UNMAKING MOTHERHOOD: ARGUMENTATIVE EVIDENCE FROM ROMANIA-BASED BLOGS AND MEDIA
UNMAKING MOTHERHOOD: ARGUMENTATIVE EVIDENCE FROM ROMANIA-BASED BLOGS AND MEDIA

Summary/Abstract: The current study inquires whether women’s narratives and prescriptive comments related to the burden of being a mother echo socialization practices typical for these corporate cultures that implicitly promote a counter-maternalistic discourse by demanding on-call availability and total commitment from employees. The study relies on grounded theory, meaning that it starts from examples of arguments and dwells on empirical evidence to connect it to the conceptual framework and larger-scale theoretical input. It strives to determine women’s vocabularies of motives on rejecting motherhood and to showcase how rational and affective language gravitates around the childfree rhetoric performativity. The netnographic analysis concerns 188 anti-motherhood comments posted on seven Romanian media (six blogs and one media article) with predominantly feminine readership. Informants’ arguments are immersed in a corporate culture that is time voracious and hostile to motherhood. Argumentative streams and deliberative threads belong to the following thematic categories: feminism, heteronomy, neoliberal free choice and rational choice, uncontrollable and unpredictable outcomes, ecological concerns and incompatibility with lifestyle, overwhelming responsibility, time voracity and maternal role spill-over, lack of maternal skills, in-built career penalty, downshifting options and hedonistic outlook. These thematic categories are customized according to contributors’ status (mother or non-mother) and biographical background. Due to work-family conflict, women face the dilemma of professional upskilling in the absence of children or professional deskilling subsequent to motherhood. Conclusions show the eclectic and multi-layered nature of discourse that combines (self) narratives with prescriptions, with a strong connotative dimension illustrated by a vivid vocabulary of emotional social imagery.

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