@sophiemmary.bsky.social
Postdoc @VUAmsterdam @Cambridge_Uni | sociologist researching culture, care, and motherhood | previously PhD @Cambridge_Uni | she/her | cover art by Barbara Swan
One page of Cruel Optimism by Lauren Berlant, with the following sentence highlighted: “the ‘technologies of patience’ that enable a concept of the later to suspend questions about the cruelty of the now.”
I like to imagine Berlant came up with this sentence while trying to survive writing a grant proposal (Cruel Optimism, 2011, p.28)
12.05.2025 17:54 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Hearing the news this morning that Joshua Clover has died is very much like the ending of "The Day Lady Died," a poem which Clover wrote beautifully about: "and everyone and I stopped breathing"
28.04.2025 12:10 — 👍 19 🔁 3 💬 2 📌 0
1/ Lauren Gail Berlant (October 31, 1957 – June 28, 2021) was an American scholar, cultural theorist, and author who is regarded as "one of the most esteemed and influential literary and cultural critics in the United States." #WomanToday
23.04.2025 13:00 — 👍 16 🔁 6 💬 1 📌 0
A red-bricked house with a purple poster reading “Sociologists, welcome to Manchester.”
In Manchester this week for the British Sociological Association conference #britsoc25 💬
I’ll be presenting my work on the affects and strategies of sustaining (maternal) optimism at 9:00 on Friday!
With @robbieduschinsky.bsky.social, Barry Coughlan & Susan Dunnett.
Out now in Sociology @sociologyjnl.bsky.social
Open access thanks to the University of Cambridge.
🧵 3/3
A screenshot of the article's abstract reads as follows: The fantasy of traditional motherhood, according to which women find fulfilment through family care, still dominates market texts. However, there is increasing acknowledgement of motherhood’s difficulties, often in the very same texts. This tension is not immediately understandable; neither are its political and economic implications. We propose an explanation by deploying a Berlantian framework to analyse the new media presence of five brands targeting UK mothers. We identify a mothers’ culture: a market where motherhood’s difficulties are organised incessantly. We argue that mothers’ culture simultaneously validates traditional motherhood’s power to achieve the good life and provides therapeutic explanations and tactics to retain optimism when its lived experiences become too far removed from the fantasy of that good life. Combined, these mechanisms absorb the difficulties of traditional motherhood in a way that protects its promises of fulfilment. This prevents a questioning of the system of norms that effectively blocks this fulfilment.
Adapting Lauren Berlant’s idea of 'Women’s Culture', we explore how this tension enables traditional ideologies to address mothers’ disappointments while preventing a larger questioning of the system that creates them.
🧵 2/3
New publication🚨
How can we make sense of marketing that tells us traditional motherhood will bring us happiness, but also take up all our time, energy, and sanity? What does that contradiction mean politically?
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
🧵 1/3
“It is not uncommon for a parent’s entire salary to be wiped out every month by childcare costs.”
Social worker and mother Rosie Buckland sums up the difficulties – financial and otherwise – of raising children with no support from family or community. Out now in the Magazine.
buff.ly/fb0g0Tb
