96: Mediating Motherhood feat. Hannah Zeavin

Abby and Patrick welcome returning guest Hannah Zeavin – scholar, write, editor, co-founder of the Psychosocial Foundation and Founding Editor of Parapraxis magazine – to talk about her brand-new book, Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the 20th Century. It’s an exploration of the complex relationships that have tied together the figure of the mother as an abstraction, the work of mothering as a practical matter, and academic and popular discourses about what mothers should be and how they should go about doing it. What does it mean to think about the mother as a “medium” for containing, nurturing, and shepherding the development of a child, and why do debates about mothering pivot so invariably around questions of media consumption and technological mediation? The conversation spans the history of academic research into parenting from behaviorism to attachment theory; clinical and popular discourses about mothers from Freud to Dr. Spock; the profusion of tools that promise to “help” mothers with their kids; “good-enough” mothering, mother-blaming, and vicious double binds; moral, political, and legal debates about nannies, “helicopter mothers,” incarcerated mothers, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome; and much, much more. 

Read and subscribe to Parapraxis here: https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/

Learn more about the Psychosocial Foundation here: https://www.thepsychosocialfoundation.org/

Mother Media is available here: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262049559/mother-media/

An excerpt from Mother Media in the Los Angeles Review of Books: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-heir-conditioner/

Zeavin, “Composite Case: The Fate of the Children of Psychoanalysis”: https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/composite-case

Zeavin, “Unfree Associations”: https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-42/essays/unfree-associations/

Zeavin, “Parallel Processes”: https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-49/politics/parallel-processes/

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