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http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/mothering-through-precarity

Mothering through Precarity

Women's Work and Digital Media

Julie A. Wilson & Emily Chivers Yochim

"Mothering through Precarity ... richly illustrates what a theoretically, conceptually and emotionally confused and paradoxical situation women are in with respect to an online world that offers family-enhancing information and advice, communicative solace and flexible income-earning opportunities, but also exploits their ongoing efforts at maintaining a positive family environment by creating new anxieties and offering meagre financial returns.... After reading this book, it is not so difficult to understand why some women in the Rust Belt voted for Donald Trump’s media-fuelled promises of a better future."–Times Higher Education, E. Stina Lyon

"Julie A. Wilson and Emily Chivers Yochim provide a highly compelling commentary on the state of motherhood in the present moment, infused as it is with technologies and concerns about emotional and economic precarity. Making a strong (if depressing) case for the failure of the nuclear family project in the context of neoliberalism, their beautifully executed work helps us to think about labor and affect theory in new ways."– Brenda R. Weber, editor of Reality Gendervision: Sexuality and Gender on Transatlantic Reality Television

"Motherhood and mothering—a vexed feminist issue, a central form of invisible labor along vectors of race and class, a capitalist invention, a digital community, a source of affect, love, and often pain. The remarkable Mothering through Precarity manages to parse all these dimensions and more, with insight, intelligence, and compassion. Connecting capitalist economies with networks of care, Julie A. Wilson and Emily Chivers Yochim have produced a brilliant, compelling book, one that refuses easy generalizations about what it means to be a mother in uncertain neoliberal times."– Sarah Banet-Weiser, author of Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture

"... women, with children or without, have a lot to gain from this smart, insightful work. It outlines a nagging problem so specific I lacked a clear definition of it before I started reading.... It’s an idea rooted directly in our dominant political ideology, one that many cannot name: neoliberalism."– Amani Newton, Pittsburgh City Paper

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.

Julie A. Wilson is Assistant Professor of Communication Arts and Theatre at Allegheny College. Emily Chivers Yochim is Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Theatre at Allegheny College and the author of Skate Life: Re-Imagining White Masculinity.

Duke University Press | March 2017 | 232pp | 11 illus. | 9780822363477 | Paperback | £20.99*

20% discount with this code: CSL517MOTP**

*Price subject to change.

**Offer excludes the USA, South America and Australia.

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