Copyright by Ashley N. Mack 2013 The Dissertation Committee for Ashley N. Mack Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: DISCIPLINING MOMMY: RHETORICS OF REPRODUCTION IN CONTEMPORARY MATERNITY CULTURE Committee: Dana L. Cloud, Supervisor Joshua Gunn Barry Brummett Sharon J. Hardesty Christine Williams DISCIPLINING MOMMY: RHETORICS OF REPRODUCTION IN CONTEMPORARY MATERNITY CULTURE by Ashley N. Mack, B.A.; B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August, 2013 Dedication To Tiffany—for being an awesome lady, thinker, worker, “true” sister, daughter, and mother. Acknowledgements My family has something of a “curse”: Multiple generations of women have been single, working mothers. Therefore, the social pressures, expectations and norms of motherhood have always permeated my experiences of reproduction and labor. Everything I do has been built on the backs of the women in my family—so it is important that I thank them first and foremost. I would be remised if I did not also specifically thank my big sister, Tiffany, for sharing her experiences as a mother with me. Hearing her stories inspired me to look closer at rhetorics of maternity and this project would not exist if she were not brave enough to speak up about issues that produce shame and fear for many moms. Dana Cloud, my advisor, is a shining light at the end of the many dark tunnels that academic work can produce. Her openness, patience, and rigor helped me form and finish this project. Thank you, Dana. I also want to thank all of the professors and teachers I was guided by at UT, especially my committee members Joshua Gunn, Barry Brummett, Christine Williams and Sharon Jarvis. Josh, you have always inspired me to take risks as a thinker and writer, and every time I write with humor I will whisper thank you to you. Barry, you are a wizard who reigned in my brain and use of theory. Christine, your rigorous questions made me demand more of myself. Sharon, you brought humanity and clarity to what I was working on. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Additionally, thanks must go out to the Graduate School at UT-Austin for providing me with a continuing fellowship so I could work on this project while living out of state. v To all my parents—biological, step and everything in between—thanks for conceiving me, feeding me, and supporting me through it all. Mom, you especially are just unbelievably awesome! And Dave: thanks for annoying me enough about finishing this that I forced myself to do it just so I wouldn’t have to hear you ask about it again. Special thanks to my Grandma Gladys, who passed away while I was in the middle of writing this dissertation and who in so many ways inspired me to love writing, thinking and imagining. I want to also thank my brother and photography partner, Ryan, who when I was using our business as an advanced method of procrastination, had enough sense to change the password of our e-mail account and not tell me it. Thanks for that one, Pookie. Thanks must go out to my friends and colleagues: Brandon Bumstead and my UT family, for helping me have fun when I needed it; Tiara Na’puti, for sending the best friendship, support, and care packages; Matt Morris, for always gut-checking me when I was too hard on myself; and, Katie Feyh, for always being an inspiration. Lastly, Bryan, my partner in life and work, you are the best lady a girl could ask for. Thank you for never following gender roles and rules. Also, thanks for being an excellent personal assistant when I got so overwhelmed I couldn’t function. Your labor is much appreciated and I will pay you back someday in craft beer and so many giggles. You listened to me rant for hours when neither of us had any idea what I was talking about. You typed my dictated notes when I couldn’t settle down. You moved us across the country, sold all my old books, decorated our house, and hid things from me you knew would stress me out. You’re like a magical love leprechaun and I want to make out with you so hard. vi DISCIPLINING MOMMY: RHETORICS OF REPRODUCTION IN CONTEMPORARY MATERNITY CULTURE Ashley N. Mack, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2013 Supervisor: Dana L. Cloud In this dissertation, I argue that the maternal body is a chief site of discursive political and cultural struggle over gender, family, and work in a neoliberal America. I consider contemporary discourses of maternity, an aggregate I call maternity culture, as cultural products and rhetorical expressions of the antagonistic arrangements in contemporary capitalism since the neoliberal turn. The complexities of maternity culture discourses can therefore be better understood when they are historicized alongside changing economic and political realities. Using materialist feminism as my primary methodology, I contend that maternity culture discourses express the ethics of neoliberalism including the privatization of social/political responsibility and self- actualization through entrepreneurialism and labor, while simultaneously justifying the intensification of maternal labor and the continued surveillance of women’s bodies. I argue that maternity culture discourses are, therefore, rhetorics of reproduction and reproducing rhetorics. That is to say, they are a part of a larger set of discourses about the reproductive function that are themselves caught in the logics of capital that may result in the reproduction of unequal arrangements in material and symbolic life. In order vii to illuminate how maternity culture operates in neoliberal public life as a reproducing rhetoric, I provide a historical analysis of rhetorics of women’s health, and analyze two case studies involving discourses surrounding breastfeeding and natural childbirth, major sites of struggle within maternity culture. viii Table of Contents Chapter One: An Introduction to Rhetorics of Reproducing Motherhood .............1 Maternity Culture and Communication Studies .............................................7 Rhetorics of Reproduction in Communication Studies .........................7 Rhetorics of Science, Health, and Medicine ........................................11 Agency, Power, and Rhetorics of Personal Responsibility ..................12 Analyzing Maternity Culture ........................................................................18 Materialist Feminism ...........................................................................19 Maternity Culture in (New) Publics .....................................................25 Analysis of Case Studies ......................................................................32 Chapter Two: Neoliberalism and the Maternal Body ............................................45 Family and Reproduction in Industrial Capitalism ..............................46 Motherhood and Feminism in the Mid-20th Century ...........................49 Neoliberal Ethics and The Post-1970s Maternal Body ........................52 Depolicitization of Feminism ..............................................................62 Chapter Three: From the Pill to the Nipple: Rhetorics of the Women’s Health Movement and the Privatization of Women’s Health ...................................69 Rhetorics of the Radical Women’s Health Movement .................................70 A Crisis in Women’s Health ................................................................71 Beyond Boston .....................................................................................78 A Backlash and Radical Retreat ..........................................................80 The Privatization and Surveillance of Women’s Health ...............................87 Conclusion: The Rise of Maternity Culture ..................................................92 Chapter Four: “Whip ‘em out!”: Macho Maternalism in TheBump.com’s Boob- olution Campaign ..........................................................................................97 Macho maternalism .....................................................................................100 TheBump.com’s Boob-olution ....................................................................105 Show Me Your Dick! … and other Narratives of Entrepreneurialism108 The Science of Rugged Individualism ...............................................115 ix Conclusion ..................................................................................................126 Chapter Five: The Self-Made Mom: Home Birth Videos on YouTube and Rhetorics of Hard Work, Redemption and Masochism ..............................................136 Rhetorics of the Self-Made Masochist ........................................................140 Masochistic Motherhood ...................................................................145 The Self-Made Mom on YouTube ..............................................................147 Self-Sufficiency and Rugged Individualism ......................................153 Pain, Self-Optimization, and Redemption .........................................157 Conclusion ..................................................................................................166 Chapter Six: Conclusion: Disciplining the Maternal Body ................................175 Theoretical Contributions ...........................................................................177 Rhetorics of Reproduction as Reproducing Rhetorics