Blended families are increasingly common, yet our understanding of these families—especially the role of stepmothers—is limited and lacks a critical focus. Such lack is a problem when recognizing that the stepmother is one of the most culturally stigmatized family positions. Guided by family systems theory, which recognizes the family as an interdependent system where roles are created and maintained through interactions, we seek to provide a deeper understanding of how stepmothers navigate the difficulties that accompany their stigmatized role. Instead of writing about the stepmother role in the family system from an outside perspective, we use critical duoethnography to write from inside the system by composing first-person, collaborative, reflexive accounts of our lived experiences as stepmothers that highlight the unique work we do within our blended families. Our accounts engage an intersectional lens where we embrace our layered identities—as stepmothers, women, feminists, and academics who hail from the working class and have differing ethnic backgrounds—to write ourselves out of the simplistic, and often negative, cultural ideas about stepmothers. Our primary goal is to provide a dynamic illustration of the nuanced, messy, and multifaceted experiences of (step)m(Other)ing—hence the strategic use of parentheses to encapsulate such experiences. We pinpoint the struggles we encounter in striving to find a balance between establishing a close bond with our (step)children and taking on a more authoritative parental role—all with the threat of the “wicked stepmother” stereotype looming over us. Ideally, our insider accounts help to untangle the lived experiences of stepmothers from the grip of a pervasive, distorted, denigrating, and essentializing cultural construct.
Wicked Stepmother, Best Friend, and the Unaccounted Space Between: A Critical Duoethnography of (Step)m(Other)ing in Blended Families
Tasha R. Dunn (PhD, University of South Florida) is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Toledo. Her research addresses the complex and increasingly interwoven relationship between media and life, with a particular focus on interpersonal relationships, social media, critical/cultural studies, qualitative inquiry, whiteness, class, and gender. Tasha has published work in a variety of scholarly journals, and she is also the author of Talking White Trash (Routledge, 2019), an award-winning book that documents the relationship between mediated representations and lived experiences of white working-class people. To learn more, visit www.tashardunn.com
Carolyn Ly-Donovan (PhD, Yale University) is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Augustana University. Her work explores mechanisms of inequality with particular focus on organizations and culture. She has published and engaged in projects that examine professional medical associations, archival and public libraries, and municipal fire departments using ethnographic, archival, and interview methods. Currently, she is involved in two national grant-supported projects that fuse academic engagement and social change. To learn more, visit https://www.augie.edu/faculty-6#Ly
Tasha R. Dunn, Carolyn Ly-Donovan; Wicked Stepmother, Best Friend, and the Unaccounted Space Between: A Critical Duoethnography of (Step)m(Other)ing in Blended Families. Journal of Autoethnography 11 January 2021; 2 (1): 55–74. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/joae.2021.2.1.55
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