No room for baby fat in skinny jeans: promotion and online engagement with the yummy mummy discourse in US weekly

This study investigates how an entertainment magazine promotes the ‘yummy mummy’ (YM) discourse, identifies how alternative discourses are used to support or challenge the YM discourse, and analyzes how individuals engage with aspects of the YM discourse promoted by the magazine. Using discourse analysis, I investigate print and online articles published by Us Weekly magazine as well as reader’s responses to content which were posted on Usmagazine.com. The findings reveal that Us Weekly promotes the YM discourse by praising celebrity mothers who exemplify the YM aesthetic and by disparaging failed celebrity YMs, by positioning celebrities as being ‘just like us’, and by aligning the YM aesthetic with expert advice and tenets of the ‘good mother’ discourse. Readers’ engagement with the YM discourse is diverse and demonstrates how the YM discourse is taken-up, reproduced, enforced and resisted. The implications of these findings for women’s mental health are extensively discussed.