{"id":5362,"date":"2012-07-19T15:49:39","date_gmt":"2012-07-19T20:49:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/girlwpen.com\/?p=5362"},"modified":"2012-07-19T15:49:39","modified_gmt":"2012-07-19T20:49:39","slug":"global-mama-the-other-mothers-of-manhattan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/2012\/07\/19\/global-mama-the-other-mothers-of-manhattan\/","title":{"rendered":"GLOBAL MAMA: “The Other Mothers of Manhattan”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been thinking about Mona Simpson\u2019s beautifully written essay<\/a> and Michele Asselin\u2019s exquisite photographs<\/a> since they appeared in The New York Times Magazine<\/em> last weekend. Asselin\u2019s portrait series, accompanied by interviews, is called \u201cFull Time Preferred: Portraits of Love, Work and Dependence.\u201d Her photographs feature nannies with their charges\u2014their employers\u2019 children\u2014in intimate moments of caregiving. The women and children are beautiful and content, bathed in radiant luminescence and surrounded by darkness. Most of the children are babies or toddlers, ages when showering them with love comes easily, more often than not.<\/p>\n

Simpson writes with nuance and honesty about the complexities of relationships based on paid caregiving. She accurately describes Asselin\u2019s photographs as<\/p>\n

\u2026moments of private contentment, with the serenity and depth borrowed from the portraiture legacy of the Madonna and child\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

By placing nannies in this visual legacy, the photographs deliberately elevate caregivers who aren\u2019t valued in our society. Asselin\u2019s impulse is to make paid caregivers visible, to bring them out of the shadows and into the center. In her essay, Simpson observes that nannies have confided to her that their employers \u201ccrop them out of photographs of their children.\u201d These portraits, the interviews with them, and Simpson\u2019s essay all work against a society that still prefers to keep caregiving and domestic work invisible.<\/p>\n

The online slideshow allows viewers to play a series of recorded interviews with nannies and their employers. I prefer this to the excerpts in the magazine because more individuality and complexity emerge among and between the different women. For the same reason, I\u2019d love to see more<\/em> photographs from Asselin\u2014ones that leave behind the vein of Madonna-and-child. I\u2019ve love to see photographs that not only lift paid caregivers out of their private, \u201cunseen\u201d world but also allow a fuller register of lived experience to emerge. With these children, yes, but also with their own children. Their own friends, partners, parents, relatives. And in all the public places we see paid caregivers, with others or by themselves: at the playground. At the store. At school. At the bank. At the airport. At the mall. And at daycare. (Because most children aren’t cared for by nannies or au pairs<\/em>, and most paid caregivers don’t work in private homes.)<\/p>\n

Just as biological and adoptive mothers have worked hard to break out of the impossible expectations placed on them by the ideologies of motherhood associated with the Madonna\u2014everlasting patience, self-sacrifice, martyrdom, perfection\u2014these \u201cother mothers\u201d deserve to be seen as being fully human, too.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d also love to see some portraits of male caregivers. There used to be a male au pair<\/em> in my neighborhood. This was unusual, so all the kids at the playground knew him. But they\u2019re out there. Just like fathers.<\/p>\n

At its core, caring for others is not exclusively women’s work. It’s at the core of what it means to be\u00a0human.<\/p>\n

Visual imagery can\u2019t convey the truly invisible structures of global inequality, sexism, and racism that underlie these relationships. But they can expand how we see the world\u2014and how we imagine what\u2019s possible. For this reason, I\u2019d love for Asselin to continue to create images that ask us to re-imagine family in the broadest and most expansive ways.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been thinking about Mona Simpson\u2019s beautifully written essay and Michele Asselin\u2019s exquisite photographs since they appeared in The New York Times Magazine last weekend. Asselin\u2019s portrait series, accompanied by interviews, is called \u201cFull Time Preferred: Portraits of Love, Work and Dependence.\u201d Her photographs feature nannies with their charges\u2014their employers\u2019 children\u2014in intimate moments of caregiving. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1916,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21105,1],"tags":[21594,21609,21633,21650],"class_list":["post-5362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-global-mama","category-uncategorized","tag-michele-asselin","tag-mona-simpson","tag-nannies","tag-new-york-times-magazine"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1916"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5362"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5362\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}