The Motherhood Business: Consumption, Communication, and Privilege ed. by Anne Teresa Demo, Jennifer L. Borda, and Charlotte Kroløkke (review)

“The mergers of mothering and commerce, public goods and consumer goods, define the business of motherhood, and a goal of our volume [is] to understand how social inequality is a subsidiary product” (20). Anne Teresa Demo’s capacious claim in her introduction to The Motherhood Business: Consumption, Communication, and Privilege stayed with me as I read the collection, which was edited by Demo, Jennifer L. Borda, and Charlotte Kroløkke. It sets the stage for a study rich with integrated concepts and concerns—the “mergers” that meld the experiences of motherhood, the market forces that twist through our lives, whether we are parents or not, and the discourses that enable us to reflect, obscure, and make sense of this enmeshed reality. Also apparent in Demo’s statement is a purposefully ambiguous reference to “social inequality.” Demo makes no claim that this polyvocal project will outline inequality directed to or experienced by mothers; instead, she promises that the collection explores, with all due rigor, the “product[s]” of motherhood’s undeniable, if sometimes difficult to detect, relationship to consumption, empowerment, and privilege. Such products—from “mompreneurial” ventures to assisted reproductive technologies—are theorized as vexed sites of power; they result from ideologies of consumption, contribute to consumption-oriented ways of knowing and doing, and are ever implicated in the uneven and unequal consequences of consumption-driven markets. The result of this ambitious collaboration is a volume that ranges continents, lived experiences, methodological approaches, and iterations of mothering. This scope, rather than distracting, enables the collection to pose and explore intriguing and valuable questions that will surely leave readers rethinking what they know—and how they see, think, and talk—about motherhood.

In addition to Demo’s introduction, the collection contains eight chapters that explore facets of contemporary motherhood’s rhetorical relationship to consumption, particularly in terms of the objects and identities that give shape to motherhood’s various iterations. Demo helpfully defines and theorizes “consumption,” “consumerism,” and “commodification,” terms that “overlap in contradictory ways” (7). She further defines “neoliberalism,” taxonomizes “capital,” and explains that “intensive mothering” refers to an ideology that conscribes mothering (the act) to socially, morally, economically, and kairotically correct patterns of being and doing. This move to stabilize key concepts for the purpose of the collection brings precision to otherwise potentially muddled terminology, but it also encourages and enables expansive applications of these terms.

At a moment of increasing scholarly attention to rhetorics of motherhood and mothering, this collection offers unparalleled contributions that suggest the ongoing potential for this subarea of study. Readers will appreciate essays that resist close textual reading for the sake of reaching predetermined critique. Instead, contributors grapple with unresolved tensions and unexpected paradoxes. For example, many of the essays investigate mothers’ efforts to exert agency while being imbricated in a commodity culture that limits that agency. In an impressive blend of theory and criticism, Christine Harold articulates children’s development vis-à-vis commodity culture, proposing that parents feel pressure to “invent” children rather than allow them to cultivate agency through open-ended and inventive play. With similar breadth, Borda surveys the evolving “mommy” blog genre to map the shifting entrepreneurial landscape for bloggers who negotiate mothering publicly while participating in “advertising, marketing, and consumer culture” (140). In her examination of “global gestational surrogacy” and this market in India specifically (87), Karen Hvidtfeldt Madsen makes clear how blogging is used to cultivate a sense of kinship between surrogate mothers and adopting parents that enables adopters to experience “virtual motherhood” (83). After researching fertility travel of Europeans seeking transnational egg donation, Kroløkke points to the rhetorical framing of this market activity by an industry that configures egg donation as fulfilling a “higher purpose” (32), surrogates who view themselves as entrepreneurs, and those wanting to be mothers traveling to consume a...