Discussion
In this article we examine how motherhood is engaged and enacted in daytime television talk-show debates about parenting. Our findings build on prior research which reveal motherhood as a moral category (E.g. Austin & Fitzgerald, 2007; Flinkfeldt, 2017; Stokoe, 2003a), and one that is vested with expertise (E.g. Hanell and Salö, 2017; Hollan, 2019; Mackenzie and Zhao, 2021). Our analysis offers further insight on both counts.
Firstly, in examining how motherhood category membership is worked up, we have identified a common use of what we refer to as the how many-how old device. We suggest that quantifying the number and age of children serves as a powerful rhetorical mechanism which qualifies members’ expertise, and thus their rights to be heard on matters of children and parenting. Further research might examine if this device is engaged in other contexts where members are speaking as mothers, and indeed consider if it is similarly engaged when members are speaking from other parental or child-centric identities.
Across our data, members consistently foreground their arguments with assertions of their motherhood identity and thus, their claim to expertise on child-centric matters. Moreover, those occupying the category of mother routinely disempower the arguments of speakers occupying other expert categories. The fact that our analysis focuses on a setting where the stakes and/or need for professional expertise might not be paramount (I.e. compared to a health or educational setting), is perhaps a factor here. However, witnessing members in our data electing to set aside other available forms of professional expertise, preferring instead to speak as a mother during these debates, emphasises the rhetorical power of motherhood over other, elite membership categories. This is especially notable given that in, other non child-centric contexts, significant interactional power is typically wielded by professional experts during debates with lay speakers. (c.f. Author & Author, date).
Lastly, in our analysis, the construction of motherhood routinely relies upon and (re)produces patriarchal, heteronormative, cisgendered norms. This differs from the findings of Mackenzie’s (2018a) analysis of Mumsnet discourse, which identifies some degree of gender-norm subversion. We suggest that the differing contexts in which the talk occurs may be a relevant factor here. Daytime television talk shows are designed to appeal to a female-dominated home-based audience (Livingstone and Lunt, 1994; Ohara and Saft, 2003). In contrast, as Mackenzie (2018a) notes, Mumsnet users are likely to be working mothers. Whilst we don’t have any demographic data of the women who participated in the debates we analysed, what we want to emphasise here is that the talk we analysed was oriented towards a predominantly female stay-at-home audience. Thus the (re)production and wholesale communication of ‘traditional’ motherhood through the medium of daytime television shows both speaks to a captive female audience and potentially also works to keep its audience captive.
On the limited occasions in our data where speakers either intentionally or unintentionally transgress the normative bounds of motherhood, it becomes an accountable matter. We witness this when members contravene the moral expectation that women should desire motherhood, and instead elect not to have children. On such occasions, women are not only held accountable by other members about their choices, but in some instances, they also hold themselves to account, marking out their choices as ‘problematic’. (See Wager, 2000 for discussion of the complexities experienced by women who chose not to have children).
Our analysis also indicates how biologically essentialist constructions of motherhood are wielded in a manner which pre-emptively denies some women possible category membership. We present one such occasion which reveals how a trans woman is subtly excluded from possible motherhood category incumbency, before her non-membership is then used to negate the argument she seeks to make. Research on parenting experiences of trans woman and men remains in its infancy (although see Averett, 2021; Biblarz & Savci, 2010; Ryan, 2009), and we do not have sufficient data to add anything substantial to current knowledge. Our one example points to the live enactment of prejudice based upon a particularised and essentialised construction of motherhood and we align our interests with Averett (2021, p.291) who asks “What would it look like to de-couple the concept of mothering from female – often assumed to mean childbearing – bodies?” We suggest that this is an area of future work that discursive psychologists are well placed to contribute to.
In sum, our findings suggest that whilst there is power in motherhood insomuch as it vests members with expertise and elevates their rights to be heard on child-centric matters, the concept of motherhood itself, at least as it plays out in these popularised, mainstream contexts, nevertheless serves to reinforce essentialised notions of gender which at best constrain, and at worst deny women’s agency. Moreover, they oppress women, and indeed mothers who do not conform to biologically essentialised constructions of womanhood.
Acknowledgements
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