‘The Synergy Between You’: Mothers, Nannies, and Collaborative Caregiving in Contemporary Matroethnographies

In this article I examine representations of mother/caregiver relationships in what I am calling a new genre: matroethnography. The term fuses the prefix matro (Latin root for mater) with ethnography; and further, signals a conflation of matro with the auto (autobiography) in autoethnography, itself a hybrid genre from the fields of life writing, anthropology, and sociology. Driven by auto/biographical and autoethnographical impulses, matroethnographies record maternal subjectivities that are individual and collective, personal and communal. I focus on a cluster of matroethnographies published mainly in the last fifteen years that bring together an array of mothers, who are typically white, middle- to upper-class, and Anglo-American; and caregivers, who are typically racialized, low-income-earning, and frequently (illegal) immigrants, and who are often mothers themselves. Utilising innovative combinations of interviews, testimonials, scholarship, and creative non-fiction storytelling, these matroethnographies radically re-position the mother (the traditional primary nurturer) in dialogue with her child's waged caregiver. In so doing, the texts inscribe, negotiate, and critique prevailing twenty-first-century maternal practices, identities, and ideologies.