From Perfect Mothers to Real Moms : Empowering Maternal Narratives in Contemporary Anglo-American Advertising
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| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Requested lectures |
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| Description | The idealized image of the ‘perfect mother’ constructed by the 20th-century mass media presented mothering as the most satisfying job that makes a woman complete. Media-driven concepts such as intensive mothering (Hays, 1996), new momism (Douglas and Michaels, 2004) or yummy mummy (Pitt, 2008) have been widely criticized for imposing unrealistic standards on mothers, particularly in advertising texts. However, recent sociocultural shifts – driven in part by the rise of social media where real mothers share their lived experiences and practices – have prompted advertisers to challenge these traditional depictions. Nowadays, advertising are addressing ‘the raw realities of motherhood’ or ‘the dark side of motherhood’, tackling thus topics that were once considered taboo, such as clogged breasts, postpartum depression, aging mothers or maternal mental health. This shift reflects what O’Reilly terms “maternal empowerment” (2010), which challenges the patriarchal control of motherhood and reasserts a woman’s agency in defining her maternal identity. This talk introduces my research on the evolving portrayal of motherhood in Anglo-American advertising, focusing on how contemporary commercials reconstruct maternal identities. Drawing upon a multimodal discourse analysis approach (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001; Ledin & Machin, 2020), alongside (critical) discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995; Wodak, 2001; etc.) and critical stylistics (Jeffries, 2010), I examine how verbal, visual, and other semiotic communication strategies depict the complexities of real-life parenting. Additionally, I also discuss how this new maternal representation and identities are received and appreciated by both mothers and the wider public, assessing their impact on cultural perceptions of maternal identity. |