Olivia Zaid
The invaluable labor of mothers often goes overlooked in favor of other types of work that are known to provide a steady income to a household or are perceived to be more intellectually stimulating; this is something that too many women know to be true. The hierarchical division that has been integrated into our society between the labor of motherhood and that required of other jobs has been objected to by generations of hardworking mothers.
Unfortunately, it seems that this distinction of labor has permeated yet another aspect of life: our technology. The articles Our mothers have always been machines: The conflation of media and motherhood by Kara van Cleaf and The Emperor’s new data clothes: Implications of “nudity” as a racialized and gendered metaphor in discourse on personal digital data by Yuliya Grinberg offer perspectives about the often unmentioned ways in which our technology is inextricably linked to femininity and motherhood. While each article consists of differing main topics, both use a feminist lens to uncover the gendered aspects of our everyday technology and how it relates to public perception of the labor of mothers.
In van Cleaf’s article, one of her central arguments is that there is a clear similarity between the practice of attunement taken on by digital labor and that of motherhood.
Additionally, she examines “mommy blogs,” which she defines as “any online platform that discusses motherhood from the perspective of the mother herself.” While van Cleaf also focuses on the relationship that exists between bloggers attuning to their blogs and followers and mothers
attuning to their children, the sections I found to be most compelling were those where she touched on how digital technology specifically related to the work of motherhood. Van Cleaf explains how a mother’s attunement to her child and digital technology’s attunement to its users both hold the purpose of anticipating needs. In this way, mothers and digital technology collect data and statistics to better attend to those who rely on them. One of the most intriguing aspects of van Cleaf’s argument came towards the end of her article when she stated, “…digital technologies are rushing to mother us: they attach to our bodies, track our physical activity, calibrate our moods and moments to various products and services, and maintain a basic level of sociality for us.” This was a particularly compelling claim, not only because of how true I found it to be, but also because it connects to Grinberg’s article quite nicely.
A section that I thought was one of the most interesting in Grinberg’s piece was when she spoke about the rise of female assistants in our digital devices. She discusses a similar point expressed by van Cleaf through mentioning that the gathering of data is considered gendered when the labor of monitoring another individual’s personal life is believed to be feminized, as is the role of a mother. She compares Amazon’s female digital assistant, Alexa, with IBM’s male digital assistant, Watson, by covering how the responsibilities of each assistant align with society’s gender roles and ideas of motherhood simply through their assigned names. Compared to Alexa, a name of a product whose responsibilities commonly lie in the home, Watson is given a name associated with Sherlock Holmes’s assistant Dr. Watson, implying a high level of intellect to demonstrate the product’s “critical thinking abilities.” Through this example, as well as others she provides in her piece, Grinberg focuses on how the female body is taken as a “mnemonic” for the tracking and collecting of personal data, a type of labor that is seen as “less skilled” while also “understood in line with other forms of feminized work such as housework
and childcare, as that which is perceived as more natural and intuitive to women.” Taken together with van Cleaf’s piece, Grinberg makes it practically impossible for us to ignore how gender and motherhood are inextricably linked to our technologies.
Reading van Cleaf’s and Grinberg’s works together opens the door to a perspective on technology that is rarely taken by the general public, or by many scholars for that matter. While both pieces stand well on their own, their complementary standpoints make an even stronger case for how gender penetrates our technology in ways that typically go unnoticed. What I found to be most interesting was how Grinberg’s argument strengthened the information presented by van Cleaf. Both authors spoke about the attunement that is required of our digital technologies and the role of motherhood, respectively. Yet, Grinberg goes further to say that this type of attunement achieved by our technology is not necessarily perceived as a job that requires a high skill level. This is similar to how many do not view the attunement required by motherhood to be as challenging or stimulating as an intellectual role would be, something that many women understandably object to today. By reading the two pieces together, we are encouraged to open our eyes to the feminization of digital technology that attunes to our personal data and specific needs and how it replicates a pattern of labor consistently gone unrecognized by our society: the labor of motherhood.