Momfluenced by Sara Petersen

Author:Sara Petersen [Petersen, Sara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

The pursuit of an aesthetic feels so critical to understanding momfluencer culture from a visual performance angle, and it resonates on a personal level for me, the mom who constantly falls victim to the misguided desire for products as a shortcut to maternal satisfaction. Both the cool mom aesthetic and the pared-down minimalist mom aesthetic appeal to my desire for a certain level of peace, both internally and externally, and the pursuits of such aesthetics are continuously confounding because of the innately unpeaceful experience of parenthood. Children are messy. And loud. And disruptive. No amount of white paint or photos of cool baby sneakers can erase that truth.

And the truth of mothering, and all the bodily fluids it entails, is what the “unfiltered” mom aesthetic seeks to uncover. Think photos of engorged breasts, runny noses, or surrealist images of a mom’s back scrawled with marker courtesy of their kid. Karni Arieli started the Eye Mama Project during the first days of pandemic lockdown, with the intention of viewing motherhood through the eyes of mothers themselves, not a filtered patriarchal gaze. The result is an Instagram account bursting with images of quotidian life made magical by the skill and attention of artist mothers. One contribution from Amy Woodward features a photo of a baby reaching for their mother’s breast; the nipple is spurting milk water-gun-style in a way immediately familiar to anyone who has breastfed. The spurts of milk feel playful, powerful, beautiful, in a way that has nothing to do with aspiration and everything to do with inclusion. It’s a photo that draws the viewer into an intensely personal, specific experience of motherhood. It’s a photo of a tiny moment usually swallowed up in the action of the day but slowed down in film to render the small labors of motherhood awesome.

Karni and I Zoomed about British pub culture, structural support for caregiving, and, of course, the aesthetics of truth inherent in the Eye Mama Project. She explained that in the UK, one is less likely to encounter the pretty Nap-Dress-wearing mama and more likely to find beer-drinking mums who glory in profanity and bright colors. “They drink a bit more beer,” she said. “Nobody’s really high-end in the UK unless you’re, like, a princess. Everyone’s a little more scruffy. We’re quite down and dirty, you know, so you compare it to the US aesthetic of, like, detoxing green juice.”63 Karni’s invocation of “princesses” seems particularly apt when we consider the aesthetic of the domestic-goddess mom, who, if nothing else, looks like a pretty princess in a pretty castle. And obviously I adore the fact that “green juice” popped into Karni’s mind when imagining a typical US momfluencer. I mean, truly.

While I’d take a beer-swilling pub mumfluencer over a perfect all-white-everything momfluencer any day of the week, Karni points out that, despite the aesthetic differences, both archetypes are still, after all, types. They are imagistic ideals of motherhood that flatten the lived experiences of most moms into neat, tidy squares, as addictive and easy to gobble up as potato chips.

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