Radical Psychology
Volume Nine, Issue 2
“Watching with my hands over my eyes”:
Shame and irritation in
ambivalent encounters with ‘Bad Mothers’
Introduction
At a conference I attended earlier this year, on a panel discussing the
specificities of parenting in an age which has been described as
'paranoid' (Furedi, 2001), 'anxious' (Warner, 2005), 'intensive' (Hays,
1998), 'impossible' (DiQuinzio, 1999)
and
'finger-pointing'
(Douglas
and
Michaels, 2004), one panel member, who writes regularly about
mothering in a national newspaper, made her confession. She
admitted that, although she ‘knows’, and indeed makes her living
writing about the ways in which gossip, marketing and pseudo-science
coalesce to make her feel anxious as a mother, she still feels it; and,
perhaps even willingly enters into it. She offered the example of
her son and his bicycle. She had recently bought him his first
bike, and had shortly afterwards heard that many parents were choosing
bikes without pedals, since they may help children learn to balance
faster than the pedalled versions. Oh no, she immediately
thought. I’ve made a bad choice! I’m holding my son back!
Will he ever learn to ride his bike?
This story, frivolous as it might first appear – and indeed frivolity
and humour were the register in which this woman ‘confessed’ – is
interesting to me through its very unremarkability. Modern
motherhood does indeed appear to continue to be marked by intensive
worry, anxiety and the constant self-monitoring by mothers of the
decisions they are making towards their children and their childrearing
(Miller, 2005; Thompson,
2008; Hays, 1998; Furedi, 2001) and moreover
by the ways in which these worries are absolutely normalised.
Even drawing a wry observation about ‘knowing’ of the machinations that
create feelings of maternal anxiety did not prevent this mother from
feeling it anyway or, even willingly entering into it.
This paper is concerned with exploring some of the complex affective
relationships that emerge in encounters between maternal subjects and
childrearing advice and expertise. Much feminist scholarship has
demonstrated the impossibility of fulfilling fantasies of motherhood,
and yet cultural and symbolic fields, texts and representations
continue to be saturated with these fantasies, and how to attain
them. Of particular interest is ‘makeover television’, a cultural
field which has in the past decade made its own successful foray into
the intimate sphere of childrearing and family relations, and which
promises to demonstrate how maternal subjects can re-make themselves in
reference to fantasies of motherhood. The article draws on
empirical data produced through watching this parenting television with
fifteen mothers in order to explore the psychosocial investments that
these mothers have in such fantasies. These investments are
situated within a postfeminist landscape (Gill,
2007) that requires
psychological self-scrutiny and individualise the struggles and
challenges of childrearing. I argue that by situating these
affective encounters with the programme within this wider cultural,
postfeminist moment – in which the turn is towards psychological
self-improvement rather than collective action (Walkerdine, 2003) – we
can better understand why these mothers did not ground their
dissatisfactions with advice within a wider critique of instructional
parenting television.
Parenting advice – from feminism to postfeminism
The imperative to be a good parent is not ‘new’, nor is the anxiety
that this imperative engenders. Parenting advice has flourished
in a professional form for at least a century, with its discursive
roots stretching back even further than that to, at least, the
seventeenth century (Grant, 1998).
The history of parenting
advice reveals a complicated lineage of parenting experts whose
endlessly transforming dictates have consistently mirrored prevailing
anxieties. What is new is the recent, enormous proliferation and
saturation of cultural space with parenting advice, and the
corresponding mainstreaming of parental anxiety as an entirely
unremarkable, even essential part of becoming a parent. In 1997,
five times as many parenting books were published than were in 1975
(Hulbert, 2003). Writing about
parenting books in the United
States, media analysts Douglas
and
Michaels
(2004)
estimate that in the 1970s, four or five new books about
motherhood were published each year, but by 1995 this had increased to
more than sixty new books each year. In global terms, the book
which has sold most copies worldwide in the history of publishing,
second only to the Bible, is parenting author Dr Spock’s Baby and Child
Care (first published 1946, now in its eighth edition and has never
been out of print). The prevalence of public discussions about
parenting is not confined to the publishing world; in very recent
years, several UK newspapers have begun to include weekly supplements
and inserts aimed specifically at parents and families . In spite
of the reducing magazine market in the UK, more parenting titles have
been launched, found a niche and appear to be sustaining their hold,
including Parenting and Mother & Baby. One of the biggest
online successes of recent years has been Mumsnet.org, an online
discussion portal which receives up to 20,000 ‘hits’ a day. This
constant stream of advice, dialogue, conversation and concern has been
institutionalized, to some degree, in the UK with the launch of the
National Academy of Parenting Practitioners in 2007; a national body
devoted to training parenting practitioners how to teach parenting to
parents.
How might critical theorists evaluate the intensity and saturation with
which parenting advice has colonised public space? Does the
ubiquity of this advice suggest that mothers are now liberated
from assumptions that they always-already ‘know’ about parenting?
These lineages of parenting advice that have led to this historical
moment certainly resonate in some places with feminist work, research
and activism; work that has sought to highlight maternal
dissatisfaction as well as the invisible labour and frustrations of
childrearing. Many feminist writers have powerfully articulated
the anxieties, doubts and frustrations they have experienced in their
own mothering (Rich, 1977; Dally, 1982) whilst yet others have robustly
deconstructed the notion of a timeless ‘mother-love’ or ‘maternal
instinct’, pointing to the historical contingency of competing versions
of motherhood (Badinter, 1982; Thurer, 1994). The fantasy of the
perfect mother who populates the pages of mother-craft manuals –
demure, forgiving, sensitively attuned to the needs of her children,
endlessly patient and self-sacrificing – became, rightly, a source of
feminist anger. How were women to live up to these expectations
set out in the literature and repeated across advertisements, national
discourses and maternalist propaganda? This specific
version of mothering was interpreted by some as an integral obstacle to
autonomous selfhood. Friedan (1963)
made such a claim in The
Feminine Mystique in which she examined the accounts of a
wordless unhappiness – 'the problem with no name' - told by many
American suburban housewives. Feminists continue to point out
that this problem with no name has not disappeared; indeed, the myths
of motherhood and the anxieties of how to be the perfect mother have
continued to proliferate across cultural fields, across representation,
and throughout policy (Douglas
and
Michaels,
2004).
Although the feminism of the 1970s and 1980s has often been accused of
‘forgetting’ motherhood, or of being ‘anti-family’(see McRobbie, 2008
for a summary of these claims and counter-claims), mothers were very
much at the centre of the feminist project. Cultural or
maternalist feminism, which sought to amplify and celebrate gendered
difference rather than erase or deny it (O’Rielly,
2004; Blum, 2000)
endeavoured to reclaim the creative and productive possibilities of
mothering (Segal, 2007). In her
now-classic exploration of
motherhood in Of Woman Born, Rich (1977)
firmly locates the
difficulties and anxieties experienced by mothers within the matrices
of power that are produced by patriarchy. The problem for women
is not motherhood per se, but the modern doctrine of the denial of
particular emotions that threatened the institution, namely a doctrine
of continuous and unconditional mother-love and a denial of
anger. Her plotting of the historical contingency of supposedly
‘natural’ aspects of motherhood de-naturalises maternal identity as
neither automatic, natural nor given, but rather, as a difficult
process that is always already marked by the potential for
failure. Motherhood is not a private enterprise, but is always,
endlessly and exhaustively public, involving the medical establishment,
legal institutions and the state. And for women who fail to live
up to this romanticised vision of the self-sacrificing, boundlessly
loving mother, the diagnosis is relentlessly individualised:
Reading of the ‘bad’ mother’s desperate
response to an invisible
assault on her being, ‘good’ mothers resolve to become better, more
patient and long-suffering, to cling more tightly to what passes for
sanity. The scapegoat is different from the martyr; she cannot
teach resistance of or revolt. She represents a terrible
temptation: to suffer uniquely, to assume that I, the individual woman,
am the ‘problem’ (Rich, 1977, p277).
Rich’s (1977) insights around the ‘terrible
temptation’ continue to resonate
within today’s parenting advice in ways that I excavate more fully
later in this paper. In many ways, Rich’s
(1977) work is blind to the
racial and classed axis of difference between mothers (Collins, 1994;
Reynolds, 2006), yet the above quote is
testament to her sensitivity
towards the part that discourses of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mothering play in
opening up divisions between women. This sensitivity around
differences and divisions between women is more absent than present in
cultural feminism that is keen to celebrate ‘womanhood’ even at the
risk of essentialising women.
We can see this too in early scholarship surrounding the rise of the
parenting advice and expert industries, in which feminist scholars
produced passionate and often damning criticism of what was considered
a male-dominated field of medical and clinical authority. For
example, Ehrenreich and
English (1978) argued that the
advice industry, including figures such as ministers, experts, doctors,
psychiatrists and clinicians, was a force that removed power from women
and pathologised the complexities of their everyday lives, particularly
those of childrearing. They argued that the rise of this industry
amounted to a misogynist disenfranchising of women from their own
reproduction and childrearing capacities.
Cultural feminists such as Rich, Ehrenreich and English rendered
intelligible the division between the institution of motherhood and its
experience. Perhaps we might interpret the proliferation of
parenting advice as a legacy of these feminist calls to make the labour
of mothering visible, and to acknowledge the complexities involved
within such labour. When a parenting book begins with the premise
that it is normal to feel anxious, this speaks in some ways to feminist
struggles to give voice to difficult maternal feelings. More
recent social historians of parenting advice (Hulbert,
2003; Apple,
2006) have sought to invert the ‘top-down’ orientation of earlier
scholarship, and to look at the ways in which (some) mothers demanded
expertise, and were not simply passive vessels upon which expertise was
imposed by clinicians. These more recent histories situate the
growth of advice positively within a story of the progressive
empowerment of mothers, the transfer of authority from clinician to
parent, and the growing capacity for parents to autonomously ‘choose’
their expertise from a marketplace of advice. It is almost de
rigeur for any writer offering parenting advice today to begin with a
disclaimer or acknowledgement that too much parenting advice has made
parents confused, or has undermined parental confidence, or is bossy
and patronising (Murkoff, 2002; Doherty and Coleridge, 2008;
Skenazy,
2009). It is also de rigeur for these same advisors to
promise
that their particular offering of advice will – of course – be
different by virtue of that recognition.
Both the inversion of parenting advice history and the continuous
acknowledgement within parenting advice now that ‘real’ mothering is
hard and that ‘real’ children do not come with instructions are
indications of how firmly the contemporary mothering landscape has
become a firm pillar of postfeminism. The term ‘postfeminism’ is
used in many ways: in some contexts it has been used to indicate a
backlash against the principles of feminism, in which feminism itself
is blamed for the problems now facing women (Faludi,
1993); a practice
of reclaiming misogynist words (Wurtzel, 1999);
or
a
strategy
to
progress feminism beyond gynocentricism, whiteness or middle-classness
(Modleski, 1991; Hoff-Sommers, 1994). In popular
discourse,
postfeminism assumes that the goals of feminism have been reached, that
feminists are out of date and that feminism has nothing useful to
say. This is reflected in theory that presumes women have been
nothing but unproblematically empowered by reflexive modernisation
(Giddens, 1991) as we can see in the
accounts of parenting advice that
see choice itself as a guarantee of freedom.
Others have been more cautious in the unravelling of postfeminist
notions of ‘choice’. Gill (2007)
suggests that postfeminism
is best theorised as a distinct cultural sensibility, which invites a
particular relationship to oneself: one of self-surveillance,
monitoring and regulating oneself and one’s life practices; of a
constant willingness to enter into the makeover paradigm of
transformation and improvement and to seek out and evaluate advice
pertaining to this improvement; of individualism, of old structures and
constraints fading away (or at least imagined to fade away) to be
replaced with the mantra and the requirement to ‘invent
yourself’. Angela McRobbie has posited that postfeminist language
invites women to subject themselves to ever more insidious forms of
normalizing power; to ‘choose to be subjected’. In this climate,
visions of meritocratic success require what McRobbie (2004, p257) calls ‘a
forceful non-identity’ or dis-identification with feminism
in which feminist politics is erased and replaced with female
individualization, or more specifically “an anti-feminist endorsement
of female individualization,” in which ambition replaces
collective politics, or the grammar of psychological improvement has
replaced the language of injustice and oppression (Walkerdine,
2003). McRobbie (2004)
points to cultural forms such as the television
makeover programme which generates and legitimates new forms of
antagonism and judgement and in which the most critical judges of women
are no longer men, but other women. Referring to these
antagonisms as "postfeminist symbolic violence", McRobbie (2004, p256-258) offers a
powerful critique of the discourse of empowerment through choice.
One public ‘debate’ which illustrates this is the media-hyped ‘mummy
wars’ which pits working mothers against stay-at-home mothers and
generates antagonisms which fail to offer any feminist critique beyond
these imaginary binaries, but continue the demonisation of women on
both sides of the fence (Peskowitz, 2005;
Parkins, 2009).
Mothers, far from being empowered by ever-conflicting bodies of
childrearing advice, from their entry in record numbers into the labour
market, or by the postfeminist invitations to ‘invent themselves’, are
damned if they do and damned if they don’t. As Imogen Tyler
notes":
young working-class mothers are still
routinely demonised in political
discourse and are stable television comic fodder, working mothers are
routinely castigated for failing their children, mothers who don’t work
outside the home are rebuked for failing themselves, their families and
the economy” (
Tyler, 2009, p1).
For Tyler (2009), the maternal has never
been so hyper-visible, and yet so
incoherent. She points to recent research, conducted by the UK
Equalities Review, demonstrating that it is now motherhood – not
gender – that leads to women’s continuing discrimination in the
workforce. And yet it is not feminist anger about these
injustices that take the centre stage of culture, but rather notions of
good and bad mothering, and conversations about how to situate oneself
within the former and avoid the latter, that continue to dominate
popular cultural and representational fields.
Parenting television
One important new site where the visualising of good and bad mothers
happens is on television. The genre of reality and makeover
television has become a space for the coalescing of several discursive
shifts, towards for example ordinariness, transformation and
instruction concerning the world of the everyday. The issue of
parenting, and especially mothering, constitutes a significant strand
of the reality format, and includes programmes such as Wife Swap (RDF
Media; Channel 4, 2003-present), Young, Dumb and Living Off Mum (BBC
Three, 2009) The World’s Strictest Parents (BBC Three, 2008-2009) which
fall broadly under new configurations of ‘documentary’. Parenting in
documentaries which broadcast extreme examples of parenting styles and
the ‘swap’ format which exchanges members of very different families,
emerges as a problematic matter which is inescapably about conflict and
strife, and in which the viewer is invoked to take a hard moral stance.
More specifically, in terms of the instructional ‘how-to-live’
programmes which offer expertise to subjects seeking to transform
facets of their lives which are causing them unhappiness, the issue of
bad parenting has become a staple of the genre here too: programmes
such as Nanny 911 (FOX, United States, 2004-present; ITV2, UK, 2009)
Little Angels (BBC, 2004-2007, UK); Who Rules the Roost? (BBC3, 2004,
UK) ; House of Tiny Tearaways (BBC3, UK) and the ubiquitous Supernanny
(Channel 4, UK, 2003-present; ABC, United States, 2005-present).
Supernanny is a television programme in which troubled parents are
subjected to a familial makeover, and ‘bad parents’ are transformed
under the guidance of a parenting guru, Jo Frost (the Supernanny), into
‘good parents’. It is this programme that I focus on in my work,
for the reasons of its popularity and of its numerous franchise
imitations globally.
The programme offers us a seductive peek into the intimate lives of
families and the private problems of parenting. The intended
purpose of this peeking seems wilfully obtuse: at times the
accompanying promotion to the programme seems to promise guidance and
advice for all families; a kind of everyman Dr Spock for today’s
complex world of parenting. The promotional material for the
programme asks: “wouldn’t it be nice if someone were on hand to tell us
how to do it?” and promises that it will “save the world, one family at
a time”. At others, the programme is publicised as a shocking
exposé of the nation’s naughtiest children and an invitation to
enjoy the pleasures of passing judgement; in an online interview prior
to the broadcast of the third series, Frost promises that “we’ve got
some real tyrants in the next series”. This oscillation between
appearing to offer sound advice that every parent needs, and appearing
to offer extreme cases of bad behaviour as ‘must-see TV’, means that
Supernanny straddles a complex territory in terms of interpellation;
who is being beckoned and in what ways. Does the programme
promise to offer a moral judgement of bad examples of parenting?
Does it promise to help every parent, since we are all, after all, bad
parents sometimes? These questions are left unresolved, vague and
ever-shifting. I suggest that it is this very oscillation which
engenders ambivalence in the viewing encounter and which prevents
viewers from sustaining a grounded critique of the
programme.
Exploring encounters with the text-in-action method
In other places I have interrogated the assumptions, and inadequacies,
of the narrative of transformation that is offered up by Supernanny; a
narrative which appears to ‘work’ only through a hysterical and
panoptic scrutiny upon the minutiae of family life, and through the
psychologising and pathologising of particular ways of being in the
world that we might theorise as a classed habitus (Bourdieu, 1977; see
Jensen, 2010). Supernanny appears
at times to speak in a feminist
register. Its underlying premise, like all parenting television
and indeed advice, is that being a parent is hard work and requires
much invisible and continuous labour, that fathers can and should take
up some of this labour and that parents can make positive changes to
their lives. However, the transformational narrative that
Supernanny offers centres on very narrow solutions to the complex and
often fraught difficulties that programme participants are
facing. Neither intensive parenting cultures nor unrealistic
parental expectations are scrutinised; there is no examination of how
emotional labour is divided in the home or how work-life balance may be
adjusted, or how challenges might be levelled at the institution of
mothering, experiences of sexism, poverty, racism or heteronormativity,
conflicts with paid employment or with additional caring
responsibilities. The transformation can only offer an
individualist, and often unsatisfactory, call to police and transform
‘mothering’. Moreover, only knowledge from a legible authority
counts, and is required to assist parents in successfully operating in
their everyday lives.
However, important as critiques of the content of these kind of
makeover programme undoubtedly are (Ouellette and Hay, 2009; Walkerdine
and Ringrose, 2008; Biressi
and Nunn, 2005), in this paper I want to
attend, instead, to the ways in which the programme is animated in
reception; what happens in the encounter between the programme and
those who watch it? I became interested during research of the
programme’s narrative and discursive underpinnings in unpicking the
encounters between the mothers on the screen and the mothers watching,
and by the psychosocial role played by what we might call the ‘bad
enough’ mother (to play on the term of the ‘good enough’ mother, see
Winnicott, 1965); the Other mothers
against which we constitute
ourselves. Makeover, or transformation, television (of which
Supernanny is a part) presents us with an opportunity to reflect upon
the processes of subject-making in a psycho-social register, since the
narratives within it are explicitly concerned with change. The
drama of the narrative speaks both to anxieties about the kind of
mother-subject we might already be and the desires for a promised
future mother-subject we might yet become.
I interviewed fifteen parents from South East London, UK, either alone
or in groups, about their background, their parenting philosophies and
their relationship to advice. These interviews were followed by a
viewing session in which we watched an episode of Supernanny.
Using the text-in-action method, developed by Helen Wood in her
examination of the relationship between textuality and subjectivity for
women watching daytime talkshows (Wood,
2005; Wood, 2007; Skeggs, Wood
and Thumim, 2008), I recorded these viewing events with a digital
sound
recorder. After viewing, we reflected upon the episode in a
post-viewing interview. The text-in-action method is an
innovative way of creating data by recording the viewing encounter
itself, challenging the hyper-rationalist subject that can sometimes be
presumed and created within other research methodologies. It also
opens up the affective aspects of the viewing encounter: the gasps,
tuts and sighs, the non-verbal and (perhaps) unintentional parts of
cultural conversation with media texts.
Taking a psycho-social approach to the text-in-action data was a way of
bridging distinctions between interior and exterior worlds. It
also attended to the ways in which the viewing encounters with bad
mothers on the screen reproduced discursive landscapes of good and bad
parenting, through the messy and partial processes of psychic disowning
and projection. I draw on these concepts as set out by the school
of psychoanalytic object relations, which takes a departure from
Freud’s drive theory, via the work of Melanie Klein (Mitchell,
1986). Whilst Klein’s work, importantly, is conceptually
distinct
from object relations, her work on the dynamism and fluidity of
splitting and projection has had profound influence on the subsequent
object relations school. Kleinian projection entails the
expulsion of unwanted material onto others; the disowning and
externalising of our own faults, the faults that are too costly for us
to bear. Klein’s conceptual dyad of projective and introjective
processes point us towards the ways in which the boundaries between
selves and others are permeable and flexible, generative and
transformative (Bondi, 2003). In
object relations, our interior
space is held to be populated with objects, psychic representations of
ourselves and others in the world, and parts of those selves and
others. Our interactions in the world bear the impression of
these psychic objects and our need to relate to others mobilises these
unknowable interior dramas. In other words, our interiorised
unconscious relationships both mediate and animate our experiences of
the world and our relationships with others.
Whilst there are obvious problems with moving freely between the
conscious and unconscious, affect and emotion, I want to use Klein’s
notion of projection as a way of thinking about what the screen mothers
of the programme do for the mothers watching, and what they hold for
them; principally, that the bad mothers on the Supernanny screen serve
as generative figures for the mothers watching. By ‘generative’ I
refer to the production of affective matter that was mobilized through
these textual encounters. I want to focus on a few examples that
illuminate the messy and partial nature of this projection – how the
on-screen mothers are never quite bad-enough – and tease out the
complex emotional textures that circulated though these partial
projections. In particular, I want to explore what I saw as
pragmatic shifts in the affective registers that participants spoke in;
from feelings of vicarious shame and exposure, as if what was happening
on the screen was somehow felt to reveal one’s own fraught parental
life, to sudden expressions of irritation and annoyance. I want
to explore what the shift to irritation does, or rather permits one to
not do; that is, to feel anger and rage.
Managing the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’
The pleasures of watching ‘them on the screen’ against whom a distance
with oneself could be drawn was for some participants fraught with
emotional complexity. It is important to note that nearly all the
parents who participated in this research stated during the interview
that although they had watched Supernanny before, they would not
consider themselves ‘fans’ or regular viewers; even though many of them
demonstrated a good deal of familiarity with the programme, referred to
other episodes they had watched and so on. Most were also
hesitant, in the interview, with claiming any viewing pleasures;
although again this was complicated by the affective pleasures they
demonstrated during viewing. Some participants spoke of their
relief that they could watch another parent failing, and of their
relief that it was not them on the screen. But this relief was
precarious and shadowed by the possibility that they might ‘see
themselves up there’. Some participants spoke of their anxieties
that watching might curse or jinx them, that laughing at or enjoying
another parent’s failings on the screen might have ‘karmic’ costs and
they might come to recognise themselves in the future.
Any pleasures were precarious and unfinished. The distinctions
between ‘us’ and ‘them’, between failing on-screen family and failing
viewer were felt to be porous. Good and bad mothers may mutate
into one another; both in terms of a psychologised television makeover
(where bad mothers become good mothers with the help of the
Supernanny), but also in terms of the partiality with which any
projection might be made.
One participant, Helen, made several statements of judgment about the
on-screen family during the first few minutes of our viewing session
(Series 3, Episode 3), remarking on the "lethal stairwell", the
excessive cleanliness of the house which she found “unnerving”, and
gasping with outrage when the father admitted that he had never read to
his two sons. In response to a montage of the two boys walking to
school, she exclaimed:
Helen: You do think, how can people live like
that? It’s just crazy.
Through this and several other expressions of her disgust and outrage,
Helen is able to do a degree of distancing work in a short space of
time, creating (what seems to be) a firm sense of herself as different
from the on-screen family. Yet within a few minutes, Helen
quietly said to her husband, who was also taking part in the session,
“that’s me, isn’t it?” Something about the narrative had
unsettled Helen, and the disquiet of recognition prevented her from
continuing with her distancing remarks. Instead, many of her
subsequent comments were concerned with whether or not her parenting
style was in fact similar to the father she had initially been outraged
by, and she was concerned to find ways to draw finely coded
distinctions between this man on the screen who she continued to want
to hold at a distance, yet felt increasingly unable to, and her own
‘good’ mothering. The slippery projections, illustrated in
Helen’s shifting register from distance to disquiet, happened at other
points across the other viewing sessions. Like Helen, these
attempts to make distinctions between on-screen parents, and the
parents watching, were not always entirely successful. Security
in one’s own parental competence, for many of the viewers, waxed and
waned throughout the viewing of the episode.
My viewing session with Louisa demonstrated the deep complexity and
ambivalence with which notions of good and bad mothering can be claimed
and held on to. Louisa demonstrated clearly the many different
layers of meaning that the programme had for her and the reasons, often
uncomfortable, that she watched and felt invested in the format:
Louisa: And partly its like,
thank god my kid isn’t
like that. But partly, you are trying to pick up some tips, how
not to be like that….and then on the other hand, its pure
entertainment. And there’s a little bit of schadenfreude, isn’t
there, watching someone else slip in the poo. Thank god that’s
not me, you know? And then you think, some people actually have to
learn this. I mean, who are these weirdos?
Emma: That’s not very nice.
Louisa: No? Well, but come on.
Louisa performs a kind of relief (‘thank god that’s not me’), and
during the episode viewing itself, she also performs her agony over
whether she is able to watch, why she is watching, and what it might
mean that she continues to watch. It is Louisa who claimed to be
“watching with my hands over my eyes”. But her performance of
relief is haunted by her contempt for ‘these weirdos’. Who are
these people, she asks again and again, even after her partner Emma
reprimands her for not being very nice. When I first examined the
material generated from my interview and text-in-action session with
Louisa, I read her comments as expressions of contempt, even
arrogance. At first, I felt that she was holding ‘these weirdos’
at a distance only because she was able to think of the on-screen
mothers as value-less and incompetent, and because she was able to feel
secure in her own competence. When I looked again, more carefully
and across our entire conversation, I found that there were alternative
ways to interpret Louisa’s encounter with Supernanny.
Far from feeling secure in her own parental competence, Louisa’s
interview was saturated with her uncertainty. As a lesbian
mother, she initially positioned herself outside of parenting advice,
declaring that it had little relevance for her and her partner by dint
of its heteronormative presumptions. Louisa remarked that as soon
as she read the word ‘dad’ in parenting advice, she “just dismissed it,
really”. She anticipates that the problems her family will face
are likely to be “so different” from anything a (heterosexual)
parenting expert might know about, that she doubts she will find
anything useful there. In this way, Louisa is able to mobilise
her queerness, her lesbian identity, to exonerate and distance herself
from parenting advice and the anxiety she feels it engenders. In
her agentic account of herself, her sexuality acts as another resource,
alongside her other cultural capital and resources, through which she
can reject the anxiety generating parenting industry.
But Louisa’s rejection of parenting expertise and her secure account of
herself as a competent parent is not entirely robust. Later in
the interview she tells a story of her ordeal with a friend’s parents
who were due to meet her, her partner and their baby son. Prior
to the arranged meeting, her friend confessed that her parents had
already voiced their homophobic doubts around lesbian parenting.
When telling this story, Louisa repeated the question that her friend
had repeated to her; “what are they doing to that child?” For
obvious reasons, Louisa found the meeting a trial of both managing her
emotions and worrying how she was being interpreted by her friend’s
parents; of hyper-vigilance and self-consciousness. It acted as a
reminder that her “own world of normality” is not always granted a
normative status, or in her words:
Occasionally
you
see
yourself
through other people’s eyes and then you
think, oh god, they think we’re freaks. They think we’re weirdos.
What I find instructive here is the repetition of the word
‘weirdos’. Louisa used this very word when discussing the people
who needed to be told how to do what she considered basic parenting
tasks, people who were unable to follow what she considered the most
rudimentary of parenting instincts. Louisa’s decree that these
people are ‘weirdos’ acquires, I think, a new level of projective
complexity in light of her own experiences of feeling like a ‘weirdo’,
or rather, feeling the projections of ‘weirdo’ upon her, by homophobic
others. Her own negative feelings of being judged as (possibly)
inadequate, or at least problematic, of feeling self-conscious and
hyper-vigilant as a parent are not transformed into a reticence about
judging other parents on Supernanny; rather the feelings they invoke in
her, of feeling like a ‘weirdo’, serve her with the very terms she
projects onto others.
Louisa partially revised her initial decree about ‘these weirdos’ after
viewing a mother who was not quite ‘bad-enough’ to be cast out. I
would suggest that this revision is partly, at least, about social
class and agency. Louisa and I watched one of the few Supernanny
families that are not easily readable in terms of social class;
Caroline and Sonny of Series 2. Over the course of viewing,
Louisa’s pleasure shifted from schadenfreude (taking pleasure in the
misfortune of others) to recognition that perhaps these misfortunes
were also her own or may come to be her own; this prompted a great deal
of anxious talk. Louisa ruminated over this at length
afterwards:
Louisa:
You’re
not
judging
them, are you…well, I
suppose you are…but you’re sort of willing it to turn out…especially
when they seem really nice and well-meaning […] and they did seem very
sweet and well-meaning and they desperately wanted to do the right
thing […] I think it depends on who the parents are and whether you
like them or not […] There is this sort of anxiety about it. You
really want it to turn out alright. I was really empathising with
the mother in that one […] Sometimes in those episodes, they’re very
obviously doing the wrong thing, and you can be a bit more judgmental
about it? I mean. One doesn’t want to be judgmental, but
obviously we all are. But in that particular episode, I sort of
felt their pain a bit […] you’re on their side. But with some of
them [parents], you almost sort of enjoy it when she tells them off a
bit.
Louisa draws very careful and hesitant distinctions between the parents
whose pain she can feel and those whose pain she can enjoy. There
is an unspoken classed dimension to the distinctions she draws between
who she will judge and who she can empathise with; her terms are nice,
sweet and well-meaning, but I would argue that what she means is
middle-class and agentic. Although Louisa does not explicitly
reference social class, I would follow other theorists (Reay, 2004;
Skeggs, Woods and Thumim,
2008) and suggest nonetheless that social
class is the animating vector of difference. These are the terms
in which she tries to narrate her own mothering decisions. But I
also think her ruminations must be analysed in light of the
postfeminist climate of advice in which she lives and operates, in
which self-surveillance and self-transformation are the central tropes
of being in the world, and in which evaluative capitals are prized and
assumed of people, and parents, weighing up and choosing the
philosophies and lifestyles they want to live by.
From shame to irritation
The viewing encounters were saturated with the ambivalent experience of
shame. Returning to the content of the programme, the shame on
the Supernanny screen is multi-layered; during an episode we watch
children behave in ways that their parents experience as shaming: the
shame of failing to take control of escalating situations; the shaming
of these parents by the Supernanny, Jo Frost, who tells them that she
is ashamed by what she has seen. During the course of the episode
parents are confronted over and over again by shaming video footage of
the moments where they failed to implement behavioural strategies in
the Supernanny’s absence. Ahmed (2004) suggests
that
shame
is
an
ambivalent emotion which has a double meaning; to be both exposed
and concealed. The shamed subject, burning with the sensation of
shame, drops her gaze or turns away, and yet she remains exposed.
It is the exposure which is shaming; to be witnessed as having done
something terrible. Being alone does not erase the experience of
shame, since the ‘witness’ continues to be imagined. The many
layers of looking in Supernanny incite the unending nature of shame;
even when Jo Frost has left the building, the camera remains, sometimes
even wall-mounted and equipped with night-vision, and so we continue to
witness. The transformation from bad parent to good is driven
forward narratively when Frost returns with yet more footage filmed
during her absence and the on-screen parents are freshly shamed.
For Munt (2007, p8), shame is about
“self-attention, induced by another”. Once this attention has
been induced, shame, of all
the emotions is the stickiest; she says: “it travels quickly, it has an
infective, contagious property that means it can circulate and be
exchanged with intensity” (Munt, 2007,
p3). In Spanish there is a term
for this kind of vicarious shame – vergüenza ajena – the shame
that one feels upon witnessing the shame of another, but there is no
corresponding word in English . The circulation and exchange of
shame lent a difficult emotional texture to the session, which I was
only really able to make partial sense of during transcription.
Specific visual sequences in the programme were most obviously about
the circulation of shame – long camera close-ups on parents’ faces as
Jo Frost delivers her initial diagnosis of the family’s problems or
when confronted by shaming video footage in particular – and these
sequences have been defined usefully as ‘judgment shots’ (Skeggs, Woods
and Thumim, 2008). During these judgment shots, the
text-in-action sound recordings were agonisingly quiet, compared to the
almost continuous audio soundtrack cues, the sounds of children
screaming and shouting, as well as the affective and outraged chatter
from participants as they watched. Mothers participating in the
text-in-action sessions sometimes covered their eyes or their mouths
with their hands; Louisa, as I have noted already, remarked during one
of these shaming judgment shots that she was “watching with her hands
over her eyes”.
Where did this shaming take subjects? What are the possibilities
once vicarious shame has been exchanged? Like the shifts between
projection and recognition that happened in the encounter, the
affective shaming experiences that were invoked through watching the
programme also shifted. In many instances, there was a distinct
shift from shame to irritation, as the following exchange with another
group of viewing mothers illustrates:
Jane:
The worse they are at the beginning, the
better […] don’t you find that you watch them, and you’re relieved […]
and when it cuts back to the parents, and you’re like right, what’s
wrong with them! And they’re really nice and encouraging, and
you’re like oh god!
Kelly: The thing about
Supernanny is just the stupid
parents on them really.
Fiona: The closer they get to
Trisha the more I have
a problem with them.
Jane: But I think you watch
them because you
genuinely want them to become beautiful children, don’t you, and the
reunion and they realise what a shit they’ve been, and you want it to
come around full circle, don’t you?
Jane’s performance of relief – that it is the parents on the screen who
are failing, not her – is just as complex and fragile as
Louisa’s. She acknowledges here her own complicity with wider
expectations that there is no such thing as bad children, only bad
parents, and her panic when that expectation falls flat (‘oh
god!’). When good parents (that are nice and encouraging) and bad
parents (who have out-of-control children) are one and the same, it not
only confounds wider moral explanations of parental causality, it also
disrupts Jane’s own personal guarantees. The parents on the
screen serve as a reminder to her that even if she does all the things
she is ‘supposed’ to do, her children may yet embarrass her, behave
badly or otherwise shame her. She solicits agreement from the
rest of the group, punctuating her statements with ‘don’t you’ but she
does not receive it. Instead, both Kelly and Fiona express their
irritation with the parents on parenting television; Kelly’s annoyance
is with their stupidity, while Fiona speaks exasperatingly of her
‘problem’ with the ones that remind her of the subjects on a popular
daytime talk-show, Trisha (Channel 5, 2004-2009) hosted by Trisha
Goddard.
I would argue that it is the irritations expressed by Jane and her
peers that limit the astute observations they made, at other points in
the viewing session, about the injustices of the programme and of the
unreasonable expectations they felt contemporary parenting culture made
of them. During viewing, this group responded to the episode
(Series 2, Episode 11) at several points with expressions of empathy
and understanding for the mother on screen, Heather. Jane and
Fiona in particular pointed out that the on-screen husband worked long
hours and she was alone with her children, that she may be depressed,
that she too worked full-time and was exhausted. In short, they
responded to the gaps in the narrative and the voiceover, challenging
and talking over the explanations presented by the programme and
filling it with their own, and making their expressions of sympathy, as
the following exchange demonstrates:
Jane: She’s around them a lot. She feels
he’s
way out of the picture.
Fiona: She’s mad at the dad.
Jane: Who is he to come back and start saying,
start
criticising?
Fiona: And yet he’ll come back
and see everything that’s wrong, and
she’ll be resentful.
Jane and Fiona are drawing on their own experience, on pop-psychology
and on cultural tropes of gender and family to flesh out an explanation
which they are not satisfied with. But ultimately, in the
post-viewing discussion, the moments of irritation they had felt
outweighed the moments of sympathy and their impassioned challenges to
the terms in which the Bixley family problems were psychologised and
‘transformed’ are re-articulated, instead, as a declaration to “take on
board” what they have seen on the screen. The irritations they
felt towards Heather, and indeed the irritations that are invited by
the cultural form of instructional television, I would argue, prevented
these women from grounding the dissatisfactions they felt with the
episode within a wider refusal or critique of instructional parenting
television. Instead, the irritations serve as prompts that they
must ‘take on board’, monitor and regulate their own parenting lives
for the kinds of behaviours and problems that they found irritating.
Conclusion – Ugly feelings and the postfeminist maternal subject
In her exploration of the cultural forms which give rise to the ‘less
noble’ emotions of envy, irritation, anxiety, Ngai
(2005) points
out that there has been a relative theoretical silence around these
emotions, when compared to more powerful and politically mobilising
emotions, such as anger. Ngai (2005)
suggests that these ‘dysphoric’
affects are considered to be negative. She suggests that they are
also associated with inaction, considered critically effete, ‘flat’ or
affectively disorienting, amoral and petty.
Ngai (2005) terms these
collective dysphoric affects “ugly feelings”, and focuses her analysis
of each at cultural moments in which they seem to be particularly
charged or at stake in symbolic struggles. Her analysis of envy
is connected to contemporary feminist debates about the problems of
expressions of aggression between women. I would suggest that the
‘ugly feeling’ of irritation has a theoretical significance in terms of
the postfeminist climate of parenting advice, in which it is the
maternal, so hyper-visible and so public, that is used as an invitation
for women to judge other women so readily.
Ngai begins her discussion of irritability with a quote from the
philosopher Aristotle: “those people we call irritable are those who
are irritated by the wrong things, more severely and for longer than is
right” (Ngai, 2005, p175). The
continuing dominance of bad mothers
across representational and cultural fields, together with the
postfeminist requirement to be endlessly surveilling oneself and one’s
life, means that it is increasingly difficult for mothers to articulate
their dissatisfactions with the everyday injustices of their lives as
mothers. The angry maternal writing of second-wave feminism,
which gave voice to the invisible labours of mothering and offered a
semblence of collective feminist action, has been swamped by the
contemporary tidal wave of how-to-parent instructional books,
television programmes and websites. This tidal wave has clear
links with the wider therapeutic discourses through which the
contemporary subject is invited to re-make oneself rather than remake
society and address social injustice. My interest in this paper
has been with tracking the investments that we have in these processes
of self-making. The bad mother – although apparently celebrated
in confessional ‘mummylit’ with ironic abandon – remained in the
encounters with these programmes a figure upon whom one’s own possible
failings must be projected and against whom finely coded distinctions
should be drawn.
It is through, I have suggested, the ‘ugly feelings’ that makeover
television, with its invitation to postfeminist symbolic violence and
“new cruelty” (McRobbie, 2004) that the
feminist possibilities of the
programmes become stifled, and recast instead as requirements to
transform oneself. In this paper I have sought to demonstrate how
critical theorists of postfeminist culture can intervene in these
encounters, to excavate more fully the complexity of psychosocial
projections and investments, and to attend to the damaging ways in
which the psychologising turn within culture contributes to divisions
between women. In spite of the problematic aspects of her work,
Adrienne Rich was attuned to the potential injury that the institution
of motherhood could bring to bear upon mothers enmeshed within it; the
‘terrible temptation’ to endure the blame for the impossibility of
fantasies of mothering. As radical psychologists, we too should
remain suspicious of psychologised culture which continues to divide
women into good, bad and better parents without attending to the expert
discourses that both decry and redeem parents enmeshed within it.
Until, perhaps, we are able to watch ‘bad’ mothers without our hands
covering our eyes in shame, refusing to be merely irritated and instead
remaining angry, ‘real’ mothering will continue to lurk on the margins
of culture.
Acknowledgements
I would like to offer my gratitude and thanks for the helpful
suggestions made by the two anonymous reviewers of this article.
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Tracey Jensen teaches at the Centre for Creative and Cultural
Industries at King’s College London. Her doctoral research
examined the discourses of class and gender produced within
instructional parenting television, maps the circuits of value and
capital
that parents play in their encounters with these programmes and
explores the relationship between televisual encounters and the
promises of political parenting interventions.