Mamapreneurialism: Family Appreciation in the Digital Mundane

This chapter drills down into the everyday lives of four women to show how mamapreneurialism emerges as the primary sensibility of mothering through precarity. For these mothers, it is not enough to be a “good mom”; they also feel responsible for securitizing the family. As financial and other sorts of disasters loom, family can readily depreciate or be depreciated, so mothers must continually work to appreciate it anew by becoming ever more mamapreneurial. Mamapreneurialism includes not only enterprising economic activities like online couponing and work-at-home sales but also a battery of banal decisions, activities, affects, and labors. It asks mothers to reinvent family life as a rationalized web of economized care, which in turn promises freedom, independence, autonomy, and security while allaying the affective and material volatilities of precarity.