Sophie Mary
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sophiemmary.bsky.social
Sophie Mary
@sophiemmary.bsky.social
81 followers 110 following 5 posts
Postdoc @VUAmsterdam @Cambridge_Uni
| sociologist researching culture, care, and motherhood | previously PhD @Cambridge_Uni | she/her | cover art by Barbara Swan
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sophiemmary.bsky.social
I like to imagine Berlant came up with this sentence while trying to survive writing a grant proposal (Cruel Optimism, 2011, p.28)
One page of Cruel Optimism by Lauren Berlant, with the following sentence highlighted: “the ‘technologies of patience’ that enable a concept of the later to suspend questions about the cruelty of the now.”
May 12, 2025 at 5:54 PM
sophiemmary.bsky.social
In Manchester this week for the British Sociological Association conference #britsoc25 💬

I’ll be presenting my work on the affects and strategies of sustaining (maternal) optimism at 9:00 on Friday!
A red-bricked house with a purple poster reading “Sociologists, welcome to Manchester.”
April 23, 2025 at 3:38 PM
sophiemmary.bsky.social
Adapting Lauren Berlant’s idea of 'Women’s Culture', we explore how this tension enables traditional ideologies to address mothers’ disappointments while preventing a larger questioning of the system that creates them.

🧵 2/3
A screenshot of the article's abstract reads as follows: The fantasy of traditional motherhood, according to which women find fulfilment through family care, still dominates market texts. However, there is increasing acknowledgement of motherhood’s difficulties, often in the very same texts. This tension is not immediately understandable; neither are its political and economic implications. We propose an explanation by deploying a Berlantian framework to analyse the new media presence of five brands targeting UK mothers. We identify a mothers’ culture: a market where motherhood’s difficulties are organised incessantly. We argue that mothers’ culture simultaneously validates traditional motherhood’s power to achieve the good life and provides therapeutic explanations and tactics to retain optimism when its lived experiences become too far removed from the fantasy of that good life. Combined, these mechanisms absorb the difficulties of traditional motherhood in a way that protects its promises of fulfilment. This prevents a questioning of the system of norms that effectively blocks this fulfilment.
April 23, 2025 at 10:47 AM