SEWSA 2016 Intersectionality in the New Millennium: An Assessment of Culture, Power, and Society

Re-domesticating Women: An Intersectional Analysis of Mothering in the Age of National Security

Room 222, DiGiorgio Campus Center (DiGs)

In this paper, I look at the ways current mobile media technologies and security discourses enable the insertion of the private sphere into the public sphere through devices which now act to tether “home” to women wherever they go and whatever they do. A nexus of three discourses enable this re-domestication of women: 1) mass media and consumer marketing discourse child safety and “cyberparenting,” 2) child protection concerns articulated by social service organizations and 3) conservative women’s claims to be “security moms” as their duty to family and nation. This nexus of safety/security discourses when tied to mobile technology reconstitutes women’s bodies as the locus of reproductive labor in concert with, rather than antagonistically toward, broad social and economic demands for women’s productive labor. A woman’s inability to meet the ideal as “cyberparent” or “security mom” leads to state interventions which impact women and children most often along racial and class lines while also marking groups for generational surveillance across the life span. I use an intersectional framework to discuss the differential application of state power at the intersections of race, class, gender, location, and time.