Situated in the context of the coronavirus pandemic, this paper begins by looking at the recent advertisement by Amul praising mothers who are ‘working from home’ and ‘working for home’ during the lockdown, with an accompanying cartoon visualizing the iconic Amul girl sitting beside her mother who is working on her laptop while keeping an eye on her daughter; in a juxtaposed cartoon, the mother is cooking in the kitchen while simultaneously scrolling through her smartphone. Amongst my groups of women friends, the advertisement elicited strong and contradictory responses: ranging from approval of the appreciation for maternal work to disapproval at the missing father. In order to critique this advertisement, I would use the lens of Motherhood Studies, an emerging area of scholarship that is inherently interdisciplinary. Reading the advertisement as a cultural text, I will attempt to locate the maternal stereotypes embedded in it: the merging of the stay-at-home mother and the working-mother into the ideal neoliberal mother-worker, the supermom who effortlessly balances work and home, even in extraordinary times like the pandemic and lockdown. These entangled maternal stereotypes have been reified in popular consciousness through mythic, religious, literary and filmic artefacts. A cross-disciplinary tracing of the stereotypes will reveal the motherhood constructs and the cultural expectations that mothers encounter, and also attempt to explain why and how these constructs and expectations operate. The paper will look at the possibilities of resistance to these stereotypes, germinating in feminist, or posthuman, or matricentric approaches to motherhood. I will use the critical distinction between motherhood-as-ideology and mothering-as-agency to understand maternal resistances, some of which may be located in the responses to the Amul advertisement. The paper will conclude by assessing the emergence of Motherhood Studies as a legitimate field of interdisciplinary humanities and/or social sciences.

中文翻译：

---

“在家工作/在家工作”：对印度母亲的跨学科理解

在冠状病毒大流行的背景下，本文首先查看阿穆尔最近的广告，该广告赞扬在封锁期间“在家工作”和“为家工作”的母亲，并附有一幅卡通形象，形象化了坐在旁边的标志性阿穆尔女孩她的母亲一边看着她的女儿，一边在她的笔记本电脑上工作；在并列的卡通片中，母亲正在厨房做饭，同时滚动浏览她的智能手机。在我的女性朋友群体中，这则广告引起了强烈而矛盾的反应：从赞同对母亲工作的赞赏到对失踪父亲的反对。为了批评这个广告，我将使用母性研究的镜头，这是一个新兴的学术领域，本质上是跨学科的。将这则广告作为一种文化文本阅读，我将尝试找出其中嵌入的母性刻板印象：全职妈妈和全职妈妈的融合，成为理想的新自由主义母工，即毫不费力地平衡工作和工作的超级妈妈。家，即使在大流行和封锁等特殊时期也是如此。这些纠缠不清的母性刻板印象通过神话、宗教、文学和电影制品在大众意识中得到了具体化。对刻板印象的跨学科追踪将揭示母亲所遇到的母性结构和文化期望，并试图解释这些结构和期望为何以及如何运作。这篇论文将着眼于抵制这些刻板印象的可能性，这些刻板印象在女权主义、后人类或母权主义的母性方法中萌芽。我将使用作为意识形态的母性和作为代理的母性之间的关键区别来理解母亲的抵抗，其中一些可能位于对 Amul 广告的回应中。该论文将通过评估母性研究作为跨学科人文科学和/或社会科学的合法领域的出现来结束。