Open AccessQuelling Anxiety as Intimate Work: Maternal Responsibility to Alleviate Bad Feelings Emerging from Precarity
Author(s) -
Amanda D. Watson
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
studies in social justice
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.213
H-Index - 14
ISSN - 1911-4788
DOI - 10.26522/ssj.v10i2.1360
Subject(s) - complicity , precarity , feeling , affect (linguistics) , anxiety , context (archaeology) , sociology , moral responsibility , politics , resistance (ecology) , social psychology , psychology , gender studies , public relations , aesthetics , political science , law , paleontology , philosophy , ecology , communication , psychiatry , biology
This article brings feminist literature on anxiety and wellness to bear on the responsibilities of mothers as they are represented in a series of popular editorial publications. It seeks to deepen the interdisciplinary dialogue between these theories of affect and theories of care work by examining how popular representations of maternal responsibility reflect a contemporary “affect of motherhood” and indicate specifically that mothers might be “coming undone” under the weight of a shared, political anxiety that they are encouraged to feel individually. It is argued that the newly complex and competing labours of mothers, and mothers’ complicity in and resistance to these labours, can only be understood in the context of public anxiety. It asks what is at stake for the most disenfranchised women when it comes to recognizing and resisting today’s intensified forms of maternal responsibility.