Under the homeland gaze: migrant mothers’ discursive legitimacy work and the relational negotiation of motherhood

As motherhood extends from the private sphere to the public arena of social media, it can no longer be understood merely as a form of social division of labour. Instead, it becomes an identity position that requires continuous justification and maintenance. Drawing on digital ethnographic observation of 15 migrant mother bloggers, combined with a multimodal critical discourse analysis of their video content, this study examines how they continuously negotiate with the internally heterogeneous and at times contradictory gaze within the homeland public sphere, responding to, reconciling, and reinterpreting competing imaginaries and expectations of motherhood. In doing so, they develop an interconnected structure of legitimacy argumentation concerning the social recognizability of their migrant motherhood, organised around three dimensions: cognitive–professional, moral–subjective, and existential–livability. The study ultimately proposes ‘maternal legitimacy work’ as an analytical perspective, shifting the focus from the formation of migrant motherhood imaginaries toward a relational perspective on their production, thereby capturing how motherhood imaginaries are constructed under public scrutiny and justified as social positions that can be understood, accepted, and recognised.