A containment zone or a place of surveillance? Liminal spaces on Mumsnet during COVID-19

Abstract

This article makes use of discussions on the UK parenting site Mumsnet during the first COVID-19 lockdown in the UK between March and May 2020 to investigate the ways in which users wrote about liminal sites such as front porches, windows, and front and back doors. We argue that such spaces played a number of different roles for families during lockdown: as containment zones, barriers, safe spaces of interaction, and places of performance and surveillance. These spaces bridged public and private life during lockdown by providing a perspective of the world from within the boundaries of the lockdown home. Such spaces could be perceived as both safe and unsafe – places of relocation and dislocation within which movement between the two worlds occurred and containment and disinfection strategies were performed. We also suggest that Mumsnet itself can be considered a virtual liminal space for its users, where they were able to safely access the public sphere from the comparative safety of their own homes during the pandemic and form a community with like-minded others. We thus position Mumsnet as: a liminal space in its own right, which afforded a safe place for users to be themselves, share anxieties and advice, and find friendship and companionship; a virtual third space for the discussion of politics and news; and, on occasion, a subaltern counter-public where women could formulate and circulate alternative interpretations of events counter to the frames of the mainstream media.

Rights

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.

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Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2024.2358235

Repository URI

https://rgu-repository.worktribe.com/output/2343485