Mobility, Moms, and the Babywearing Phenomenon

Abstract

This article extends scholarly inquiry into the rhetorical resonances of motherhood by examining how “motherhood” is constituted through spatial, temporal, and material relations, which themselves are inextricable from mothers’ differential mobilities. Mothers’ access to transportation, ease of movement through public spaces, and physical proximity to their children all contribute to both public and private understandings of what “good mothering” entails. Drawing on geographer Timothy Cresswell’s notion of “mobility constellations” to describe the cultures surrounding different mobility practices, the article teases out the differential affordances of two such constellations: babywearing and stroller pushing. In addition to demonstrating how these two contemporary mobility practices constitute motherhood differently, the article calls for rhetoric and communication scholars to examine “rhetorics of mobility” as a means to account more fully for the range of rhetorics that influence how identities are shaped, privilege is maintained, and rhetorical action can lead to social transformation.