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 ...