15. Parts & Labours*

This chapter deconstructs the labels of ‘momfluencer’ and the analogous ‘momification of the Internet’ as used by Neetzan Zimmerman to advance a renaming of these terms that more accurately denotes what ‘momfluencers’ and ‘momification’ mean. I put forward parts & labours, a label that offers more complexity, more nuance, and a more faithful depiction of activities occurring in the online mothering realm. I ask, what is happening just below the surface of what is commonly called momfluencing? Is it medical misinformation, white supremacy, or the evisceration of feminist footholds? Creators using digital platforms to spread malicious and uninformed content under the mantle of momfluencer aesthetics are using the ‘parts’, here, the affordances of the platform technologies, to enact dubious ‘labours’, even more deceptively than the selling of untested products. While the dark arts of conspiracy theory dissemination and white supremacist values are brought under the big tent of ‘momfluencers’ and ‘momification’, however, so, too, are the honest, radical efforts of online parent creators denigrated. There is much online mothering work that seeks to make visible the discrete entities of feminist care work, the domestic, affective, and child-rearing practices that, by design under capitalism, go unseen and unpaid.