Book review: mothering through precarity: women’s work and digital media

Julie A. Wilson and Emily Chivers Yochim. Mothering through Precarity: Women’s work and Digital Media. Duke University Press: London and Durham, 2017, 216 pp

Why don’t people act when they know about suffering? (guest-blog)

Thanks to modern media everyone in Britain knows that there are people suffering from famine, war and deprivation around the world. From Haiti to Australia they are shown the suffering – so why don’t they do anything

Incongruous encounters: media representations and lived experiences of stay-at-home mothers

This article juxtaposes mediated representations of stay-at-home mothers (SAHMs) with accounts of twenty-two UK -educated middle-class SAHMs. It exposes a fundamental chasm between media constructions of women’s “opting out” of the workplace as a personal choice, and the factors shaping women’s decisions to leave a career, and their complex, often painful consequences. The juxtaposition highlights three aspects largely rendered invisible in current representations of SAHMs: (1) the influence of husbands’ demanding careers and work cultures on their wives’ “choices” to not return to paid employment; (2) the issue of childcare; and (3) women’s immense unpaid domestic and maternal labour. Although media representations often fail to correspond to middle-class SAHMs’ lives, they shape their thinking and feelings and reconstruct their deepest yearnings and sense of self. In particular, SAHMs speak of feeling invisible, lacking confidence, and being silent and silenced. I conclude by discussing how the disconnect between media representation and SAHMs’ experience may be enhancing and sustaining their silence, which supports and re-secures a patriarchal capitalist system, and by reflecting on the role of feminist media research to voice the lived experience of gender inequality

The use of the internet in the lives of women with breast cancer: narrating and storytelling online and offline

This thesis explores the experience of breast cancer patients' online participation in relation to their illness. The research focuses on the work of narrating as the key process in patients' online communication. Empirically, it stems from the noticeable recent proliferation of breast cancer forums, particularly in online spaces. I argue that the production of a story and its telling online enables the patient to cope with a radically new situation in her life. The claim for the significance of breast cancer patients' online communication, particularly narrating, is located within the historical and cultural context of the illness. In examining the process of narrating and storytelling, I draw on sociological and psychoanalytical theories of narrative and storytelling, and sociological debates on issues of health and illness, everyday life and the nature of agency, social exchange, and the tension between the public and the private. The study is based on a phenomenological study that included twenty nine online (e-mail) and twelve face-toface interviews with breast cancer patients, and a textual analysis of related websites. It shows how the work of narrating is facilitated through the online space, highlighting it as a process that has significant consequences for their ability to cope with their illness. The thesis concludes with a self-reflexive account of the employment of narrating as a conceptual, analytical and methodological tool for the study of breast cancer patients' processes of online communication. It argues for the need to acknowledge the constraints that shape the online space, calling into doubt its supposed openness, borderlessness, fluidity and lack of structure. In particular, the discussion highlights the persistence of the cultural dimension of the online communication, questioning the extent to which the nature of online communication is global, as is often argued. The concluding chapter uses the empirical case to engage with the broader concern with the relationship between media, communication and agency. Key words: narrative; narrating; storytelling; Internet; online; offline; breast cancer; agency; interviews

Heading home: public discourse and women’s experience of family and work

The debate on gender equality in the workplace is based predominantly on evidence and anecdote related to the experience of women in the workplace. Dr Orgad’s research highlights the importance of complementing this with (1) the experience of women who, more often than not, are of less interest to workplaces: those women who have left their workplaces, specifically after having children; (2) understanding the neglected aspect of husbands’/partners’ influence on women’s careers and family ‘choices’; (3) examining what may be preventing women from returning to the workplace

Mumpreneurialism: a gig economy side-hustle fantasy

A day job that puts food on the table is now not enough. Women are being encouraged to pursue energising, passionate work after hours. Women’s increased insecurity, exhaustion, precarity, and anxiety are entirely absent from the equation. Shani Orgad writes that encouraging women to embrace the gig economy has its origins in the rise of Thatcherism and Reaganism, which promoted a shift away from traditional “jobs for life”. Women were cast as the perfect beneficiaries of this shift, especially in the context of the dismantling of social welfare and the state’s ongoing withdrawal of public support for childcare provision. The figure of the “mumpreneur” was born

Why is vulnerability trending on LinkedIn?

As the landscape of social media is constantly shifting, and with many academics migrating from Twitter, LinkedIn has become an increasingly popular platform and is considered by many academics to be an essential tool. Discussing the recent trend for sharing images and stories that highlight vulnerability on the platform, Shani Orgad explores whether this is indicative of a new culture of self-promotion or a wider critique of working life

The cruel optimism of The Good Wife: the fantastic working mother on the fantastical treadmill

This article juxtaposes The Good Wife’s (TGW) representation of Alicia Florrick’s experience as a professional woman and a mother, against interview accounts of middle-class women who left successful careers after having children. I show that TGW furnishes a compelling fantasy based on (1) the valorization of combining motherhood with competitive, long-hours high-powered waged work as the basis for a woman’s value and liberation, and (2) an emphasis on women’s professional performance and satisfaction as depending largely on their individual self-confidence and ability to “lean in,” while marginalizing the impact of structural issues on women’s success and workplace equality. This fantasy fails to correspond to women’s lived experience, but shapes their sense of self in painful ways. The TGW fantasy thus involves a relation of “cruel optimism”: it attracts women to desire it while impeding them from tackling the structural issues that are obstructing realization of their desire

LSE Festival 2021: working from home will not necessarily bring about gender equality

The pandemic has thrown many women out of paid work and forced them to take on caring responsibilities. Shani Orgad (LSE) says that until prevailing cultural narratives change, women will continue to blame themselves for the ‘choices’ foisted upon them by an unequal society

Caring enterprise in crisis? Challenges and opportunities of humanitarian NGO communications

This chapter looks at how nongovernmental organization (NGO) professionals think about, plan, select, and produce appeals and campaigns. Drawing on interviews with NGO practitioners, it discusses how professionals account for their communications practices and how their understanding of their organizations’ goals, structures, and values, and the conditions within which they operate, shape their decisions about how to communicate distant suffering and appeal to the public. The discussion is structured by the three types of relationship represented by the ‘humanitarian triangle’: (1) NGO-public; (2) public-beneficiaries; (3) NGO-beneficiaries. It concludes by discussing some of the consequences of NGOs’ employment of ‘intimacy at a distance’ in their communication, NGOs’ emphasis on creating comfortable and non-threatening relations with the public, and the implications of their communication’s over-reliance on the emergency model