Margaret Weisblum
If you open Instagram or TikTok and scroll, you’re sure to come across someone like this: thin, cisgender, white, straight, young, pretty, and, most importantly, a mom. American motherhood used to be a mostly private experience confined to the home, but the internet has redefined the role. Starting in the early 2000s, mothers took to blogs to write about their “authentic” experiences, seek advice, and, eventually, make money. Social media sites have created even more avenues for these mommy bloggers, or “momfluencers”, to document their parenting journey. In Our mothers have always been machines: The conflation of media and motherhood, Kara van Cleaf analyzes the “digital labor” (448) performed on mommy blogs that she followed from 2010 to 2013. By applying Goffman’s dramaturgical lens to van Cleaf’s analysis of motherhood and blogging, we can understand mommy blogging as a performance, and question its authenticity.
In Goffman and Garfinkel on Dramaturgy, Ethnomethodology, and Everyday Life, Larry T. Reynolds and Nancy J. Herman dissect the work of Erving Goffman, focusing on his major theoretical works. Touching on his analysis of self-presentation, they discuss Goffman’s use of the dramaturgical metaphor. He sees life as a theater where we put on shows, and social interactions as “performances” by “actors” who “read social scripts,” “enact routines,” and “play parts” with “props” and “settings” (181). The ultimate goal of these actors is to prove their authenticity. In the back stage, actors are not in front of an audience, but they are still preparing their performances and anticipating how they will be perceived through impression management. In the front stage, they then give these performances before an audience that assigns a kind of self to the “character” performing (181). We can compare this performance to the labor of motherhood and blogging, which Van Cleaf describes as “attunement”: “the unending work of reading a situation (or baby, blog, reader, follower), and anticipating or altering responses to make sense of things” (449). She argues that mothers attune to their children just as bloggers attune to their readers and commenters. This is also similar to how Goffman describes life as a theater; we are constantly cycling between our life backstage, where our performance for others is prepared and managed, to onstage, where we attune our performances to the audience before us.
Van Cleaf defines the work she is observing online as “digital labor” that includes all the technical activities that constitute blogging, such as creating the webpage, writing blog posts, sharing others’ work, and even “liking” another blogger’s post (450). Invoking Goffman, albeit not by name, she also includes “self-presentation” (the creation of photographs, bios, and curated content that represent the self) as part of this labor. Through Goffman’s work, we can see all of this labor as part of impression management, in which these bloggers are preparing to present themselves in their role as mothers. According to van Cleaf, the most popular blogs represent a normative figure, “the white middle-class heterosexual woman” (454). Many of these women are preparing to fit into the societal expectations of motherhood to capture the largest audience, particularly given the increased economic potential that comes with more viewers.
This desire for financial success would be taboo to admit publicly, particularly because blogging has become a space that people claim is non-competitive. Many successful bloggers write “how to blog” posts that focus on why they became bloggers while downplaying the technical details of how they achieved success. For example, one particularly successful mommy blogger wrote: “‘I’m not an expert. I’m a highly distractible, over-wrought moron who has written a blog for a couple of years’” (456). Van Cleaf acknowledges that by portraying themselves as successful due to their authenticity rather than hard work, mommy bloggers are purposefully making themselves seem non-competitive and non-technical, while also helping the reader relate.
Through what van Cleaf would call attunement and Goffman would call impression management, these bloggers work to convince the audience that their front stage (i.e., their blog posts) is their backstage (their “authentic” self that is not performing). In doing so they create a fantasy where mothers have a community of close friendships, can pick their children up from school every day or even homeschool them, and access financial gain through blogging that allows them to overcome the structural challenges of being a working mother. However, van Cleaf neglects to mention just how much of a performance this fantasy is. She argues that mothers and bloggers’ same labor of attunement is a model for understanding the “free labor of care work within capitalist societies” (459). While both motherhood and blogging are certainly labor, van Cleaf’s analysis diminishes just how financially beneficial mommy blogging can be.
Of course, not all mommy bloggers are financially successful, but in the ten years since van Cleaf collected data, social media has created even more paths to earn: some mothers are making more than seven figures, and formulas tell influencers that they should earn about $100 per 10,000 followers for every sponsored post. This $16.4 billion influencer industry is projected to continue growing, and momfluencers are among the most in-demand given how well their advertising translates to sales. Additionally, mommy blogging has created opportunities for mothers to grow their own businesses. Last year, Hannah Neeleman, better known as @ballerinafarm, posted a picture of her pregnant surrounded by her husband and children; she captioned it, “just a little family, wanting to farm and make a life in the country. We had a dream, to sell our farm products direct to consumers. In Utah, in the West, and the whole country. It started with just a few boxes a week. Then it grew, and @fedex has been there every step of the way.” In this post, she is being paid by FedEx and is promoting her own company, all while neglecting to mention that her “little family” is heir to the JetBlue fortune. Even for the already-wealthy, mommy blogging creates a way to perform authenticity as a relatable family and further grow their wealth.
While van Cleaf’s article provides an important foundation to understand the labor performed by mommy bloggers, reading it in the context of Goffman’s work helps us to understand how “mommy bloggers” might purposefully manufacture their performance of motherhood as authentic for the potential to earn money, rather than to build genuine connection or support. As the financial incentives grow, so does the gap between the performance of blogging and the performance of motherhood.
For those interested in more updated work on the landscape of momfluencing, see Kathryn Jezer-Morton’s writing on motherhood on social media, Jo Piazza’s podcast “Under the Influence” investigating the commodification of everyday life by women and mothers online, or Sara Petersen’s new book “Momfluenced: Inside the Maddening, Picture-Perfect World of Mommy Influencer Culture.”