Mobility, Moms, and the Babywearing Phenomenon

Abstract

This article extends scholarly inquiry into the rhetorical resonances of motherhood by examining how “motherhood” is constituted through spatial, temporal, and material relations, which themselves are inextricable from mothers’ differential mobilities. Mothers’ access to transportation, ease of movement through public spaces, and physical proximity to their children all contribute to both public and private understandings of what “good mothering” entails. Drawing on geographer Timothy Cresswell’s notion of “mobility constellations” to describe the cultures surrounding different mobility practices, the article teases out the differential affordances of two such constellations: babywearing and stroller pushing. In addition to demonstrating how these two contemporary mobility practices constitute motherhood differently, the article calls for rhetoric and communication scholars to examine “rhetorics of mobility” as a means to account more fully for the range of rhetorics that influence how identities are shaped, privilege is maintained, and rhetorical action can lead to social transformation.

Keywords:

• Babywearing
• identity
• mobility
• mobility constellations
• motherhood
• strollers

Notes

Notes

1 Six essays on various aspects of motherhood, as well as an “Introduction to Mothering Rhetorics” by guest editor Lynn O’Brien Hallstein, are featured in vol. 40, no. 1, of Women’s Studies in Communication, while full-length monographs include Buchanan’s Rhetorics of Motherhood and Hallstein’s White Feminists and Contemporary Maternity and Bikini-Ready Moms: Celebrity Profiles, Motherhood, and the Body. At the 2018 Rhetoric Society of America conference, two panels and several individual papers featured “motherhood” in their titles.

2 For instance, the first edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves was self-published in 1970, with the first commercial edition following in 1973 (“About Our Bodies, Ourselves”).

3 As I was completing the final edits for this essay, I discovered that Babywearing International had filed for bankruptcy and announced it would cease operations on August 31, 2018. The organization’s Web site emphasizes that local chapters will still maintain active lending libraries and support systems even in the absence of the national umbrella organization.