Excerpt from Consuming Motherhood edited by Janelle S. Taylor, Linda L. Layne, and Danielle F. Wozniak

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Under a blue summer-afternoon sky in a well-tended city park, a woman perches on the edge of a sandbox, watching a little boy at play. Then, suddenly, the sandbox becomes a tambourine, and the toys resolve into a safety pin, an animal cracker, a starfish, a cork, and a spool.

This scene, featured on the cover of this book, comes from Look-Alikes, a 1998 children’s book by Joan Steiner, which invites readers to engage in a game of searching out and identifying the familiar objects that she has used to construct meticulous dioramas of scenes of public life. The challenge of the game lies in the difficulty of disrupting the pattern of meaning that leads this image to cohere, at first glance, as a scene of motherhood. What we see is a mother watching over her child, one person caring for another, a relationship between two human beings. The pleasure and the interest of the Look-Alikes game, however, lies in the shock of recognition that comes when we first recognize, “hidden in plain sight” (di Leonardo 1998:10), the oddments of consumer culture of which this scene is composed. These humble objects, grown fantastically large, seem to take on unsettling new powers, thoroughly encompassing the human figures. And this moment of recognition invites, perhaps, a shock of self-recognition as well for mothers engaged with their children in the activity of puzzling together over an expensive hardback book, trying to pick out familiar consumer items.

Steiner leads her viewers, through a sort of poetics of the concrete, to perceive hitherto unsuspected affinities and potentialities within objects: a shoehorn can also be a slide, or a cork a child’s bucket. In so doing, she also reveals to us the presence and the power of two different conceptual frameworks, mutually irreconcilable, that let us read this either as a scene of motherhood or as an image of consumption. As with Edgar Rubin’s famous face/vase illusion, one perspective shows us people interacting, another shows us a thing of value. By analogy, one reading of Steiner’s artwork points to motherhood as a relationship between people, while the other points to consumption as a relationship of people to material objects—and these two angles of vision, these two orders of meaning, seem as inextricable as they are irreconcilable.

We begin with Steiner’s artwork because it raises, in a humorous and engaging way, the very serious questions that motivate this volume. How do motherhood and consumption—as ideologies, and as patterns of social action—mutually shape and constitute each other in contemporary North American and European social life? How can we, instead of oscillating between motherhood and consumption as ways of understanding what we see, hold them both in focus together? Or, to put it another way, how can we really hope to understand either motherhood or consumption without considering how they are in fact imbricated in social life? The project of Consuming Motherhood thus reprises a question that has been central to social theory since Marx: How are relations among people shaped and mediated by relations between people and objects?

To approach this broad question specifically through an interrogation of the relationship between motherhood and consumption might seem like an obvious move. On one level, it is obvious that mothering relationships are much like other social relationships and, like them, are bound to take shape from the broader political and economic order within which they are forged. In a consumer-capitalist society, mothers provide for their children by purchasing food, clothing, toys, and an ever-increasing range of other commodities (Seiter 1993; Miller 1998, this volume). Mothers also navigate the demands of paid employment and unpaid work in the home, from the very different class positions that they occupy, partly by purchasing and selling child care as well as other household tasks as paid services (Colen 1995; Nelson 1994; Romero 1992; Sampson 1998; Segura 1994). With the rise of new biomedical technologies of reproduction, even egg cells, embryos, and the gestation of the developing fetus—precisely those bodily realities widely thought to ground motherhood in biology, for better or for worse—are now readily commodified, purchased, and sold (Franklin 1997; Macklin 1996; Ragoné 1999, 1996, 1994; Roberts 1997; Rothman 2000[1989]; Strathern 1992).

At the same time, motherhood also seems like an obvious locus at which to examine the workings of consumption precisely because of the ways that it is (considered to be) unlike other social relationships. Motherhood is supposed to be a special kind of human relationship, uniquely important because uniquely free of the kind of calculating instrumentality associated with the consumption of objects. It stands for “love,” in sharp contrast to “money”—a simple but persistent opposition that structures American middle-class cultural values concerning family, parenthood, and child-rearing. Thus construed, motherhood offers a powerful model for human relationships that stands in opposition to the logic of the marketplace and has provided a vitally important grounding for social critiques, both conservative and feminist (Umansky 1994).

Practices that confuse and confound distinctions between love and money resist ready analysis for the same reason that they arouse cultural anxieties and provoke controversy: they reveal, by the very manner in which they transgress, the contours of deeply rooted ideological oppositions between that which is readily recognized as “real,” good, or legitimate motherhood and the corrupting influence of consumption. It is precisely because they are so forcefully contrasted that ethnographic inquiry into the relationship between motherhood and consumption is so important. Like Viviana Zelizer’s excellent historical studies of financial valuations of children’s lives (1985) and of the social “marking” of currency (1994), the ethnographic essays collected here put the categorical distinction between love and money to test empirically, through close and careful study of social life, and reveal how complexly they are intertwined.

Marilyn Strathern has argued that “what constitutes a natural or logical domain of ideas” is what gives an image or idea its distinctive cultural stamp, and that “this is equally true of what is thinkable in terms of combinations and syntheses—you can tell a culture by what it can and cannot bring together” (1992:3). One might understand the powerful opposition between love and money, in these terms, as a culturally unthinkable combination or synthesis. At the same time, however, such systems of thought must also be situated in relation to systems of social action—and at that level, the social practices of love and of money turn out to be quite inextricable. To modify Strathern’s insight slightly, we might conclude, perhaps, that one can tell a culture both by what it keeps apart and what it brings together.

This tension between love and money is one that many women experience, in their own lives, as a problem. The vision of motherhood kept pure of the taint of consumption is one that many women value but few if any are able to realize in their own lives. Indeed, Daniel Miller (this volume) argues that for the North London women he studied, the felt need to shield their children from consumption, coupled with their inevitable failure to succeed in doing so, form a central part of the social and cultural process through which women are produced as mothers.

If intrusions of "money" into the realm of maternal "love" are arguably inevitable for all women engaged in mothering in a consumer-capitalist society, they are perhaps especially troubling for those who most strongly value motherhood as that which stands for the promise and the possibility of human relationships not based on a narrow calculus of individual value, in contrast to the values that guide consumerism. The concern that encroaching commodification threatens to irrevocably evacuate from motherhood all that is best and most powerful about it, which Barbara Katz Rothman voiced so eloquently in "Motherhood under Capitalism" (reprinted in this volume), is one that many share. The home-birthing feminists of whom Pamela Klassen writes, for example, embrace home birth as part of a religiously informed feminist critique of the commodification of birth. They do so, however, from "the midst of their own location within a culture of consumption in which nothing, not even religion, is sacred. That is, religion itself is commoditized in complex ways" (Klassen, this volume, 000). As Klassen shows, ironies, ambivalences, and uneasy tensions arise as, in the course of their efforts to live out a vision of motherhood construed in opposition to consumption, these women inevitably "turn to the tools of their consumer culture, while also challenging its premises" (Klassen, this volume, 000). Similarly, Robbie Davis-Floyd (this volume) writes of home-birth midwives whose life work takes its meaning from an understanding of motherhood that, again, casts it in opposition to consumer culture, and documents their struggles to navigate the necessary process of commodifying their own services without compromising the values to which they remain committed.

Keeping "love" distinct from "money" may pose problems for all women, then, but it does so in ways mediated by class, racial, and other kinds of difference among women (Gordon 1994; Ladd-Taylor and Umansky 1998; Ragoné and Twine 2000; Roberts 1997). The ideological opposition between motherhood and consumption both casts individualizing blame upon and renders invisible the lived realities of many people whose life situations make it especially difficult to cherish the illusion that mothering can somehow remain free and pure of issues of consumption and commodification. These include, for example, women who find it necessary to purchase and sell childcare services (Colen 1995; Nelson 1994; Romero 1992; Sampson 1998; Segura 1994); those whose identity encompasses the historical memory of enslavement and the commodification of black women’s reproductive capacities and children (Collins 1994; Roberts 1997); and those engaging with mothering relations in nonnormative ways, sometimes in the wake of encounters with infertility, through fostering, adoption, surrogacy, or assisted reproduction (Franklin 1997; Ragoné 1999, 1996, 1994; Layne 1999a; Sandelowski 1993; Wozniak 2002, 1999, 1997a, 1997b, this volume).

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