Mothers behaving badly: chaotic hedonism and the crisis of neoliberal social reproduction

This article focuses on the significance of the plethora of representations of mothers ‘behaving badly’ in contemporary anglophone media texts, including the films Bad Moms, Fun Mom Dinner and Bad Mom’s Christmas, the book and online cartoons Hurrah for Gin and the recent TV comedy dramas Motherland, The Let Down and Catastrophe. All these media texts include representations of, first, mothers in the midst of highly chaotic everyday spaces where any smooth routine of domesticity is conspicuous by its absence; and second, mothers behaving hedonistically, usually through drinking and partying, behaviour that is more conventionally associated with men or women without children. After identifying the social type of the mother behaving badly (MBB), the article locates and analyses it in relation to several different social and cultural contexts. These contexts are: a neoliberal crisis in social reproduction marked by inequality and overwork; the continual if contested role of women as ‘foundation parents’; and the negotiation of longer-term discourses of female hedonism. The title gestures towards a popular British sitcom of the 1990s, Men Behaving Badly, which popularized the idea of the ‘new lad’; and this article suggests that the new lad’s counterpart, the ladette, is mutating into the mother behaving badly, or the ‘lad mom’. Asking what work this figure does now, in a later neoliberal context, it argues that the mother behaving badly is simultaneously indicative of a widening and liberating range of maternal subject positions and symptomatic of a profound contemporary crisis in social reproduction. By focusing on the classed and racialised dynamics of the MBB – by examining who exactly is permitted to be hedonistic, and how – and by considering the MBB’s limited and partial imagining of progressive social change, the article concludes by emphasizing the urgency of creating more connections between such discourses and ‘parents behaving politically’

Band alignment issues in metal/dielectric stacks: A combined photoemission and inverse photoemission study of the HfO 2/Pt and HfO 2/Hf systems

We have studied the HfO 2/Hf and HfO 2/Pt systems by photoemission and inverse photoemission spectroscopies. It is found that the "effective workfunction" of metals in multilayer structures are different than their vacuum workfunctions and are modified by their interface dipoles at the metal/high-k interface. The effective workfunction of Hf is 4.4 eV whereas that of Pt is 5.3 eV, within the range of acceptable values for PMOS and NMOS respectively

Critical review of the current status of thickness measurements for ultrathin SiO \u3csub\u3e2\u3c/sub\u3e on Si Part V:results of a CCQM pilot study

\u3cp\u3eA study was carried out for the measurement of ultrathin SiO \u3csub\u3e2\u3c/sub\u3e on (100) and (111) orientation silicon wafer in the thickness range 1.5-8 nm. XPS, medium-energy ion scattering spectrometry (MEIS), nuclear reaction analysis (NRA), RBS, elastic backscattering spectrometry (EBS), SIMS, ellipsometry, gazing-incidence x-ray reflectometry (GIXRR), neutron reflectometry and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) were used for the measurements. Water and carbonaceous contamination about 1 nm were observed by ellipsometry and adsorbed oxygen mainly from water at thickness of 0.5 nm were seen by MEIS, NRA, RBS and GIXRR. The different uncertainty of the techniques for the scaling constant were also discussed.\u3c/p\u3