Affects and strategies of maternal optimism: The accounts of mothers with experiences of anxiety and/or depression

Abstract

This article draws on the critical feminist argument that women are encouraged to desire forms of life that are limiting and sometimes cruel. It asks: what can we learn about motherhood if we view it not simply as a set of normative practices, but as an assemblage of projections and negotiations about what life could and ought to be? To address this question, we analyse the accounts of 15 mothers with experiences of anxiety and/or depression. We move beyond the idea that mothers’ difficult affects stem (merely) from failing to meet societal expectations of ‘good mothering’. Instead, we argue that what wounds them is (also) the impossibility of achieving a feminine good life, or the cruelty of that good life, once achieved. Considering motherhood in this way helps explain why and when norms might be appealing and locate the source of mothers’ difficult affects more precisely.