[ecrea] New book: Mothering through Precarity

A new publication from Duke University Press


http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/mothering-through-precarity **

**

*Mothering through Precarity***

*Women's Work and Digital Media***

/Julie A. Wilson & Emily Chivers Yochim/

"/Mothering through Precarity/ ... richly illustrates what a 
theoretically, conceptually and emotionally confused and paradoxical 
situation women are in with respect to an online world that offers 
family-enhancing information and advice, communicative solace and 
flexible income-earning opportunities, but also exploits their ongoing 
efforts at maintaining a positive family environment by creating new 
anxieties and offering meagre financial returns.... After reading this 
book, it is not so difficult to understand why some women in the Rust 
Belt voted for Donald Trump’s media-fuelled promises of a better 
future."–/Times Higher Education/, E. Stina Lyon

    "Julie A. Wilson and Emily Chivers Yochim provide a highly 
compelling commentary on the state of motherhood in the present moment, 
infused as it is with technologies and concerns about emotional and 
economic precarity. Making a strong (if depressing) case for the failure 
of the nuclear family project in the context of neoliberalism, their 
beautifully executed work helps us to think about labor and affect 
theory in new ways."– Brenda R. Weber, editor of /Reality Gendervision: 
Sexuality and Gender on Transatlantic Reality Television/

  "Motherhood and mothering—a vexed feminist issue, a central form of 
invisible labor along vectors of race and class, a capitalist invention, 
a digital community, a source of affect, love, and often pain. The 
remarkable /Mothering through Precarity /manages to parse all these 
dimensions and more, with insight, intelligence, and compassion. 
Connecting capitalist economies with networks of care, Julie A. Wilson 
and Emily Chivers Yochim have produced a brilliant, compelling book, one 
that refuses easy generalizations about what it means to be a mother in 
uncertain neoliberal times."– Sarah Banet-Weiser, author of /Authentic™: 
The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture /

  "... women, with children or without, have a lot to gain from this 
smart, insightful work. It outlines a nagging problem so specific I 
lacked a clear definition of it before I started reading.... It’s an 
idea rooted directly in our dominant political ideology, one that many 
cannot name: neoliberalism."– Amani Newton, Pittsburgh City Paper

In /Mothering through Precarity/ Julie A. Wilson and Emily Chivers 
Yochim explore how working- and middle-class mothers negotiate the 
difficulties of twenty-first-century mothering through their everyday 
engagement with digital media. From Facebook and Pinterest to couponing, 
health, and parenting websites, the women Wilson and Yochim study rely 
upon online resources and communities for material and emotional 
support. Feeling responsible for their family's economic security, these 
women often become "mamapreneurs," running side businesses out of their 
homes. They also feel the need to provide for their family's happiness, 
making successful mothering dependent upon economic and emotional labor. 
Questioning these standards of motherhood, Wilson and Yochim demonstrate 
that mothers' work is inseparable from digital media as it provides them 
the means for sustaining their families through such difficulties as 
health scares, underfunded schools, a weakening social safety net, and 
job losses.

*Julie A. Wilson*is Assistant Professor of Communication Arts and 
Theatre at Allegheny College. *Emily Chivers Yochim* is Associate 
Professor of Communication Arts and Theatre at Allegheny College and the 
author of /Skate Life: Re-Imagining White Masculinity./

Duke University Press | March 2017| 232pp | 11 illus. | 9780822363477 | 
Paperback | £20.99*

20% discount with this code: CSL517MOTP**

*Price subject to change.


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