Digital Entanglements: Staying Happy in the Mamasphere

Mothers live entangled with digital media: the affective circuits of contemporary mothering are intimately bound up with the communicative circuits of digital culture. This chapter is about how mothers come to sustain themselves through these digital entanglements, as encounters between digital flows and ordinary affects engender the resilient happiness required to mother through precarity. Through providing a range of snapshots of women’s everyday lives with online platforms like Facebook and Pinterest, this chapter shows how the digital mundane figures as a potent contact zone quivering with an intense power to mobilize, route, better, and buttress mothers’ lives. The digital mundane thus figures as a crucial affective infrastructure for mothers, making their lives feel livable and full of happy potential and thereby keeping them invested in the work of privatizing happiness.