Mothering for Capital : Labor, Race, and Child "Value" in Neoliberalism

A bold new interpretation about the crisis of motherhood in neoliberalism

Mothering for Capital offers a bold new interpretation about the crisis of motherhood in neoliberalism. It documents how the drive of capital stealthily subsumes mothering, tethering women’s work, care, and socialization of children, as well as their wishes, fears, and understandings of themselves as mothers, to the imperatives of value accumulation. Through the framework of “good” parenting that maximizes the odds of a child’s “success” in a precarious future, capital orients mothers to cultivate a set of specific cognitive, social, emotional, and psychological traits that shape children as future labor power, the ideal manageable yet self-managed subject. The child is the site of capital’s most audacious aspirations—to flatten and empty human life of all that is superfluous or dangerous to capital. What is ultimately at stake, Kromidas argues, is the subordination or emancipation of the human subject, and Mothering for Capital tracks this hidden terrain of struggle.