Consuming Motherhood (review)

Motherhood imposes a birth of sorts for the women involved, according to the various authors in this exceptionally well integrated and provocative volume of essays. Women are reborn to a new status of 'mother' and simultaneously as a new kind of consumer of goods—goods in the form of services, consumer products, and even of babies. This volume weds the study of consumerism to the anthropological study of motherhood and represents a genuine contribution to an array of fields, including technological studies, reproduction studies, women's studies, and anthropology.

Editor Janelle S. Taylor begins with an essay outlining the reasons why motherhood itself is such a rich source of inquiry for students of consumerism. Motherhood (and the essays do not limit themselves to biological maternity but also deal with adoptive and fostering mothers) neatly encapsulates the productionand consumption polarities of consumerist economics. Mothering, as an intense emotional relationship, resists the logic of the market, but at the same time, being a "good mother" often requires a construction of maternal identity as a consumer. In addition, maternal status imposes new identities as a commodity: the mother and the child are commodified throughout the lifeway of motherhood. The use of ethnographic methodology provides rich and valuable insight into the very real ambivalence that mothers (birth, adoptive, fostering) experience about the intrusion of economistic models of relationships into their own dyad of child and parent.

The essays focus on the contemporary North American and European family. First, two essays (by Daniel Miller and Barbara Katz Rothman, respectively) provide context for the volume. These essays lay out some central themes of the volume: feminist understandings of the role of motherhood within capitalist systems; the tension between the bodily experience of pregnancy and the social constructions placed upon that body as a productive tool of an economic system; the demarcation of parental relationships as a form of giving and, hence, supposedly distant from the market; the psychological development of women's and children's subjectivity as it is constituted through shopping. The essays of ethnographic research and the analyses follow. Lastly, there are commentaries by Igor Kopytoff and Barbara Katz Rothman.

This volume is especially pleasing in that the essays relate to one another. Individual authors speak to each other's work beyond internal references to the landmark works of Katz Rothman, Kopytoff, and Miller. In addition, there are several common threads that unite many of the essays, and the authors are aware of these commonalities. For example, the role of technology is debated in several essays. In Taylor's essay on sonography, the role of professional sonographers in using the technology to create a "fetishized public fetus" is discussed, while Robbie E. Davis-Floyd's work focuses on another female worker, the midwife, and presents the ways midwives have used commodification to elevate their profession while simultaneously resisting the move toward market health care. Ambivalence about the consumer market infuses the attitudes of birthing women discussed by Pamela E. Klassen. Adoption imposes the status of "good" on children who then circuit through the transactions of international adoption. In two separate essays Ann Anagnost and Barbara Yngvesson examine how adoptive parents use consumerism to make children "their own." Consumerism is presented as maternal practice in several essays. Alison J. Clarke examines how the identities of 'mother' and 'child' are formulated through consumerist practices in a North London community, while Danielle F. Wozniak presents a nuanced view of how foster-care mothers resist both federal and market definitions of their emotional labor. The commodification of infants is challenged by children born with disabilities in Gail Landsman's essay, in which she also demonstrates how the parents of those children use the market to "buy" at least partial acceptance of their infants. Linda L. Layne examines how pregnancy loss is materialized by mourning parents through an array of self-created and purchased objects and narratives. Other...