Media Work, Mothers and Motherhood


Book Description

This interdisciplinary and international volume offers an innovative and critical exploration of the impact of motherhood on the engagement of women in media and creative industries across the globe. Diverse contributions critically engage with the intersections and overlap between the social categories of worker and mother, and the work of media production and maternal caregiving. Conflicting ideas about, and expectations of, mothers are untangled in the context of the working world of radio, film, television and creative media industries. The book teases out commonalities between experiences that are evident across a number of countries, from Hollywood to Bollywood, as well as examining the differences between class, religion, maternal status and cultural frameworks that surround working mothers in various nation states. It also offers some possibilities for ways forward that can improve the lives of women workers who are also mothers. A timely and valuable contribution to international debates on equality, mothers and motherhood in audiovisual industries, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of media, communication, cultural studies and gender, programmes engaged with work inequalities and motherhood studies, and activists, funders, policymakers and practitioners.




Media Work, Mothers and Motherhood


Book Description

This interdisciplinary and international volume offers an innovative and critical exploration of the impact of motherhood on the engagement of women in media and creative industries across the globe. Diverse contributions critically engage with the intersections and overlap between the social categories of worker and mother, and the work of media production and maternal care-giving. Conflicting ideas about, and expectations of, mothers are untangled in the context of the working world of radio, film, television and creative media industries. The book teases out commonalities between experiences that are evident across a number of countries, from Hollywood to Bollywood, as well as examining the differences between class, religious, maternal status and cultural frameworks that surround working mothers in various nation states. It also offers some possibilities for ways forward that can improve the lives of women workers who are also mothers. A timely and valuable contribution to international debates on equality, mothers and motherhood in audio visual industries, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of media, communication, cultural studies and gender, programmes engaged with work inequalities and motherhood studies, as well as activists, funders, policy makers and practitioners.




Taking the Village Online


Book Description

The contributing authors in this anthology address diverse topics in mothering and social media, including framing of stepmothers in online forums, mothering in the digital diaspora, the construction of the "bad mother" on Twitter, immersive gaming and parenting classes, virtual mother outlaws, alternative mothering websites, feminist parenting, and more. While the works are primarily rooted in critical and feminist perspectives, a variety of methodologies and approaches to studying mothering and social media are represented in this text, and encourage a robust and thoughtful examination of the role of interactive media in the maternal experience. Lorin Basden Arnold, Ph.D. is a family communication and gender scholar. Her recent scholarly work has primarily related to understandings and enactments of motherhood.




Making Motherhood Work


Book Description

The work-family conflict that mothers experience today is a national crisis. Women struggle to balance breadwinning with the bulk of parenting, and social policies aren't helping. Of all Western industrialized countries, the United States ranks dead last for supportive work-family policies. Can American women look to Europe for solutions? Making Motherhood Work draws on interviews that Caitlyn Collins conducted over five years with 135 middle-class working mothers in Sweden, Germany, Italy, and the United States. She explores how women navigate work and family given the different policy supports available in each country. Taking readers into women's homes, neighborhoods, and workplaces, Collins shows that mothers' expectations depend on context and that policies alone cannot solve women's struggles. With women held to unrealistic standards, the best solutions demand that we redefine motherhood, work, and family.




Chasing Superwoman


Book Description

The Christian community tends to operate under the assumption that the only women attending church are traditional stay-at-home moms. But in truth, more than 75% of mothers with school-age children work outside the home. Chasing Superwoman gives these working mothers what they’ve been craving—a funny, intelligent, relevant exploration of what it means to live out a vibrant faith amidst the many demands placed on their time and energy. Chasing Superwoman provides a much needed dialogue (not a formula) about the complex spiritual struggle of the working mother, plus a lot of laughter and encouragement for working women to embrace their busy life and trust God’s grace for getting it all done.




Motherhood in the Media


Book Description

This book examines contemporary media stories about women who kill their children. By analyzing media texts, motherhood blogs, and journalistic interviews, the book seeks to understand better maternal violence and the factors that lead women to harm their children. The central thesis of this book is that media practices have changed dramatically during the past 50 years, as has society’s views on "appropriate" feminine behavior, yet definitions of characteristics of good mothers remain largely defined by 1950s sit coms, Victorian ideals, and Christian theology. The book contends that in spite of media saturation in American society, and the media’s increased opportunities to tell complex and nuanced stories, news media narratives continue to situate maternal violence as rare, unfathomable, and unpredictable. The news media’s shift in focus—from public service to profit-making industry—has encouraged superficial coverage of maternal violence as reporters look for stories that sell, not stories that explain. Motherhood blogs, in contrast, offer an opportunity for women to tell their own stories about motherhood, based on experience. Interviews with journalists offer insights into how the structure of their jobs dictates media coverage of this intimate form of violence.




The Mother of All Jobs


Book Description

Have you ever looked at the lengthy school holiday dates and silently screamed in desperation? Have you gone part time yet are still doing a full-time workload? Have you ever been too afraid to ask about maternity benefits or flexible working? Do you constantly feel guilty about missing school events and secretly envious of other mums at the school gates who seem to be doing it all better than you? If any (or all) of the above rings true for you, you are NOT alone. While the demands of work are increasing with longer working hours and more pressure to remain 'switched on' to our phones and computers, the needs of our children and the world of school and childcare have stayed the same. Something has got to change before we all reach breaking point. The Mother of All Jobs brings together the wisdom of women who opened up about their experiences into a manifesto to help working parents thrive.




Taking the Village Online: Mothers, Motherhood and Social Media


Book Description

The rise of social media has changed how we understand and enact relationships across our lives, including motherhood. The meanings and practices of mothering have been significantly impacted by the availability of communities found via forums, blogs, and sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, as well as internet resources that function to inform maternal experience and self-concept (ex. motherhood websites, Pinterest, or YouTube). The village that now contributes to the mothering experience has grown exponentially, granting mothers access to interactional partners and knowledge never before available. This volume of works explores the impact of social media forms on our cultural understandings of motherhood and the ways that we communicate about the experience and practice of mothering.




Mothering through Precarity


Book Description

In Mothering through Precarity Julie A. Wilson and Emily Chivers Yochim explore how working- and middle-class mothers negotiate the difficulties of twenty-first-century mothering through their everyday engagement with digital media. From Facebook and Pinterest to couponing, health, and parenting websites, the women Wilson and Yochim study rely upon online resources and communities for material and emotional support. Feeling responsible for their family's economic security, these women often become "mamapreneurs," running side businesses out of their homes. They also feel the need to provide for their family's happiness, making successful mothering dependent upon economic and emotional labor. Questioning these standards of motherhood, Wilson and Yochim demonstrate that mothers' work is inseparable from digital media as it provides them the means for sustaining their families through such difficulties as health scares, underfunded schools, a weakening social safety net, and job losses.




Motherhood and Representation


Book Description

From novels of the nineteenth century to films of the 1990s, American culture, abounds with images of white, middle-class mothers. In Motherhood and Representation, E. Ann Kaplan considers how the mother appears in three related spheres: the historical, in which she charts changing representations of the mother from 1830 to the postmodernist present; the psychoanalytic, which discusses theories of the mother from Freud to Lacan and the French Feminists; and the mother as she is figured in cultural representations: in literary and film texts such as East Lynne, Marnie and the The Handmaid's Tale, as well as in journalism and popular manuals on motherhood. Kaplan's analysis identifies two dominant paradigms of the mother as `Angel' and `Witch', and charts the contesting and often contradictory discourses of the mother in present-day America.