Racialized Maternalisms

This chapter explores how ideologies of white motherhood function as sites through which shifts in a nation's sense of the modern is enabled by locating the Diana phenomenon in the social context of 1990s Britain. It also considers how visions of “bad motherhood” became articulated to Blairite policies of cutting welfare for poor families and lone mothers on benefits, and how representations of Princess Diana's motherhood (as well as many other [white] mothers in popular culture in 1990s and early 2000s) signal a neoliberal logic of motherhood, along with the racial implications of such logics. More specifically, the chapter contrasts such white maternal (neoliberal) logics with the conditions of black mothers in Britain during the period by focusing on Doreen Lawrence's 2006 book, And Still I Rise. It argues that models of white motherhood constantly contradict nonwhite motherhood, rendering it deviant and dysfunctional, and that images of a new kind of (white) mother are often needed by the nation to produce a vision of a modern family.