“Mommy meets Money”: Digitized forms of affective labor among ‘mommy’ bloggers and the biopolitical production of ‘life’ as a marketable commodity

Abstract: This study explores the ways in which digitized forms of affective labor among ‘mommy’ bloggers effectuate biopolitical production of ‘life’ as a marketable commodity. Situating the research in a context of a neo-liberal re-structuring of the global order and dissolving biopolitical state boundaries, this study captures the transformation of ‘life’ and its quotidian needs and capabilities into a terrain for commodification. Employing a Critical Discourse Analysis, the study uses the ‘everyday life’ activities manifested in the form of digitized affective labor in the ‘mommy’ blogosphere, as an entry point to research, to explore the blurring of the boundaries between productive and reproductive labor and the suffusion of capitalist market logics to ‘life’ in its entirety. As the findings of the study suggest, the biopolitical production of ‘life’ as a marketable commodity in the ‘mommy’ blogosphere manifests via four interrelated ways: the ‘enterprising’ of motherhood and motherly affects; manufacturing of marketable fantasies; commodification of ‘everyday’ rhythms, routines and leisure time; and commodification of ‘mommy’ subjectivities.