Acquiring Motherhood: Mass Consumption and the Rise of Mommy Blogs

“Mommy blogs” are a phenomenon in which traditional socio-cultural ideologies around motherhood and parenting are enmeshed with material consumption. Serving as a series of micro-lifestyle brands many “mommy blogs” promote conspicuous consumption as a means to paternal authenticity.  While the term “mommy blog” refers to a wide set of sites and blogs with a broad range of strategies and approaches; for the purpose of this paper I will focus on two subset of the culture the “thrifty” and the “natural” mom blogs. Both of the subsets attach themselves to alternative economies and constituencies that privilege second hand consumption and self-sufficiency.  These two subsets emerge in relative opposition to the highly consumerist nature of mommy blogs in general serving a useful site at which to test the applicability of cultural studies theory. 

In the introduction to the special issue of Cultural Studies Journal, Binkley and Litter, noted a binary in the approaches within the issue suggesting that there are anti-consumers – those that oppose consumption practices- and anti-consumerists –those that seek alternative modes of consumption. It is the latter approach that will be the most appropriate for this project. I plan to apply McRobbie’s work on the effects of consumption on women in an effort to understand the collapse of materialism and motherhood that is key feature of most “mommy blogs”. I will also use the work of Zurkin to investigate the alternative markets of the “thrifty” and more significantly the “natural” mom blogs