helplessness when
exposed to danger and wishing for rescue are important elements common
to children’s fantasies. Here, the difference between fantasy and reality is
great.
With the presence of Wyldstyle and Batman as surrogate parents,
Emmet is fortunate to find himself in the position of a child in the throes
of an Oedipus complex that can be survived. For creativity to be of use, he
needs to find (following his shattered idealism and newfound sense of
separation in the backseat of the Batmobile) that his murderous fantasies
are potent and can be turned into an ability to learn to build. Batman’s
backstory includes his being the alter ego of a successful businessman. In
this film, he is an alter ego parental figure who will help Emmet find that
he is not empty and can challenge Lord Business’ psychopathy.
Interestingly, Lego Batman’s excessive masculinity is reminiscent of the
leatherman or body-builder figures of gay sub-culture, in which masculinity
is commonly presented as performative (cf., Cohan 1997; Goldberg 1992).
This protected portrayal of “hardness” found in the film’s portrayal of
child’s play is striking in its capacity to provide an imagined heteronormative
presence of soft accessibility that is more tangible than what is found in
the harder relationship that the boy has with his own father (cf., Rothschild
 What’s Awesome? The Lego Movie 359

2004). Simply, Batman presents a contrasting male authority figure who,

unlike Lord Business, is capable of feeling some amount of empathy,
however slight. As a father surrogate, Batman is a builder whose
experience is greater than Emmet’s. He not only composes music but also
manages to fashion a submarine, which facilities escape for this ad hoc
triadic family and a few others from the raid on Cloud Cuckoo Land. At
sea, Emmet is asked if he is as special as the master builders hope he
might be. In a scene of Oedipal wish fulfillment for Emmet, Batman’s
submarine falls apart. In this moment, what may be considered parental
vulnerability is an opportunity for competitive endeavour for Emmet, who
fashions a design deemed plain (if not ridiculous) but potent enough to
avert everyone being engulfed by the sea.
Encouraged by his success while becoming aware of his creative
capacities, Emmet utilises his rote construction worker knowledge in order
to build a plain spaceship that will not stand out, so that these heroes can
use the Piece of Resistance to stop Lord Business. Their plan moves
forward, and together Wyldstyle and Emmet find themselves facing The
Kragle. Aware of her own power (cf., Irigaray 1985), Wyldstyle tells
Emmet that she had thought that she would be the one to disrupt Lord
Business’ rigidity with the Piece of Resistance. As Emmet shares that he
wanted to be the guy who pleased her, and finds that Wyldstyle does truly
appreciate him, Batman interrupts their union a second time with plans to
be of help. Wyldstyle leaves Emmet and Batman to disable The Kragle. As
Emmet reminds Batman to follow instructions, Batman replies, “Don’t
worry dad, I read your dumb instructions, stop yelling at me”. This
moment presents an interesting reversal in response to being passive. This
father’s hypermasculinity is brittle as he so easily identifies as a child
spoken at and not with. This experience becomes protracted as Batman’s
affirmative, albeit somewhat aggressive, response affords the less
experienced Emmet with a sense of relational authority. The capacity to
tolerate such a challenge to autonomy and maintain a modicum of relatedness
is a central component of successful fathering (Rothschild 2009).
One reviewer (Lane 2014) of The Lego Movie observed that when
building with Lego, sons typically want to follow the rules and that it is
fathers who wish to disrupt or get messy. In addition to disruption, the
challenge to maintain some restraint (as Batman does) is found in the
capacity to provide mutually attuned empathy that recognises the
developmental need of the parent to work with the task of holding and
letting go, so that the child’s ability to develop self-assurance in regard to
their own work might grow. This sort of engagement is what interrupts
Emmet’s emptiness which in itself is an embodiment of a tantalising
360 Chapter Eighteen

transience that has been considered a condition of fatherlessness (Strenger

2005), marking the loss of a personal transmission of cultural values that
once internalised, become pathways facilitating creative participation
within the order of the world (cf., Campbell [1949] 1973).
Once depersonalising forces have disrupted an individual or culture,
reclaiming independence in order to find a context in which participation
may again become creative, is no small matter (cf., Lear 2006). What is
true here for cultures in general is also true for particular selves, and a
vague desire to be a creative participant within the order of the world is
what prompted a boy to create Emmet. His play illustrates precariousness,
and the plans to disable The Kragle begin to fall apart. All the master
builders are captured. Lord Business orders his robots to destroy the most
senior master builder Vitruvius, a person of colour whose voice is that of
the actor Morgan Freeman, and who is referred to by Lord Business as an
old man. Although neoliberalism may attack vulnerability, Vitruvius
explains to Lord Business that he prefers the label “experienced” to “old”
and attempts to defend himself. A brief moment of battle serves to
illustrate that the greatest threat of rapid, unmediated cultural change is a
loss of productive communication across races, cultures, and between
generations due to devaluing traditions deemed other or antiquate. Morgan
Freeman’s character is killed, and Lord Business begins a monologue in
which he tells Emmet that he is not special anymore. Further, Lord
Business discloses that he “never got a trophy just for showing up”. The
Piece of Resistance is removed from Emmet’s back and taken by Lord
Business, as he initiates his plan to destroy everything with the Krazy Glue
Kragle. Pace an Oedipal-like fear of retaliation in response to declarations
of independence, Lord Business now attaches Emmet to a sort of bomb.
After watching his hometown get destroyed on a video monitor, Emmet
jumps from Lord Business’ skyscraper in hopes of retrieving the Piece of
Resistance. His act disables the bomb and frees the other master builders
who, while thinking Emmet has died and mourning Emmet’s loss, realise
that ordinary people do have special ideas. This recognition of an other as
valuable affords a mutuality that leads the master builders to take over a
television station and broadcast a call to revolt that encourages citizens to
build however they may desire, as a way to fight back against Lord
Business. Walls begin to break down and Lego worlds begin to mix.
Emmet has fallen through space only to land on the floor of a basement
where he begins to see that his Lego world is actually situated atop a crafts
table. There, Emmet notices a strange creature who the viewer recognises
as a human white middle-class boy. The boy picks up Emmet and calls
him by name. Soon the boy becomes frightened as his father enters the
 What’s Awesome? The Lego Movie 361

basement dressed as though he has just returned home from a day of

white-collar office work. Father begins to scold his son for disorganising
his well-built Lego world. Father tells son that he is in his father’s world
and that he is not supposed to disrupt anything. The spectator hears the
father say that everything needs to be put back in its place and, as he says
the word “permanently”, we are shown a drawer full of tubes of Krazy
Glue. We next hear Emmet scream, “More Kragles?!”. In a sequence of
rapid switches in perspective, utilising the voices of the humans and the
Lego characters, the rebellion begins to be stopped. The boy is told that he
is mistaken and the father angrily begins to tidy up. Emmet knows that the
boy is on his side and attempts to escape from the father’s worktable. The
boy distracts his father, returns the Piece of Resistance to Emmet, and tells
him: “it’s up to you”. The father begins to notice that his son has made
some interesting work, and asks him about what he has been doing, as
opposed to simply punishing his disruptive mess. The father continues to
relent as he reads his son’s play and thereby sees how he has thwarted his
child.
One way of reading this child’s play with his father’s Lego is that the
son has begun to perseverate due to having been disrupted by his father’s
anxiety, which occluded a loving relationship. Anxiety here refers to the
father’s distress in relation to experiences with uncertainty found in
encounters with messiness. This father’s requirement that he alone uses
Lego—and for building purposes, not to enjoy a creative endeavour—in
order to be able to enjoy a fixed feeling of completion found in his
encounter with glued Lego sets, is a brittle intolerance suggesting that for
him uncertainty is equated with an experience of engulfment and loss that
cannot be tolerated. Instead of learning to love, this father works to
actively deny separation and impermanence. Yet, unlike Icarus and
Oedipus, this son has managed to rebel in a manner that could eventually
be respectfully heard not as a threat but as an SOS signal, saving each of
them from a neurotic superego formed on the false morality of an
infanticidal father (cf., Covitz 1997).
When the father is finally able to see, he joins his child in play by
asking what the construction worker would ask President Business if he
could. Here the viewer sees Emmet tell President Business that he is
talented and interesting and does not have to be bad, and that all of them
are special. As Emmet and President Business hug, father and son hug
also. Glue begins to be removed, and a mother’s voice is heard calling that
it is dinnertime. With a move toward maternal recognition, the father tells
his son that as he is now letting him play, that they need to also make
room for his younger sister. The movie ends with a shot of the sister’s
362 Chapter Eighteen

more simplistic toys, which threatens the prospect of an excess of chaos

and destruction. Such an ending situates the destructive elements of
creativity as a real danger. Facilitating developing structures is necessary
in order to work with a centre that cannot hold, and it is through
attempting to foster appropriate tension through play that parents can work
toward balance, so children might learn to successfully fly.

Where Do the Children Play?

As a commercial venture, The Lego Movie produced close to five-
hundred-million dollars in box office revenue, and this success helped
Lego, a previously struggling company, to recover market dominance only
a decade after announcing a significant deficit (Stock 2014). It is
remarkable in its own right that this extremely popular toy and its maker
had lost footing in contemporary culture and required the aid of
consultants. One component of Lego’s strategy was to hire social scientists
to conduct ethnographic research into its customers. The research found
that educated parents were “staging” their children’s development in a
police-like manner of discipline and surveillance that actively altered and
limited child’s play (Madsbjerg and Rasmussen 2014). In addition to
manufacturing The Lego Movie, Lego developed an overarching response
to the problems of diminished play by tying its previously more open-
ended toy to successful commercial movies and their central characters.
That this commercial tie-in maintains play by limiting creative
possibilities is a bittersweet indicator of a trend impacting the
contemporary families who can afford to stage their children’s lives in the
first place. Data in Lego’s research show that children maintained sites of
resistance in hidden—that is, not staged—play spaces, such as placing
something under a bed so as to play outside of a sphere of parental
management. Such a finding is central to the story of The Lego Movie, as
the boy in the film not only resists excessive parental rigidity, but also
actively ruptures the limits of the atomised play sets in order to create his
own narrative worlds.
Stories depicting children engaged in creative play are not new, and the
British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott ([1971] 2005) includes Winnie the
Pooh and Peanuts cartoons as central to his analysis of the magic of living
in an imaginative and creative fashion. In addition to portraying the
internal worlds found in creative play, these stories illustrate what
Winnicott termed the transitional object. Such an object, e.g. the stuffed
bear that is the character Pooh and the plastic figure that is Emmet, inhabit
a paradox, which demands respect and toleration of an object that is
 What’s Awesome? The Lego Movie 363

neither an internal object of fantasy nor outside of control—like a real

parent who possesses autonomy and agency. Being a real possession that a
child can manage, this special object facilitates transitions. Here the line
between fantasy and reality is intentionally blurred. Once a minifigure is
given a name like Emmet, it is no longer simply an item as it is for the
boy’s father. It seems reasonable to think that the manner and degree to
which an adult capable of empathic care allows children to feel safe and to
imagine that their development, affects the child in a positive manner. The
importance of such security is great, as the state of children’s creative
play, a process of finding through pleasure what occupies or preoccupies
you (Phillips 1988), can be likened to a canary in a complicated cultural
coal mine. The threat to play may be measured by the degree to which
children identify as passive consumers who are empty (cf., Giroux 2014a,
2014b) and as Emmet says, “never have any ideas”.

If I Am In Mind, How Am I?
Through appreciation that limited recognition encourages creativity and a
failure to recognise fosters a rigid emptiness, Winnicott ([1971] 2005)
developed the notion of the Z dimension as a marker of a loss of faith due
to the overwhelming presence of emptiness. Winnicott writes that for a
baby the feeling of mother’s existence lasts x minutes. It the mother is
away for longer than x minutes, then the mental representation fades, as
does the capacity to use this symbol of union. This in itself is a source of
distress or a loss of faith. Ideally distress is limited and the mother returns
in x + y minutes, the baby is then soothed and faith is restored, and in a
context of soothing smiles the development of creativity may be shared.
However, if the parent returns in x + y + z minutes the baby has become
traumatised and her return does not mend this alteration. With “Z”,
defences become organised against a repetition of unthinkable anxiety.
The self creates a false (or armoured) self and if fortunate, is now faced
with the work of finding a hospitable environment in which such defensive
rigidity can be outgrown, while the self remains in conflict with a desire to
deny the need for such work (Winnicott, [1971] 2005). In The Lego Movie,
the son is burdened with Z as shown by his need to reestablish a hospitable
environment. He manages through play to communicate that dissociation
had taken, and was taking, place. At the film’s end, it is as though the
character of the father has discovered that he and his son are alive for the
first time. Finally, father is secure enough to tolerate seeing. Pace
Winnicott, a cry of Z seems to have been resolved as easily as a cry of Y.
364 Chapter Eighteen

Z defenses are not easy to resolve. With Z, instead of faith being

restored, as it is with a reunion in Y, one moves further away and begins to
see relationships as built on a scaffold of false compliance, in which
blindness is denied and accommodated. The father’s need to clean his
son’s so-called mess is an example of a violent blindness to creativity.
Fortunately, compliance is unbearable, protests are made and heard, and
compassion found. Other versions of this story are tragic, as some
traumatised children grow up knowing only pseudoknowledge that
reactively avoids reflection (cf., Fonagy 2001). Such children may never
tolerate taking leave of their own rigidity, and may never be heard. That
position may be applicable to the character of the father in the film prior to
his ability to see his son and to value creativity. The perpetual blindness
made possible by pseudoknowledge and the defensive denial that is part of
the false self-fabric of Z has much in common with what Layton (2006)
has called the normative unconscious, an internalised facilitator that
passively accepts or naturalises social inequalities among categories such
as race and gender.

Playful Interpretation
The enjoyment in play found in the boy who creates Emmet is interrupted
when his father finds him. Winnicott (1960) states that a joy may
accompany hiding behind the organisation of a false self, and that such
hiding is the best defensive response to parental failures experienced early
in life. However, Winnicott adds that it is also an alternative to being that
is comparable to an annihilation of being, the result of having twisted
oneself into a different shape in order to remain alive (cf., Eigen 2009). In
this respect, Winnicott is close to Bion’s (1962) thinking that the capacity
for frustration tolerance is related to a decision to modify frustration, and
that such a proactive decision is the beginning of a capacity for thinking.
Such modification is importantly disruptive in facilitating reorganisation
and progression by disturbing the status quo (cf., Herzog 2001; Kupers
1993). Furthermore, the conflict to communicate and hide appears to be a
necessary developmental experience from which to foster solitude
(Phillips, 1993). This is to say, the false self is part of development, and is
problematic to the degree that development becomes arrested and the false
self is felt to be a terminal point. Simply the rediscovery of being in
solitude is central to both Winnicott’s developmental psychology and the
plot of The Lego Movie. To the extent that, like the father in the film, a
neoliberal agenda considers the pseudoknowledge of a false self to be
perfect knowledge, there is a significant problem. We might say that the
 What’s Awesome? The Lego Movie 365

ability to differentiate between knowledge and pseudoknowledge is a

position of maturation.
The technocratic threat to being, as depicted in The Lego Movie, is a
worrisome part of our contemporary zeitgeist. Winnicott knew the
importance of a larger society for personal growth and felt that it was
necessary to look at society as healthy while simultaneously knowing that
the number of psychiatric unhealthy members may be too high (Winnicott
[1971] 2005). In his decision to maintain a working optimism, he further
argued in favour of the assumption that the vast majority of children never
experienced the deprivation of their original root—that is, the Z
dimension. In contrast, The Lego Movie suggests that identification with
such experience may be common. More disturbing is the idea that one is to
identify and solve this problem without assistance, and that the boy in the
film may be above average in his ability to successfully think and modify
Z. When one does not have the capacity to think (resulting from solitude),
what should be a thought becomes what in psychoanalysis is referred to as
a “bad object”, reeking havoc within the self (Bion 1962). This is not
simply an idiosyncratic individual assessment. A capacity for creativity
found in solitude may lead to a consideration of what social contexts are
necessary to facilitate productive disruptions, as opposed to experiences of
claustrophobia and agoraphobia. Solitude is a relational achievement
marked by grace, and it may not be developed in a culture that devalues
Aggadah. From this perspective, the father’s obsessional use of Krazy
Glue is in fact crazy, in that it indicates his inability to distinguish
thoughts from bad objects and inside from outside. Craziness hiding
behind and in pseudoknowledge, masquerading as knowledge, may
believe its own lie.
The popularity of The Lego Movie suggests that we as a society have a
normalising acceptance of an inevitable contact with Z (cf., Epstein 2013).
The Lego Movie also suggests that the problem of thwarting creativity can
be solved. Although there is no absolute solution to this problem, working
with that idea of faith in the ability to foster particular openings matters. It
is a loss to leave the cinema with a vague idea that others might be playing
in their respective basements, assuming of course that these imagined
others are in possession of basements, have resources to purchase Lego,
and might use Lego in an open-ended fashion. Further, it is wrongheaded
to think that such an elaborate stage is the only way to foster creativity.
The denial of a need to make contact with another is an aspect of the Z
dimension that need not be a terminal point. Finding a way out of Z is why
Emmet was created, and history shows that a piece of string may
sufficiently anchor a relational space when a Lego figure is not
366 Chapter Eighteen

forthcoming. Extending Winnicott, Eigen (2014) suggests a possibility of

working with the rigid and vulnerable qualities of the Z dimension. That is
an important—if not necessarily optimistic—working assumption. Eigen
considers that Z may be textured, and that an inner experience that
something is wrong affords a place to work and develop creative
capacities willing to work with the threat of destruction. It is hard to
sufficiently tolerate that inner sense in order to recognise and work. Here
is an imperative to develop creative capacities, in part through the act of
valuing difference. Many who conduct the private work of psychotherapy
know that valuing creativity and the oblique perspectives that appreciate
its destructive potential allows for a careful and caring building. Such
knowledge is actively in opposition to aspects of neoliberalism that
perpetuate a manner of social interaction that prevents people from
connecting private troubles with larger social and systemic considerations
(Giroux 2014a).

References
Arendt, H. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press.
Barrie, J.M. [1911]2000. Peter Pan: A Classic Illustrated Edition.
Compiled by Edens, C. San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books.
Bion, W.R. 1962. “The Psycho-Analytic Study of Thinking.” The
International Journal of Psychoanalysis 43: 306–310.
Campbell, J. [1949]1973. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Cobb, J. 2004. “No Such Thing as Racial Profiling.” The New Yorker,
December 4. Retrieved from: http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-
desk/eric-garner-racial-profiling
Cohan, S. 1997. Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Covitz, H. H. 1997. Oedipal Paradigms in Collision: A Centennial
Emendation of a Piece of Freudian Canon (1897–1997). New York,
NY: Peter Lang Publishing.
Dorfman, A. 2010. The Empire’s Old Clothes: What the Lone Ranger,
Babar, and Other Innocent Heroes do to Our Minds. Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press.
Eigen, M. 2014. The Birth of Experience. London: Karnac Books.
—. 2009. Flames from the Unconscious: Trauma, Madness, and Faith.
London: Karnac Books.
 What’s Awesome? The Lego Movie 367

Epstein, M. 2013. The Trauma of Everyday Life. New York: Penguin

Press.
Fonagy, P. 2001. Attachment Theory and Psychoanalysis. New York, NY:
Other Press.
Foucault, M. [1965]1988. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity
in the Age of Reason, trans. Howard, R. New York, NY: Vintage
Books.
Freud, A. [1937]1966. The Writings of Anna Freud Volume II: The Ego
and the Mechanisms of Defense, trans. Baines, C. New York, NY:
International Universities Press.
Ghent, E. 1992. “Paradox and Process.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 2: 135–
159.
Giroux, H. A. 2014a. The Violence of Organised Forgetting: Thinking
Beyond America’s Disimagination Machine. San Francisco, CA: City
Lights Press.
—. 2014b. Neoliberalism’s War Against Higher Education. Chicago, IL:
Haymarket Press.
Goldberg, J. 1992. “Recalling Totalities: The Mirrored Stages of Arnold
Schwarzenegger.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies
4(1): 172–204.
Herzog, J. M. 2001. Father Hunger: Explorations with Adults and
Children. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.
Irigaray, L. 1985. This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Porter, C. and Burke,
C. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Jacoby, R. 1975. Social Amnesia: A Critique of Contemporary Psychology
from Adler to Laing. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Kupers, T.A. 1993. Revisioning Men’s Lives: Gender, Intimacy, and
Power. New York, NY: The Guilford Press.
Layton, L. 2006. “Racial Identities, Racial Enactments, and Normative
Unconscious Processes.” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 75(1): 237–269.
Lane, A. 2014. “Following Orders.” The New Yorker, March 3, 84–85.
Lear, J. 2006. Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Levinas, E. [1968]1990. Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. Aronowicz, A.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Lord, P. and Miller, C. (Writers and Directors). 2014. The Lego Movie.
Warner Bros. Pictures.
Madsbjerg, C. and Rasmussen, M. B. 2014. The Moment of Clarity: Using
the Human Sciences to Solve Your Toughest Business Problems.
Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press.
368 Chapter Eighteen

Mitchell, S. A. 1986. “The Wings of Icarus: Illusion and the Problem of

Narcissism.” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 22: 107–132.
Mullahy, P. 1953. Oedipus Myth and Complex: A Review of
Psychoanalytic Theory. New York, NY: Hermitage House.
Oates, J.C. 2005. “‘Dangling Men’: Review of Indecision by Benjamin
Kunkel.” The New York Review of Books 52(17): 36–40.
Phillips, A. 1993. On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic
Essays on the Unexamined Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Rothschild, L. 2009. “Finding a Father: Repetition Difference and Fantasy
in Finding Nemo” in Heterosexual Masculinities: Contemporary
Perspectives from Psychoanalytic Gender Theory, eds. Reis, B. and
Grossmark, R., 217–230. New York: Taylor and Francis.
—. 2004. “Penis.” Men and Masculinities: A Social, Cultural, and
Historical Encyclopedia, eds. Kimmel, M. and Aronson, A. Santa
Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.
Schachtel, E. [1959]2001. Metamorphosis: On the Conflict of Human
Development and the Psychology of Creativity. Hillsdale, NJ: The
Analytic Press.
Stock, K. 2014. “At Lego, Everything Is Awesome.” Businessweek,
September 4. Retrieved from:
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-09-04/at-lego-everything-
is-awesome .
Strenger, C. 2005. The Designed Self: Psychoanalysis and Contemporary
Identities. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.
Winnicott, D.W. [1971]2005. Playing and Reality. London and New York:
Routledge Classics.
—. 1960. “The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship.” The
International Journal of Psychoanalysis 41: 585–595.
Yeoman, A. 1998. Now or Neverland: Peter Pan and the Myth of Eternal
Youth. Toronto, CA: University of Toronto Press.
Zukauskaite, A. 2014. “The Schizoanalysis of Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari, or the Political between Schizophrenia and Paranoia” in
Nationalism and the Body Politic: Psychoanalysis and the Rise of
Ethnocentrism and Xenophobia, ed. Austed, L., 109–126. London:
Karnac Books.
 What’s Awesome? The Lego Movie 369

Notes

i. In Greek mythology Icarus and his father Daedalus, the creator of the Labyrinth,
attempt to escape from Crete by means of wings constructed by Daedalus. Icarus
ignores his father’s instructions and falls into the sea.