Constituting Savvy Aunties: From childless women to child-focused consumers

In August 2008, self-identified "auntrepreneur" Melanie Notkin launched SavvyAuntie.com, "the first online community for aunts." Targeted at the growing demographic of childless women in the United States, the site functions as a constitutive rhetoric that interpellates childless women as "savvy aunts." Although this constitutive effort challenges the idea that all good women are mothers, the author of this essay argues that Notkin's site interpellates childless women in terms of the most oppressive aspects of intensive motherhood while simultaneously thwarting the positive values intensive mothering seeks to uphold.