148 Kathleen S. G. Skott-Myhre
2004). Any abnormality or digression from the Taylorist assembly line of
appropriate developmental progress was diagnosed as a failure of some
kind in the maternal function. From refrigerator mothers, to double binding
modes of maternal affection, inappropriate triangulation of the family
system, overbearing mothers, distant mothers, too much touching, not
enough touching, too little discipline, too much, insufficient nurturance, or
overindulgence were all corrective diagnoses of mothering gone wrong.
The isolation of the mother in the suburban home of the post-World War II
era placed even more responsibility on women to raise the next generation
of compliant citizenry (Coontz, 2016). The central task of motherhood was
that of care, but care as defined by industrial models that articulated
childhood as driven by the necessities of industrial capitalism.
As we move from the twentieth to the twenty-first century, the
enclosures of industrial capitalism begin to come apart (Negri, 2012). As
capitalism shifts towards modes of immaterial labor, the process of
subjectification moves from a focus on disciplining the body through
apparatuses of containment to what Deleuze (1992) call the society of
control in which we are controlled by abstract logarithms such as our social
security numbers, credit scores, and, more recently, the development in
China of social credit ratings. The model of assembling childhood and
children along a developmental assembly line of rigid stages gives way to a
new definition of development no longer focused on preparing workers.
Correspondingly, the role of mothers begins to shift. Instead of technicians
who coordinate the activities of home with schools and clinics, mothers are
responsible for coordinating the abstract overcoding of children as
consumers and entrepreneurs.
Simultaneously, there is a shift in the social roles for women with,
what Hardt and Negri (2011) term, the “feminization of labor.” As we
move away from industrialized labor to new forms of immaterial labor,
women enter the workplace in ever-increasing numbers. In terms of the
reduced human labor deployed within the factory, women begin to take up
tasks that require fine motor control, such as computer chip assemblage
and a return to their role as seamstresses. A good deal of this feminized
labor takes place in the Global South in newly resurrected sweatshops