Do we begin with the ill-advised intermittent fasting experiment which ravaged
my menstrual cycle (two short then one long) or with a coffee down the road with E
who told me about imminent homebirth plans, or do we begin with the disruption,
as they say, of TikTok into a platform economy that had previously favoured images?;
either way, we arrive at the same place, that is, soliciting information from my phone
in a putative act of solitary study which nonetheless involves proprietary algorithms
and targeted advertising shortly thereafter – a place that reveals to me the ugly
contours of my demographic read as a dataset of problems and their commodified
solutions, that is, my age my weight the degradation of my eggs over time and the
inexplicable yet definite effects of environmental stressors on my body’s mercurial
systems and processes – and which in turn revealed to me, when I opened my phone,
a world in which the tiny instructional video format has become the medium in which
the social circulates, only it is not quite instructions that I find each time the phone
illuminates for me but something else, something altogether more unsettling and
grating, something like advice but offered in ungenerous terms, judgemental loops
in which I am addressed by someone quite apart from my desire to be addressed: for
the purpose of this example let us say a woman, who dances on the spot to a short clip
of music and punches the air five or so times, at which point text appears overlaid on
the footage showing a list of things to do or not do when gestating a baby or raising a
child: there is a lot to be said about the nature of this woman, her average age, her race
and ethnicity and nationality – that fateful triangle – but let’s say for now this woman speaks
to us from our phone, though we do not know her, and she schools us, though she is not our
teacher, and she is of course not on a dancefloor but in her kitchen or lounge room or the
‘nursery’, and her advice assumes an air of power though her claim to authority is unclear
– let’s say that this average woman is actually not average in terms of her class position but
that her class position is an unexamined aspect of her capacity to stand and dance and school,
and let’s also say that this average woman is doing something other than sharing ideas about
motherhood to an audience who may or may not want to hear them: she is doing something
specific yet almost imperceptible, she is working in a way that feels unfamiliar even though it
is by now ubiquitous, that is, she is selling something that is indirectly bought and sold and
she is working to game a platform trained to privilege certain content – what she creates she
might call ‘homestead aesthetic’ or ‘nutrition mama’, but what is read is a simple set-piece:
woman, interior, dancing, caption; let us then remember that mumsnet.com, an online forum
that hosts infinite threads tracking conception, pregnancy, and parenthood, has become a
primary site for the radicalisation of TERFs and for a reactionary brand of solidarity; remember
too that every search we conduct in order to wonder whether our inconsolable rage, perverse
dreams, tangled guts, or diminished libido is the secret sign of a not-yet signifying conception,
we are returned to these threads in which the disciplining of gender occurs; now remember
that these videos, irritating as they may be in the force of their unwelcome judgement, are a
threshold form, and that no sooner do we linger on one of these videos for more than a beat,
we are led to a new form: these videos play out scenes of motherhood that focus on the
mother-wife as a figure whose capacity to transcend the twin demands of the child and the
father-husband is the identical moral germ of an infinitely variable joke – the joke turns on
the absolute dependency that marks the mother-wife as a hero as well as a cause for sympathy,
but more than that it asks its audience to consider the blessing of this dependency, for to be
needed in the home and to succeed in delivering is a life marked out from other forms of
drudgery, fraudulence, or perversion: if we follow the tags that links these videos we see a
much clearer political project distributed across plainly personal posts, that is, a movement
that, forced by austerity and the absolute deprivation of the social store, has gotten halfway to
a radical rejection of the alienation of wage labour but at a critical juncture has swerved off
course to double-down on the gendered division of work as the answer to a problem unable
to be articulated – and it is here, we realise, that from the moment I first hesitated to consider
a new format for an Instagram post, having tweaked my landing page by confiding in my phone
about the quality of my cervical mucus, and having asked why redundant video loops are now
the dominant medium of exchange, I was destined to arrive at this archive, and we must then
ask the uncomfortable question as to what exactly this destiny foretells.