Reborn motherhood in Latin America: race, care and neoliberal subjectivities

This article examines the emergence of reborn motherhood in Latin America, a digital phenomenon in which women perform maternal practices with hyperrealistic dolls. Drawing on digital ethnography and media analysis of TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, alongside journalistic sources from Brazil and Mexico, we show how reborn care practices operate as gendered projects of neoliberal self-making, shaped by enduring colonial hierarchies of gender, class, and race. Reborn dolls circulate within technological assemblages that span global infant markets and digitally mediated care spaces. Our analysis unfolds along three axes. First, reborn mothering generates normative feminine subjectivities, shaping ideals of care and conduct through digital regimes of affective governance. Second, grief, therapy, and play are reconfigured as commodified displays, repositioning loss and affect within neoliberal circuits of consumption. Third, the industry mobilizes racialized imaginaries, positioning the reborn baby as both a technology of motherhood and of whiteness and ableism. The reborn industry naturalizes a neoliberal discourse of care that obscures structural inequities linked to race, ability, and reproductive health. We argue that seeing reborn mothers as abnormal risks overlooking how neoliberal femininity operates subtly within affective governance, reinforcing the erosion of gendered social reproduction amid the rise of right-wing politics.