MOM™ - The Boss Mommy Associate Handbook

Social media platforms have become dominant sites for resources and advice on mothering through the work of momfluencer role models—individuals who monetize idealized performances of motherhood.

This 20 pages graphic zine taking the shape of a multilevel marketing handbook investigate how marketing, emerging technologies, and viewers co-create new iterations of motherhood.

 

The visuals draw on archival advertisements of multi-level marketing companies such as Tupperware and Avon, as well as contemporary screenshots of momfluencers' reels—short Instagram videos. This interplay allows the past and present to reverberate through each other, highlighting the recurring history of emerging technologies presented as solutions to struggling mothers.

 

Multi-level marketing is also used as a framework to understand how people assigned female at birth (AFAB) are recruited into motherhood. In multi-level marketing, profit emerges primarily from new recruits rather than the sale of products, thereby suggesting that AFAB individuals are positioned as both the product and laborer, rendering them profitable to neoliberal society.

​

This suggests that social media platforms, by privileging users who monetize their identities through algorithmic visibility, perpetuate neoliberalism’s emphasis on individualized responsibility, ultimately falling to addressing systemic inequality.