Yes / In this age of ‘intensive motherhood’, new mothers are flooded with information on the best ways in which to raise their children. One of the key issues is infant feeding, in particular, the timing and method of weaning their children onto solid food. This paper examines a new approach called ‘baby-led weaning’ (BLW) in which the child feeds themselves instead of being spoon-fed, that came into popular parenting culture in recent years, considering the ways in which it is represented in National and International newspapers. The media search database Proquest International Newsstand, was searched for ‘baby-led weaning’, producing an eventual sample of 78 articles from a number of countries. The articles were subjected to a critical discursive psychological analysis. The key themes that emerged from the newspapers focused around two main areas; the infant as agentive in their eating behaviours; and, constructions of maternal identities and resisting ‘good motherhood’.

Diploma thesis "The Intensive Motherhood in the Czech Society" deals with the motherhood. It focuses on finding the forms of motherhood in two different social environments in the Czech Republic reflecting the Ideology of Intensive Mothering. In response to identified information from secondary sources in this thesis I consider motherhood a social construct that is proved by the analysis of primary data too. The qualitative research strategy was chosen to achieve defined goals. Outcomes of analysis of the Problem-Centered Interviews, realized with mothers of young children from different social backgrounds, show two different realities of motherhood. This distinction also proves that The Intensive Mothering is not accepted by all mothers. Although the cited authors present it like dominant model, it can't be automatically considered the dominant model in practice.

In this thesis, I investigate the German-speaking attachment-oriented parenting community on Instagram. Focusing on a debate about new-right activities in the community, I analyze how motherhood (self-)conceptions were discursively entangled with questions of resistance to and tolerance of the new right. Two questions guide my thesis: 1) How was attachment-oriented motherhood conceptualized in the debate? How were these con-ceptions classed and racialized? 2) How did the community produce openness for the appropriation by the new right? How did the community resist appropriation? To answer these questions, I conduct a critical discourse analysis of 45 Instagram posts and their comment sections. My thesis is grounded in motherhood theories, in particular Hays’s intensive mothering, and theories that take seriously the intersectionality of powerstructures. I also refer to Skeggs’s theory on gender, class, and respectability, and workon whiteness and femininity Ahmed and Shome. I find diverse conceptions of attachment-oriented motherhood that differed with regard to their resistance to and reinforcement of intensive motherhood and far-right ideologies. Resistant motherhood concepts sought collective action and mobilized mothers’responsibility for the opposition against the new right. Investment in the respectability of attachment-oriented motherhood on the other hand obstructed the discussion about new-right activities, diverting attention away from politics. Concepts of motherhood from New-Age community members not only tolerated far-right ideology, but at times even reproduced it, in particular in the concept of conspiritual motherhood.

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