This paper critically explores how contemporary practices of commercialised self-mediation by “celebrity mothers” increasingly normalise a strongly commodified and consumption-driven vision of motherhood. Drawing on the affordances of mediatisation and self-mediation embedded in the wider neoliberal and celebrity culture mindset, the article analyses how motherhood becomes increasingly linked, in public discourses, to economic relations of acquiring or gaining material goods – rather than being viewed as a socially or individually significant process or role. Looking at mediated discourses in Sweden and Poland, the paper shows how, over time, strong commodity and product orientation becomes a major feature characterising “good” mothers but also a fundamental way of expressing contemporary maternal identities and emotions. However, in doing so, the ever more hegemonic discourse of the commodification of motherhood normalises the wider vision of motherhood as set within a strictly consumption-related mindset founded on social and material status – closely associated with the affluent middle-class – whilst ideologically and tacitly excluding women and mothers who cannot follow discursively constructed celebrity-like lifestyles or patterns of consumption.
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