Introduction

This chapter focuses on the marginalised and under-researched group of mothers of children with Down syndrome. Applying an intersectional feminist sociological lens, we examine how neoliberalism converges with race, class, gender and ableness to shape experiences of mothering in contemporary Australia. In researching these mothers’ stories and writing this chapter, we aim to impact the reader in a way ‘that writing in that hectoring genre, prose, cannot’ (Richardson, 2018, p 663). According to the Cambridge Dictionary, hectoring is ‘to talk and behave towards someone in a loud and unpleasantly forceful way, especially in order to get them to act or think as you want’. While interviewing the mothers in this study, listening to their interviews, and reading and re-reading their transcripts, we were confronted by the incessant ‘hectoring’ that these mothers contended with in their interactions with neoliberal institutions (primarily medical, disability and welfare services), the broader community, and their families. Furthermore, despite contending with such neoliberalism-imbued hectoring, mothers shared their stories with agency, evocative language, and often humour. Hence, we considered it an ethical imperative that we did not reinforce the hectoring discourse and misrepresent the mothers’ experiences by sterilising the emotion in their stories to fit the ‘hegemonic (masculinist) disciplinary norms’ (Ellingson, 2009) of traditional academic research and writing.

We draw upon the scholarship of researchers who advocate for departing from traditional academic conventions in their scholarly work (Mackinlay, 2022), and utilise a ‘crystallisation approach’ by combining academic and creative writing (Richardson, 2000; Ellingson, 2009). Crystallisation, an approach conceptualised by Laurel Richardson (2000) and developed by Laura Ellingson (2009), brings together various forms of meaning-making and writing genres within an interpretative methodology (Ellingson, 2009) to provide researchers and readers with a ‘deepened, complex, thoroughly partial, understanding of [a] topic’ (Richardson, 2000, p 934). Within this chapter, we draw upon a variety of creative writing genres to present a narrative literature review, six case studies, and a provocative conclusion. We adapt the work of Neves et al. (2021), who research and write about loneliness in the elderly, as a stylistic guide that incorporates sociological and creative narratives in one crystallised piece. Each case study includes a sociological narrative with combined findings and discussion, a methodological explanation of our creative and analytical research and writing, and a creatively written account of the mother's story. These three components combined within each case study crystallise our findings.