Publication details
Cannamommies and the redefinition of motherhood in online press
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| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The patriarchal control of public media has framed motherhood as an institution with narrowly prescribed social and cultural expectations (Rich 1976; O’Reilly 2010). Public texts and media environment have thus developed social beliefs and moral values, as well as duties and responsibilities related to one’s mothering and maternal identity. Their circulation and reiteration in both public and private discourses have made motherhood become a cultural code with clearly defined characteristics of an ideal mother. However, mothers in their real-life parenting practice often find this normative of a perfect mother challenging and unattainable. To reduce the anxiety and stress, mothers search for relievers that make their mothering practice more pleasant and comfortable. With the access to legalized marijuana for medical and recreational use, mothers have discovered the CBD and THC aids not only for maintaining their mental health, but also to deal with pain delivery. Framed within the methodological framework of multimodal discourse analysis (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001; Ledin and Machin 2020) and systemic functional grammar (Halliday), the paper studies online magazine and newspaper articles that cover the topic of cannamommies. It examines the discursive strategies the texts use to redefine motherhood and to destigmatize marijuana consumption by mothers and expecting mothers. It focuses primarily on the strategy of naming and describing and on that of representing actions, states and events (Jeffries 2010), both in their verbal and visual representation. |
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