Troubling gender norms on Mumsnet: Working from home and parenting during the UK's first COVID lockdown

Karen Maria Handley

Gender, Work and Organization, 2023, vol. 30, issue 3, 999-1014

Abstract: This article examines the troubling of gender norms that unfolded on the social networking site, Mumsnet, at the beginning of the UK's first lockdown response to the COVID pandemic. Using an analysis of 7144 contributions which included the acronym ‘WFH’ (=working from home), posted from March 1, 2020 to April 5, 2020, the article examines how Mumsnet members talked about working from home while caring for toddlers and home‐schooled children. Mumsnet discussions about everyday moral dilemmas create a discursive space for examining the situated rationalities and normative judgments that shape expectations of how to behave as a working parent. Drawing on post‐structuralist discourse theory, the article shows how Mumsnet contributors generated alternative sub‐categorizations of ‘good mums’, and destabilized discourse assumptions of intensive motherhood, such as always ‘being there’ for their children, thereby ‘working the weakness in the norms’ (Butler, 1993) and creating potential for change.

Date: 2023
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