ABSTRACT
How do agents experience and respond to normative change? Elster (1989: 97, 128), amongst others, argues that social norms are important drivers of action, as they coordinate our expectations of ourselves and each other, not least through their ‘emotional tonality’. This chapter seeks to explain the emotional quality of mothering in deeply divided areas of Belfast’s inner city in order to explore the tension between the emerging post-conflict norm of non-sectarianism, and the long-established norms connecting motherhood to nationhood, whereby ‘good’ mothers are expected to reproduce collective identities and cultures through childrearing (Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989; Yuval-Davis 1997). In so doing, this chapter seeks to contribute to the sociology of family and intimate life, which tends to overlook the connections between gendered familial roles and the reproduction of collective cultures (e.g. see Chambers 2012; Dermott and Seymour 2011; Smart 2007). This discussion focuses on the emotional quality of normatively oriented action, through an examination of the anxieties mothers experience about the quality of their childrearing as a consequence of shifts in the normative landscape, as well as the various responses available as they cope with these tensions.
