Quelling Anxiety as Intimate Work

Maternal Responsibility to Alleviate Bad Feelings Emerging from Precarity

Bibliographic Data

ID12967428
AuthorsAmanda Watson (0000-0002-9058-3435, Simon Fraser University, corresponding author)
Year2016
Volume10
Issue2
Pages261-283
Publication date2016-12-19
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueStudies in Social Justice (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1911-4788 • E-ISSN: 1911-4788
PublisherBrock University Library (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.26522/ssj.v10i2.1360
OpenAlexW2580251588
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited14

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

Aesthetics · Affect (linguistics · Anxiety · Complicity · Context (archaeology · Feeling · Moral responsibility · Political science · Politics · Precarity · Public relations · Resistance (ecology · Sociology · Gender Studies · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology · Work-Family Balance Challenges

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Open DOIOpen Access