Super Mom in a Box

Authors

Lindsey Harding, University of GeorgiaFollow

Abstract

Super Mom in a Box examines how Pinterest influences identity formation in mothers who interact with the site. In the essay, I use my own extensive interactions on Pinterest to investigate how the site's postfeminist content and interaction design create a hypermaternal identity for maternal interactors. This piece suggests that the celebration of domesticity and femininity on Pinterest validates a mother's home-oriented interests and reinforces her commitment to family; at the same time, this celebration contributes to a limited online identity for mothers, which can produce stress and alienation in real-world experiences of motherhood. In other words, because I've scrolled through thousands of pins and repinned hundreds of times, I now wonder, Does my daughter's birthday party need to be its own version of Disneyland? Are baked goods good enough holiday gifts for neighbors? When did party food start requiring framed labels? And most importantly, What has pinning done for and done to mothers?Â

About the Author(s)

Lindsey Harding is a PhD candidate at the University of Georgia and the Assistant to the Director of UGA's Writing Intensive Program. As a rhetoric and composition scholar, she has designed and published research that investigates the intersection of digital technologies and language use. She’s currently editing her dissertation, which is a multigenre, multimodal collection on domestic digital photography and motherhood in the 21st century. You can find her online at www.lindseymharding.com.

DOI

10.15760/harlot.2014.12.7

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/39468

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Recommended Citation

Harding, Lindsey (2015) "Super Mom in a Box," Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion: No. 12, 7.
https://doi.org/10.15760/harlot.2014.12.7