Fierce Mamas: New Maternalism, Social Surveillance, and the Politics of Solidarity

This dissertation elucidates how motherhood functions as a site for both women’s agency and as a barrier to women’s solidarity within patriarchal culture. This research demonstrates that motherhood—as a set of discourses and practices—provides a mechanism for maintaining cultural hegemony and clarifies the processes through which dominant culture manufactures the consent of mothers via their quotidian experience. Constructions of motherhood, as mechanisms of cultural hegemony, work to hold tension between ‘traditional’ gendered norms and the seeming enablement of women’s ‘progress.’ It is a tension that is essential to the adaptability of systems of dominance in response to shifting socio-cultural norms and discourses because it allows for the recuperation of social hierarchies across time in new configurations. To illustrate these processes, this dissertation defines and explores the development, practice, and effects of a contemporary communicative strategy that I describe as “fierce mothering.” Fierce mothering is a gendered communicative practice whereby mothers articulate their subjectivity—speaking selves—by using fierce imagery either animal figures or as warriors (e.g., Mama Grizzlies, Moms Rising, Tiger Mothers) on behalf of their children. Fierceness, in this strategy, is used to frame a maternalist ethos such that the authority of the speaker is invoked through references to the instinctual, inborn expertise and knowledge that only mothers possess. This research shows that the practice of fierce mothering works as an agentic strategy enabling some mothers to negotiate for and with power, so long as they reproduce culturally hegemonic—white, Western, Christian, hetero-patriarchal—social structures. The project begins with my theoretical development of “cultural infrastructure” as a lens for exploring the longstanding, but historically contingent, utility of motherhood—as a set of social, cultural, political, and economic discourses and practices—for enabling specific groups of mothers to better navigate daily living. Following this I provide a history of the fierce mothering phenomenon and situate fierce mothering as a US political ideal. I then conduct three analyses exploring fierce mothering practices—as a strategic form of gendered communication, as an online mediated phenomenon, and through representative portrayals in popular televisual media—to critically assess their effects. Crucially, I show that utilizing fierce mothering as a strategy requires women’s assent to patriarchal structures thus also constraining the scope and effectiveness of such ‘mother power’ in line with dominant norms. The project concludes with a brief mapping of the worst implications and effects of fierce mothering, as it is currently developing, which are showcased through its adaptation for use by mothers engaged in the growing and interrelated extremist cultures of #TradWives, the Alt-Right, and the QAnon conspiracy online to promote white supremacy and racial hate. This mapping is followed by a discussion of how fierce mothering’s problematic features and role in manufacturing consent to cultural hegemony can be resisted.Doctor of Philosoph