Bikini-Ready Moms: Celebrity Profiles, Motherhood, and the Body

(Boston University, 2016)

By Lynn O'Brien Hallstein

2016 Outstanding Book Award, presented by the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender (OSCLG)

Argues that expectations for mothering include a new core principle of “body work.”

The requirements of “good” motherhood used to primarily involve the care of children, but now contemporary mothers are also pressured to become bikini-ready immediately postpartum. Lynn O’Brien Hallstein analyzes celebrity mom profiles to determine the various ways that they encourage all mothers to engage in body work as the energizing solution to solve any work-life balance struggles they might experience. Bikini-Ready Moms also considers the ways that maternal body work erases any evidence of mothers’ contributions both at home and in professional contexts. Hallstein theorizes possible ways to fuel a necessary mothers’ revolution, while also pointing to initial strategies of resistance.

“Bikini-Ready Moms contributes a great deal to understanding both the obsession with celebrity mom profiles and the pressure that mothers are under to conform to and perform intensive mothering as it shifts into another gear to control women.” — Fiona Joy Green, author of Practicing Feminist Mothering

Lynn O’Brien Hallstein is Associate Professor of Rhetoric at Boston University and the author of White Feminists and Contemporary Maternity: Purging Matrophobia.