Tessa Famatigan
In “Our Mothers Have Always Been Machines: The Conflation of Media and Motherhood”, Kara van Cleaf argues that social media, much like a mother with her child, attunes to the needs of its users by curating a specific algorithm to maximize their consumption of the app. Van Cleaf supports this argument by exploring how mothers use social media, specifically mommy blogs, as an outlet to find community and purpose in their new stage of life as caregivers. Van Cleaf’s argument is solid and unique: rather than turning to technological vilification (as the sci-fi genre warns us of), van Cleaf reframes an understanding of social media as motherly.
There are two primary benefits to van Cleaf’s framework: 1) it exemplifies the intentions of social media to build and strengthen social ties, and 2) it honors the hard labor of motherhood. These interventions importantly nuance the stereotypes of social media as totally evil (it has complex societal ramifications!) and mothers as monolithically and one-dimensionally euphoric about and instinctive to motherhood (which is certainly not the case!). Still, van Cleaf’s framework can also be highly problematic.
Van Cleaf’s articulation of childcare as “maternal labor”, rather than a more inclusive parental or guardian labor, harmfully implies that childcare is exclusively female, heteronormative, and biological. Although van Cleaf addresses their focalization of mothers in the technosphere because mothers are “generally . . . more active on social media platforms compared to non-mothers and men”, their argument nevertheless fails to reconcile their justification with the problems of stereotyping that it attempts to combat. Hence, albeit admitting to its limited scope, van Cleaf’s failure to analyze various classes, races, cultures, religions, ethnicities, etc. undermines the study because it bolsters a theorem applicable to only a fraction of caregivers.
Van Cleaf’s argument is useful because it challenges paradigms of social media and motherhood by characterizing them as active attunement (and does so with easy-to-understand and accessible language), but it is nevertheless more useful in its meaning rather than its analysis. This is only the case, however, when an independent read. Paired with Tressie McMillan Cottom’s “Black Cyberfeminism: Ways Forward for Intersectionality and Digital Sociology”, van Cleaf’s work has the potential to create more consequential arguments on digital space.
What is Black Cyberfeminism?
Understanding intersectionality is key to understanding black cyberfeminism. First coined by race scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, intersectionality asserts that “multiple forms of inequality or disadvantage compound themselves and create obstacles.” In other words,
intersectionality upholds that an individual’s many axes of identity (race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, etc.) affect their living of the world.
In “Black Cyberfeminism’‘, Cottom first defines cyberfeminism as “a feminist theory of how gendered bodies and relations shape technologies and how we interact with them”. Black cyberfeminism is cyberfeminism that accounts for intersectionality. In this way, Cottom portends that “Black cyberfeminism is more assertively political than cyberfeminism. . . offers a cohesive argument for interrogation and resistance . . . [and] is attentive to the mechanisms of political economy in its attention to power relations that define and constrain social mobility.” Hence, Cottom extends intersectionality to social media (terming it black cyberfeminism), asserting that people’s interactions with and within digital spaces are byproducts of the experiences of inequality that they endure in their offline lives. This recognition of power dynamics is paramount because it calls attention to technological access, use, virality, etc., according to the experience of intersecting marginalized positionalities.
Cottom explores black cyberfeminism by highlighting the tension between privacy and hypervisibility in credit scoring and higher education. Cottom finds that “marginalized groups find value in hypervisibility precisely because it . . . makes one’s social location legible.” In this way, Cottom describes that relations to power intersect in such ways that force “context collision”, a concept that contends that people “switch [their] performance depending on who is watching” because of experiences of inequality. Thus, Cottom emphasizes that black cyberfeminism is critical to understand how people differently interact with and within the digital landscape according to their intersectional identities.
Cottom’s deliberation of her own findings in line with existing scholarship effectively prove how matrices of power in the offline world are simultaneously emulated and modified in the digital world. At the same time, Cottom’s multi-modal approach makes the article difficult to read, as every sentence is infused with so much information that it requires dedication to sit with the text to entirely grasp its meanings and implications. Hence, although a strength of Cottom’s article is its ideas and research, its complexity of writing is also a shortcoming.
The Need for Black Cyberfeminism in Mommy Blogs and Beyond
Although I have criticized “Our Mothers” for platforming a narrow sample, its lack of diversity is precisely the reason why it must be read with “Black Cyberfeminism”. Considering that van Cleaf observed white, upper-middle to upper-class, cisgender females in heteronormative relationships, it is vital to analyze how these mothers’ identities influence their flock to social media. Although diverse parental blogs also rely on hypervisibility, only certain mommy blogs gain mass following. Black cyberfeminism urges us to pay attention to reasonings behind such a recurrent phenomenon. Additionally, although van Cleaf explicitly acknowledges diverse blogs and advocates for their study, black cyberfeminism teaches us to remain cognizant that van Cleaf enacted their ‘first step’ to defining social media as care through more-privileged
mothers. Again, black cyberfeminism urges us to analyze systems of inequality that proliferate the technosphere, even in academia itself.
“Our Mothers” likewise enriches “Black Cyberfeminism”. Van Cleaf’s core argument that social media enacts attunement calls attention to how black cyberfeminism is and how social media can be grounded in care. In this way, although systems of inequality are replicated in the digital space, opportunities for equality are also possible because of it. Perhaps especially with this remembrance, we can envision and utilize the digital space as a place of care that both recognizes the complexities of intersectional experiences of power yet continues to fight for liberation for all.