Abstract
How do professional mothers whose bodies undergo significant transformations engage with materiality – such as clothing, makeup and their own bodies – as active ‘resources’ when navigating their identities after maternity leave? Building on the literature on embodied identity work, we conducted 31 interviews with professional mothers in Finland to explore this question. We illustrate how mothers engage with the body and material objects to shape identities while being shaped by the agentic, symbolic and affective power of materiality. We emphasise the agency of materialities, such as aching flesh, affective makeup and everyday materiality, not only in shaping the body’s surface but also in influencing the sense of self. The identity of professional mothers is thus reconfigured through the dynamic interplay of agential flesh, objects and sociocultural forces. We contribute to discussions on the agency of materiality in embodied identity work by theorising its stigmatised, ‘fleshy’ aspects and emphasising matters ‘out of place’ and ‘out of control’, alongside bodily dysfunctions that often remain unspoken. We additionally illustrate how motherhood may facilitate subtle micro-resistance to normative expectations, thereby allowing women to challenge dominant views of their professions and organisations as rational, disembodied and fleshless – where materiality is treated as discursive rather than lived.
Keywords
Introduction
Life transitions heighten awareness of one’s identity (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002). Individuals in such transitions often face gendered, embodied and professional discourses that both limit and facilitate the processes and outcomes of ‘making sense of self’ (Trethewey, 1999). For professional women, becoming a mother represents one such life-changing transition that encompasses considerable bodily and emotional transformations, shifts in both personal and professional values and the blending of the private and work spheres (Gatrell, 2019; Gatrell et al., 2023; Grandey et al., 2019; Pimentel and Bel Hadj Ali, 2025). Motherhood is a lived experience1 intertwined with societal norms that define good and bad motherhood (Huopalainen and Satama, 2019a; Katila, 2019; Niemistö et al., 2021), which often spill over onto the professional self when time and other resources are spread across an enlarged role repertoire (Anglin et al., 2022). Consequently, motherhood often entails a significant journey of self-discovery, particularly among professional women (Boncori, 2018; Hennekam et al., 2019; Huopalainen and Satama, 2019a; van Amsterdam, 2015), which prompts a dynamic bodily process of constructing, performing and negotiating between existing and emerging (e.g. professional and maternal) identities.
We approach identity work among professional mothers as embodied identity work, which emphasises the flesh-and-blood human body as a radically materialist (Sobchack, 2004) and dynamic site of identity work (Burrow et al., 2022; Harding et al., 2022). While Snow and Anderson (1987: 1348) define identity work as ‘[t]he range of activities individuals engage in to create, present, and sustain personal identities that are congruent with and supportive of the self-concept’, embodied identity work includes the myriad bodily, material, fleshy and non-verbal ways in which identities are (per)formed on a day-to-day basis to ‘fit’ various social contexts (cf. Jammaers and Ybema, 2023, Jammaers et al., 2024; Lawrence et al., 2023; Mavin and Grandy, 2016, 2025). We argue that embodied identity work is particularly important in the context of motherhood, as the normative understandings of ideal, rational or ‘appropriate’ professional embodiment have long functioned as hidden, implicit criteria for workplace worth and competence (Cederström and Spicer, 2015; Meriläinen et al., 2015; van Amsterdam et al., 2023). Messy motherhood poses a threat to the ideal (masculine) professional embodiment (Gatrell et al., 2023) and requires professional mothers to carefully shape their bodily appearances, perform embodied identity work, and ultimately conform to normative workplace expectations. Meanwhile, implicit norms of professionalism continue to frame leaky maternal bodies and their potential for reproduction as obscure (Gatrell, 2019; Kristeva, 1984), anxiety-provoking or even taboo (Gatrell et al., 2017; Grandey et al., 2019). Given these tensions and deeply ingrained gendered attitudes and norms, embodied identity work – a salient experience for many mothers – warrants deeper empirical and theoretical understanding.
Despite the emerging literature on embodied identity work (Burrow et al., 2022; Jammaers and Ybema, 2023; Mavin and Grandy, 2016, 2025; Meriläinen et al., 2015; Rydzik and Ellis-Vowles, 2018) and the extant literature on clothing in organisations (Faiz, 2023; Guy and Banim, 2000; Humphreys and Brown, 2009; Page, 2014; Pratt and Rafaeli, 1997; Rafaeli et al., 1997; Rippin et al., 2016), the entangled, material and everyday aspects of such work have received limited scholarly attention (for exceptions, see Harding, 2003, 2020; Harding et al., 2022). By teasing out the diverse and dynamic ways that agentic materiality ‘[such] as that which clings to the body’ (Lawrence, 2013: 165), including the co-influence of clothing, makeup and accessories on shaping and controlling bodies, we offer a compelling extension of embodied identity work. The material extension of the body includes the uses of clothing, makeup and everyday objects in identity construction (Giazitzoglu, 2024) and the deliberate reshaping and modification of the changing physical body (Gatrell, 2019; Lawrence et al., 2023) to create ‘carefully crafted embodied performances’ (Burrow et al., 2022: 3). Professional mothers use these everyday practices to construct identities in regulated settings, especially the workplace, in which they must navigate not just typical gendered hurdles and penalties (Correll et al., 2007; Deming, 2022; Kleven et al., 2023) but also transformed bodies.
We centre the material and, in this case, the abject maternal and professional body as a living site for identity work (Burrow et al., 2022) that is extended through engagement with material objects (Lawrence and Phillips, 2019). In doing so, we aim to better understand how embodied identities ‘become’ through entanglements with objects and other materialities as professional mothers actively engage with these to shape their identities. This study draws empirical data from 31 semi-structured interviews with highly educated middle-class professional mothers in Finland, all of whom had recently returned to work after maternity leave and were negotiating their embodied identities in the sociocultural context of Finnish professionalism.
We advance the embodied identity work literature by identifying three types of work in which mothers were engaged: performing professionalism, bordering to maintain professionalism, and reclaiming the pre-pregnancy body. We emphasise the multiple agential roles and affective power of materialities in embodied identity work (Harding et al., 2022) by explicating how mothers engage with materialities such as clothing, makeup, accessories and their bodies to construct professionalism in an effort to ‘right’ their maternal bodies (Trethewey, 1999). These observations lead us to theoretically contribute to the embodied identity work literature in three ways. First, while recent research points to the agentic power of materialities (Li et al., 2025; van Amsterdam et al., 2022), we illustrate the affective power of agential materiality in embodied identity work and how it can profoundly impact identity. Unruly materialities, such as enlarged foot size, dislocated hips and stretched skin, reveal the agential capacities of materiality beyond control. In particular, we highlight the supplemental role of makeup in self-covering with clothing and join a discussion about body grief (De Luca and Bustad, 2023; Fox and Neiterman, 2015), that refers to the feelings of stress, loss and sadness about a body that is difficult or impossible to make ‘right’ again. Embodied identity work is thus not only deliberately performed by mothers but is continuously reconfigured through the interplay of flesh (matter ‘out of control’), objects, the materiality of bodies and sociocultural forces. Second, we theorise the stigmatised aspects of embodied identity work by exposing the unspoken bodily changes tied to reclaiming the controlled pre-pregnancy body. We explain how stigmatised abject materialities, such as scars, loose tissue or bodily dysfunction, profoundly shape mothers’ postpartum professional identities. Third, we theorise micro-resistance as a form of embodied identity work and illustrate how women engage in ‘dematerialising acts’ by withdrawing from certain body work practices – for example, by choosing not to wear makeup or uncomfortable attire like bras – in their attempts to resist gendered expectations. Motherhood can, at times, thus empower professional women by offering a temporary escape from dominant beauty norms and facilitating subtle resistance to such expectations.
Embodied identity work
Identities are fragile and fleeting processes, rather than fixed constructs (e.g. Caza et al., 2018; Giazitzoglu, 2024; Sveningsson and Alvesson, 2003), in which we engage through identity work and attempt to meet societal and organisational demands (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002). This study is situated in the emerging theoretical debate on embodied identity work (e.g. Burrow et al., 2022; Jammaers and Ybema, 2023; Mavin and Grandy, 2016, 2025; van Amsterdam and van Eck, 2019a, 2019b; van Amsterdam et al., 2023), which emphasises how identities are actively co-constructed not only through discursive or spoken identity work processes (Giazitzoglu, 2024) but also through the lived experiences and embodied material practices of shaping, covering or transforming the body. As Giazitzoglu (2024: 160) points out in their study on how male rugby players utilise their bodies as tools for (re)constructing hegemonic masculinity, ‘bodies are resources that are used in corporeal identity work processes, within distinct organisational structures and in relation to temporal gendered ideals and norms’ (see also Johansson et al., 2017; Mavin and Grandy, 2016; Meriläinen et al., 2015).
Recently, a broader ‘turn towards embodiment’ within organisation and management studies (OMS; e.g. Dale, 2001; Heaphy and Dutton, 2008; Wolkowitz, 2006) has seen growing scholarly interest devoted to embodied experiences at work (e.g. Huopalainen and Satama, 2019a, 2019b; Katila, 2019; Pullen, 2017; Satama and Huopalainen, 2022). Embodiment, which we use to refer to the sensation and lived experience of being in a body that senses, moves and feels (Dale, 2001; Noland, 2009), has a close and complex relationship with identity. Bodies and minds are not distinct but intimately connected (Grosz, 1994), and embodiment captures what it means to corporeally ‘live the body’ within multiple sites of connection and negotiation (Budgeon, 2003). Our study is interpretivist (Dale, 2001), and we perceive bodies as active, responsive and reflexive living sites (Burrow et al., 2022) of identity work and construction while attending to organisational and gendered discourses that constrain and discipline certain bodies (Bordo, 1993a, 1993b; Trethewey, 1999; Young, 2005). Embodiment explains how our sensing bodies relate to and connect with the surrounding material world in an ongoing manner, which is crucial for identity work.
The literature on embodied identity work problematises disembodied and discursive conceptualisations of identity work that privilege representational and static practices over more dynamic conceptualisations of embodiment and materiality. Accordingly, we ‘zoom in’ on the various contextual identity work practices in which individuals engage through their material, dressed bodies, and explore how these practices are experienced at the bodily level. The literature also highlights how identity work is intertwined with norms and historical conditions inscribed onto the body and, for example, how the strategic use of oddity may shape embodied identity, as demonstrated by Jammaers and Ybema (2023) in their study of performing artists with dwarfism.
Unlike objects or still surfaces, bodies relationally become through multiple connections and extensions that involve material objects and other bodies (cf. Dale and Latham, 2015; Harding et al., 2022; Symon and Pritchard, 2015). We emphasise the body as a relational and agential force that is both lived in and continuously worked upon by, for example, applying cosmetics (Nash et al., 2006), exercising (Johansson et al., 2017; Riach and Cutcher, 2014) and other forms of shaping, controlling, correcting or working on the body (Lawrence et al., 2023). Our approach to the body problematises binary ontology, mind/body dualism and static understandings of bodies as representational surfaces (e.g. Dale, 2001; Dale and Latham, 2015; Riach and Cutcher, 2014; Riach and Warren, 2015; Symon and Pritchard, 2015). At the same time, we acknowledge that context may significantly impact lived experiences and that women’s professionalism connects ‘to a particular type of embodied and constructed femininity’ (Trethewey, 1999: 425; see also Bordo, 1993b).
To date, scholars of embodied identity have built upon various theoretical conceptualisations of the body. For example, Trethewey’s (1999: 446) influential study demonstrated how ‘maintaining a fit, controlled and disciplined body’ was crucial to professional women’s identity work and reduced the risk of being ‘othered’ at work. Recent studies (e.g. Haynes, 2012; Jammaers et al., 2024; van Amsterdam et al., 2023) offer similar insights: Women must self-discipline at work to conform to masculine norms. Women’s embodied identity work often includes balancing internal aspirations to feel good, energized, feminine or professional with disciplining and gendered external norms (Jammaers and Ybema, 2023) that dictate how women should perform in their multiple role identities as women, mothers and professionals in specific sociocultural contexts. Thus, professional women actively (re)produce their bodies in relation to surrounding norms and through various materialities attached to the body, such that ‘the embodied self exceeds representation’ (Budgeon, 2003: 51). Similarly, in a study of self-identified fat female employees’ identity work, van Amsterdam and van Eck (2019a, 2019b) and van Amsterdam et al. (2023) show how dress, movement and use of space are materially entangled in employees’ processual embodied identity work, specifically how fat bodies deviate from gendered organisational norms.
Mavin and Grandy’s (2016, 2025) studies of privileged female elite leaders also explored struggles with embodied identity work within the context of intra-gender relationships. Building on abject appearance theory (Kristeva, 1984), the authors show how these leaders navigate liminal positions as abject female bodies in a masculine work context in which their bodies are identity projects or sources of desirability and disgust. Leaders co-construct and resist subjectivities through various embodied identity strategies that include shifting focus from the body and appearance to achieving professional balance. Mavin and Grandy (2016, 2025) highlight the lack of norms that guide women leaders in looking professional; therefore, these women engage in continuous identity negotiations to present and perform controlled and self-contained bodies, a process akin to walking a tight rope: dressing femininely (but not too much) and appearing professional rather than unprofessional (e.g. too masculine, matronly, slutty, feminine or motherlike). Women are also told by other women in the workplace about how their bodies do not fit in, which highlights how not just the male gaze but also the ambiguous ‘female gaze’ (Trethewey, 1999: 445) regulates women’s leadership. Relatedly, Haynes (2012: 496) reminds us that it is often women, framed as others by masculine norms, who ‘must present themselves in a way that demonstrates their status and ability as professionals and adds credibility to their competence’.
Motherhood, materiality and embodied identity work
Often, a major identity shift for women, motherhood significantly alters both identity and the material body, triggering profound embodied identity work. Most studies on the maternal body in the workplace have focused on ‘maternal body work’ (Gatrell, 2013, 2014, 2019), how pregnancy conflicts with the ideal of the disembodied worker and how the pregnant body is often hidden through material dress. Such research highlights the pregnancy and early motherhood phases and their impact on identity (Huopalainen and Satama, 2019a, 2019b; Grandey et al., 2019; van Amsterdam, 2015). While this literature addresses unspoken aspects (e.g. breastfeeding) of motherhood and the maternal body as ‘out of place’ in organisations, it focuses less on mothers returning to full-time work after parental leave. Nevertheless, women’s bodies are always under scrutiny, even after childbirth, and middle-class Western postmodern consumer ideals expect women to bounce back and conform to ideal motherhood norms, creating dichotomies such as the yummy versus slummy mummy (McRobbie, 2009; Littler, 2013).
We extend the embodied identity literature by focusing on the impact of postpartum motherhood and the active involvement of materiality in embodied identity work. The postpartum body adds a layer of richness and tension to professional women’s embodied identity work (e.g. Boncori, 2018; Gatrell, 2019; Hennekam et al., 2019; Huopalainen and Satama, 2019a; Katila, 2019; Ladge and Greenberg, 2015) because it changes professional mothers’ embodied identities profoundly, for example, by stretching their skin and altering body contours. Postpartum bodies are also constructed as hormonal, volatile, disorderly and leaky (Price and Shildrick, 1999), a fleshy materiality linked to various, often unspoken, bodily alterations and dysfunctions related to the reclamation of the pre-pregnancy body, including the pains associated with healing after childbirth (Grandey et al., 2019). Flesh, the material substance of the body, is dynamic, disruptive and affective (Harding et al., 2022; Pullen, 2017), often sexualised and constructed as abject, shocking or vulnerable. Affective histories are inscribed on the maternal flesh, which moves in intensely visceral ways, embodies vulnerability and disrupts the ideal of self-contained, controlled organisational bodies. As Huopalainen and Satama (2019b: 337) write, ‘flesh shifts, stretches, bounces and jiggles. Flesh becomes’. These aspects of embodied identity work and their fleshy, abject dimensions are central to understanding the lived experiences of mothers in contexts where (masculine) professional embodiment is the norm and therefore merit further research.
The body also serves as a signifier of identity that reflects both compliance and resistance (Rahmouni Elidrissi and Courpasson, 2021). Despite growing recognition of the body as a site of resistance within organisations (Johansson et al., 2017; Kachtan and Wasserman, 2015; Wasserman and Baikovich, 2024), the ways in which mothers use materiality and their enclothed bodies to construct alternative, resistant maternal identities have yet to be explored. Only few extant studies have explored the use of material dress and resistance with some exceptions. For example, Alkhaled (2021) examined how veil fashion serves as a form of resistance among female entrepreneurs in Saudi Arabia, while Wasserman and Baikovich (2024) discussed how ultraorthodox female entrepreneurs leverage their embodiment to resist religious bodily regulations. The authors of these studies demonstrate how religious women, bound by strict bodily regulations, employ fashion to accumulate power and challenge the rigid divide between feminine appearance and traditional religiosity. Here, fashion becomes a tool for resistance that increases women’s visibility in public spaces through contemporary clothing trends, vibrant colours and fashionable cuts.
Finally, bodies become through connections with other bodies (Budgeon, 2003) and non-human materialities, such as heels, clothing, jewellery, makeup, tattoos, lash extensions and piercings (Lawrence et al., 2023). The word ‘makeup’ literally means to make something up and therefore offers an opportunity to explore professional female embodiment and materialities. Indeed, applying makeup involves subtly covering chosen aspects of oneself and considerable energy invested in ‘looking the part’ (Ashraf et al., 2023). By centring the ever-changing sensate, dressed and material maternal body, we emphasise the material aspects of embodied identity work among professional mothers to illustrate how the materiality of maternal bodies and the objects with which they connect co-shape women’s experiences of professionalism and motherhood, thereby revealing dynamic interactions between the fleshy body, material practices and organisational and cultural norms.
Methodological considerations
To address our research question, we conducted an exploratory interview study. Specifically, we adopted an abductive qualitative approach to study the embodied and material dimensions of identity. Using a semi-structured interview method, we studied the narrated self, which is located at the intersection of the self and society. Narrating allowed the participants an opportunity to impose order on otherwise disconnected events in one’s life (Bruner, 1991; Ochs and Capps, 1996). Through this process, participants wove together fragmented events and embodied experiences in their lives to co-construct meaning in collaboration with the interviewer and surrounding materialities. Through narration, the interviewees made sense of who they were and what they valued in life as mothers and professionals in the making (Bruner, 1991). Simultaneously, they described the societal and organisational norms – and how materiality is implicated in these norms – and pressures of womanhood, motherhood and professionalism. This open-ended narrative interview approach facilitated a deeper understanding of how mothers negotiate fleeting identities in relation to materialities, norms and rules (Bruner, 1991), which resulted in rich interview data.
The Finnish context
Our study was conducted in the Nordic welfare state of Finland, where the dual-earner family model is prevalent. The interviewees’ families aligned with this model, which is supported by state and the provision of generous parental leave policies for both parents and a subjective right to state-subsidised daycare (Holmgren et al., 2009). In 2022, Finland’s most recent family leave system extended family leave from 12.5 months to 14 months to be shared equally between both parents. Moreover, all children 0–6 years of age are eligible to receive government-subsidised early childhood care and education (Pölkki and Vornanen, 2016). Despite being committed to supporting both the dual-earner family model and mothers’ return to work after the maternity leave period, the Finnish state’s family policy system has not fully achieved its desired outcomes (Närvi, 2014). In 2021, men represented 42 % of all people granted parental benefits but used only 11 % of their benefit days. During the same period, mothers used 97 % of their benefit days, which could have been divided equally between parents. In general, Finnish mothers take greater responsibility for childcare and household work than men, work part-time more often than men and spend fewer hours performing wage work (Lund et al., 2019). Due to the unpaid second shift at home (Smeby, 2017), many Finnish mothers are at high risk of parental burnout (Roskam et al., 2022). Although the position of Finnish women in the labour market is significantly better than in many European countries, many women still face career challenges (i.e. wage and career development) following maternity due to parental leave (Kleven et al., 2023; Kuitto et al., 2019). After returning to work, women often experience poor work–life balance (Attila et al., 2018) and are given new, lower-priority duties (Salmi and Närvi, 2017).
Data collection
Our interviewees were professional mothers, mostly with master’s degrees, who had become mothers and returned to work within the past 6 years. We recruited interviewees primarily through personal contacts and social media groups that supported professional mothers. During the data collection, we used snowball sampling to identify additional interviewees (Parker et al., 2019). Ultimately, we interviewed 31 mothers in specialist or leadership roles (e.g. business professionals, lawyers, researchers, public servants, consultants) who were 33–44 years of age, had 1–3 children and were either married or in a relationship. We acknowledge that the interviewees belonged to a group of privileged, heterosexual, educated middle-class individuals who had crafted strong professional identities before motherhood2.
The interviewees’ family childcare arrangements aligned with previously identified trends in Finland (Niemistö et al., 2021), which showed well-educated mothers taking relatively short parental leaves compared to the general population of women. Our interviewees had taken 6–12 months of parental leave and, at times, extended it for short periods, using a home care allowance or working part-time when their children were small; however, they reported working considerably more than mothers with less education (Lund et al., 2019; Närvi, 2014). Many of the interviewees’ spouses took some parental leave and participated in daily care activities, yet they seldom made full use of their allocated parental leave days.
We framed the interviews as inter-embodied situations constantly influenced by the bodies of the interviewees, ourselves (the researchers) and other objects (Bell, 2025). The semi-structured interviews, which were between 36 and 99 minutes in length, were recorded and transcribed using automatic transcription software and checked for accuracy during data analysis. The interview guide followed a ‘typical day as a professional mother’ narrative with additional questions about personal backgrounds, work roles, domestic work arrangements and reflections on work, motherhood and the changes brought on by motherhood. To emphasise the material aspects of embodied identity work, the interviews focused on daily grooming, dress and makeup routines, why they engaged in these activities and how motherhood had changed these rituals (or not). A comprehensive yet flexible interview guide facilitated discussions of the vivid, mundane and often taken-for-granted moments of everyday life. Some mothers spoke openly about their embodied struggles and the taboo aspects of motherhood, which we interpreted as a sign of trust in the dialogical interview situation. The interviewers and researchers are themselves mothers.
The interviewees disclosed that they were both strongly committed to motherhood and had a strong desire to feel, look like and perform the idea of a ‘professional’ at work. They also described how the chaos of life with small children and care responsibilities was ‘spilling over’ into their professional lives. In many cases, motherhood appeared to strengthen rather than weaken or threaten their professional identities, and professionalism remained a central part of these mothers’ identities, with many emphasising commitment to their careers and resistance to becoming stay-at-home mothers. Most interviews were highly emotional experiences that moved the interviewers and interviewees, as shown by the tears and laughter in the recordings.
Data analysis
The data were analysed thematically (e.g. Braun and Clarke, 2006), and we began by reading and coding the transcripts to identify which materialities the interviewees employed in their daily routines as professional mothers (see Table 1). We then organised the codes into themes according to how the interviewees reported using materiality and what they accomplished with it. This round of analysis clarified the implicit norms that the mothers encountered with their embodied identities.
Data analysis process.
The study’s abductive design and continuous engagement between our data and the literature facilitated a deeper exploration of the agency of materiality (e.g. Harding et al., 2022). We noted that materiality symbolised professionalism, credibility and belonging to a professional community and that it could build or diminish self-confidence and energise the mothers. This round of analysis revealed the symbolic and affective power of materiality in embodied identity work, although we noticed that some of the identified themes were related to being professional women in general, while others were more specifically connected to motherhood. Thus, we conducted a final round of analysis that focused specifically on distinguishing what aspects of embodied identity work were motherhood-related and which were shared by women in general. As an outcome of the analysis, we were able identify three distinct types of embodied identity work the interviewees were engaged in: performing professionalism, bordering to maintain professionalism and reclaiming the pre-pregnancy body. Performing professionalism relates to their embodied identity work as women, while bordering to maintain professionalism and reclaiming the pre-pregnancy body reflect additional embodied identity work associated with motherhood.
Materiality and embodied identity work among professional mothers
In the following, we discuss the three distinct types of embodied identity work (performing professionalism, bordering to maintain professionalism and reclaiming the pre-pregnancy body) and how and why materiality was utilised and had agency in each type of embodied identity work.
Performing professionalism
As embodied identity work, ‘performing professionalism’ describes how the mothers in our study attempted to match or align with the ideal professional embodiment of their organisations. As women, they aimed to dress correctly. The interviewees described using clothing to signal competence to both themselves and others. By aligning with organisational dress codes they also signalled community, commitment and competence, even when professionalism was largely constructed as masculine across contexts. Clothing perceived as masculine, particularly suiting, was described as having the agency to connect women with community, professionalism, expertise and competence – a connection that femininity and feminine clothing appeared to disrupt. The interviewees described how they performed professionalism, especially by downplaying femininity and emphasising masculinity, yet remaining ‘appropriately’ feminine, to be taken seriously, blend in and succeed within organisational hierarchies. Moreover, they described situations in which their professionalism became more precarious than in others, such as when presenting to an audience: There is one thing that I have thought about often: If there is a situation where I need present in front of an audience, the line between masculinity and femininity is so clear in a way. It is a shame, but I [. . .] feel more confident when I am not wearing super-feminine clothing when presenting. (Terra, consultant)
In addition to increasing the visibility of femininity and women’s bodies as ‘matter out of place’ (Douglas, 2003), presentations may heighten women’s acute awareness of their bodies’ unintended agency, its capacity disturb the rational order of organizations. Both body and femininity must be downplayed or concealed from others and oneself to perform professionalism and embody the desired organisational self. During presentations, women’s bodies are subject to gazes – observed, judged and potentially scrutinised or objectified – that threaten their professionalism and sense of self. The fleshy, soft materiality of the body must be covered for women to appear as rational and logical professionals who conform to organisational norms (see Harding, 2003). Thus, our interviewees deliberately self-monitored their gender displays to avoid appearing too sexy or feminine, both of which they believed were perceived by other as undermining their professionalism. Despite possessing embodied senses of self as women, the interviewees described performing masculinity – a task they can never fully master – to be considered professional. The female body and discourses around it impose limits on performing masculinity and how the body is perceived.
Applying makeup is essential to performing femininity (Bartky, 1988) and, according to our interviews, equally so when performing professionalism. Makeup transforms the body’s surface, especially the face, which becomes a space that connects material elements, such as form, texture and (discreet) colour. When describing their daily beauty routines, the women often emphasised how little makeup they used while listing multiple products, such as light foundation, concealer, blush, eyeshadow, eyeliner, mascara and a dash of perfume. The goal was to feel and appear fresh, perky and natural – the ‘no makeup’ look – which nevertheless requires significant effort. This look emphasises certain aspects of the face by creating the illusion of higher cheekbones, rosy cheeks and glowing skin, while concealing others, such as blemishes or under-eye circles, thereby materialising middle-class Finnish feminine beauty ideals (Åberg, 2020) that also align with ideals of professionalism. The right makeup complemented business attire by conveying neatness, self-control, competence and credibility while emphasising a restrained femininity that is appropriate in middle-class professional contexts. Notably, although none of the organisations the interviewees worked for had explicit grooming rules, the women had a shared understanding of what constituted appropriate makeup, which implies the acquisition of a particular ‘aesthetic form of knowing’ (Strati, 1992) linked to professionalism that guided their daily embodied identity work.
During the interviews, we challenged the women’s makeup routines and asked why they wore makeup to work and whether they could go without it, which created a sense of confusion among the participants. Notably, the women struggled to explain why they engaged in beauty work on in-office days, but (most) did not follow these routines on remote days. The idea of working in the office without makeup often triggered strong responses, including distress, discomfort and incredulity: I would never go to work without makeup. Imagining [that situation] feels horrible. It would feel like coming to work naked. (Porota, principal) If I do not have anything special, I do not feel compelled to wear makeup in my free time . . . but I could not come to the office natural – I draw the line there. I just could not do it. (Contessa, lawyer)
The interviewees’ embodied identities as professionals were tied to wearing makeup, which they framed as a material extension of the body as essential to professional attire as clothing. Many compared going barefaced to being ‘naked’. Without makeup’s material enhancements or modifications, the body is exposed and experienced as lacking, vulnerable or incomplete, which implies that the natural body is matter ‘out of place’. Like clothing, makeup has agency as part of the material act of covering the body, lightly veiling the face and shielding its wearer from potential judgement. Being naked – fleshy, vulnerable and intimate – is considered inappropriate or wrong in professional contexts where skin must be covered.
The interviewees expressed implicit fears of judgement connected with failure to conform with the established professional aesthetics (Kwan and Trautner, 2009) and Western ideals of femininity that emphasise attractiveness (firmness and slenderness) and are culturally associated with health, success and competence (e.g. Bartky, 1988; Bordo, 1993a, 1993b). Although perhaps not explicitly aware of the institutional powers at work, the interviewees described an embodied identity work shaped by these powers. As Bartky (1988: 87), drawing on Foucault (1979), argues, ‘The disciplinary power that inscribes femininity on the female body is everywhere and it is nowhere; the disciplinarian is everyone and yet no one in particular.’ Bartky’s explanation helps explain the sense of confusion among the interviewees when asked to describe their beauty practices. While our interviewees worked on the material surface of the body, using attire and makeup to conform to the cultural norms inscribed upon it, we argue that this work simultaneously influenced the interiority of the self and contributed to the construction of embodied professionalism (c.f. Grosz, 1994): When I put on makeup in the morning, I’m simultaneously gearing myself into work mode. It’s even a positive routine for me – a way to boost energy and self-esteem and set a certain standard. With each brushstroke, I ensure that the mirror reflects my inner motivation. (Linnea, analyst) If I could not wear makeup, I would feel a bit insecure and shabby. (Saika, director)
According to Linnea, each brush stroke boosted her self-esteem and brought her closer to professional and middle-class feminine aesthetic ideals. Each stroke acted as a material connection between Linnea’s hand, which moved over her face with subtle precision and intention, the brush, which was designed to apply specific colour and texture, and the makeup itself, composed of specific pigments, preservatives, oils, emollients, silicones and powders that interact with the skin to alter its appearance and texture. Through this mundane activity, Linnea gradually became a desirable and confident embodied professional. In Saika’s case, not wearing makeup distanced her from the ideal professional embodiment by conveying unprofessionalism to herself and others, thereby negatively influencing her self-perception. Thus, the materiality of makeup (and clothing) can either enhance or diminish professional women’s sense of professionalism and agency (Massumi, 2002). The mother experienced the material surface, shaped and carefully curated through makeup yet still acting outside of human control, as actively shaping how they felt about themselves. Although the women exercised agency when using materiality to enhance their professional appearance, materiality simultaneously exerted significant agency, not only altering the body’s surface but also influencing their self-concepts, ultimately transforming and enhancing their professional identities.
Bordering to maintain professionalism
The process of ‘bordering to maintain professionalism’ refers to the identity work women undertook to conceal the material traces or effects of motherhood on their bodies and homes to preserve a sense of professionalism at work. By applying makeup or changing their clothing, the interviewees strove to preserve their distinctiveness and maintain the delicate boundary between the often-conflicting domains of home and work: It’s also about not wanting to look so tired. Putting on a little makeup makes me feel like I’m not just exhausted, because the person looking back at me in the mirror doesn’t look the same as the one who woke up after just a few hours of sleep. (Tarja, accountant) Dressing up for work makes me feel a bit sharper so that you are less untidy. You kind of feel that you have more of a grip (on life). Your life is not as out of control as here – at home – where everything is in bits and pieces, you have clothes on the floor, and vomit and everything [. . .] Dressing up makes the shabby ‘staying at home mom’ feeling disappear, the one who walks around in loose, easy clothing. You feel more businesslike and professional. (Henrika, specialist)
Above, we see how Tarja and Henrika ‘added’ layers of materiality to construct professionalism, transitioning from a ‘chaotic’ mummy state to one that is more controlled and professional. For the women in our study, motherhood was tied to sleep deprivation from attending to children’s needs at night. The visibility of tiredness extended the distance between the self and the desired professional aesthetic ideal discussed above; thus, women worked on their bodies to hide signs of fatigue that might imply they are unprofessional and ‘unattractive’, that is, not competent or in control. They also used professional clothing to distinguish between ‘untidy’ home and tidy work. Through the material act of wearing professional clothing, the interviewees became the desired professional self and took on its energising effects. Transitioning between the identity of professional to that of mother is vividly expressed by comments about materially ‘undressing the work’, which suggests that work is put on in the morning and ‘undressed’ in the evening through these material acts. As one interviewee, Hane (consultant), stated, ‘I return home, and then I undress the work’ after an exhausting workday. In addition to working on their bodies, the women described pressure to work on their homes, thus extending embodied identity work from the professional self to maintaining a clean home: The home is, you know, flawless and clean, and the makeup is beautiful, and the kids are nicely dressed, and then you kind of forget [. . .] Like, you know, they don’t show the other side, or they don’t talk about where the money comes from, or it’s this strange kind of perfection [. . .] because my own reality doesn’t quite look like that. (Karelia, consultant) I’m thinking I really need to find time to Google how to get Zoom to blur the background because every time I point the camera in any direction, there are some really terrible messes. (Kisara, researcher)
The women in our study described life with small children as inherently messy, chaotic and unpredictable – a life filled with materiality in the form of vomit, faeces, food stains, crumbs on the floor, toys scattered everywhere and, thus, untidy homes. They described the need to hide the untidiness of their homes from the professional sphere, where it was seen as ‘matter out of place’ (Douglas, 2003) that implies a lack of control and competence. Revealing the ‘really terrible messes’ or ‘chaos at home’ threatens both the professional self, which is expected to be efficient and in control, and the ‘good mother’ self, which must maintain a clean house and meet other (often unrealistic) norms of idealised motherhood.
While the women largely submitted to gendered embodied norms of professionalism, we also observed signs of micro-resistance to bordering, where the interviewees described caring less about the opinions of others and deliberately removing normative material elements to reclaim a sense of freedom and agency. Following Thomas and Davies (2005), we see such micro-resistance as a form of resistance as means through which women reflect on and confront their identity performances as professionals and mothers, identifying critical tensions, contradictions and affective dissonances that enable them to frame situations from a different perspective.
I have been using less makeup since having my child. I have less time on my hands and less energy. You need to pick your battles. Why would I spend one hour in the morning doing my hair if it forced me to wake up one hour earlier? For whom would I be doing it? My thinking has totally changed: I do not care what other people think. (Henrika, specialist) I’ve been thinking about (makeup) in my own work community. I don’t feel there’s an expectation to look a certain way, but I kind of think the gender aspect of it – men aren’t obligated to do this. . . . I’ve also noticed that I’ve started to think quite a bit about how my children see me. They are digging in my makeup purse, and my eight-and-a-half-year-old has asked why I am putting makeup on, and can she wear blush to school. I am kind of thinking how can I do makeup in a way that I do not send a message to them that this is something that I expect them to do, but rather something that they can later on think, if they want to do it, and enjoy doing it? . . . These are new makeup-related considerations that I did not have before I had children. (Sylvi, CEO) I have stopped wearing bras because they are uncomfortable. For a long time, I agonised over why I should wear them, and then my feminism grew. I thought, ‘Why on earth should I wear a bra when I don’t physically need it?’ (Saunia, researcher)
All three interviewees quoted above describe a material object (i.e. hair, makeup, a bra) as playing a role in empowering the mothers, which hints at the agentive power of these objects, or rather, in the mothers’ choices to resist their discipline and consequential conformity to normative expectations. Here, micro-resistance functions as a form of embodied identity work. Not wearing a bra or refusing to modify one’s complexion expressed agency by rejecting the material-discursive norms governing women’s bodies. Moreover, our analyses suggest that the experience of having a child enabled our interviewees to critically reflect on the entanglement of professional and feminine aesthetic norms from the unique position of a mother. Our interviewees questioned the implied sanity, fairness and power inherent in the gendered norms and these reflections seemed to disconnect or weaken the links between makeup, clothing, personal grooming and the construction of professionalism. For those engaging in micro-resistance, working on the external body through clothing and beauty practices no longer mattered, and a shift in meaning robbed material objects of their agency and affective power in building professionalism. The positionality of motherhood appeared to thus strengthen self-confidence by fostering resilience against judgements related to breaking professional and feminine aesthetic norms. Rather than constructing professionalism by working on the body, these women drew on their experiences of motherhood to build their professional identities: When I became a mom, I became more self-confident in many situations. (Contessa, controller) I am doing things in a gutsier manner than before. I believe that this is linked solely to motherhood and family. (Viivienna, director)
Bordering offered mothers a powerful space to create distance between the work- and home-related spaces, but often also to question and reflect upon such distancing.
Reclaiming the pre-pregnancy body
Motherhood represented a significant embodied and emotional change in the lives of the women, and we identified ‘reclaiming the pre-pregnancy body’ as embodied identity work focused directly on the physical maternal body. Specifically, this form of embodied identity work fell into two categories: the first was weight and fitness, and the second was physical and mental bodily dysfunction, both brought on by maternity.
I was left with a bit more weight, so I noticed that my external image of myself was somehow not yet there. I must get rid of this weight, then I have like completed the pregnancy . . . I feel that I am in the last stretch (of recovery) because I am still breastfeeding in the morning and evening. I will end it during the summer, and then that is it. (Terra, HR manager)
Becoming a mother may not appear to unsettle the aesthetic norms of professionalism inscribed on the body; however, it disrupts women’s embodied identities as professionals by making ‘fleshiness’ – that is, the material, biological aspect of their bodies (Harding et al., 2022) – more felt to themselves and visible to others. The ideal embodied professional identity entailed being masculine yet sufficiently feminine, firm, slender and attractive, all of which communicate health, self-control, rationality and competence, as noted above. Bigger bodies have been normatively constructed as unhealthy, unproductive, unprofessional and lazy in organisational settings (e.g. Johansson et al., 2017; van Amsterdam et al., 2023) and society at large, a stigma that often also applies to pregnant and postpartum bodies. Thus, motherhood, which often makes bodies softer, rounder and heavier – whether temporarily or permanently – made it difficult if not impossible for the women to match the ideal of firm and slender embodiment.
I recovered really well due to being an active athlete and I worked really hard for it. I did a lot of sports pretty much directly after returning from the maternity ward. So, looks-wise, I have recovered well. That’s the thing for me as an athlete: it was the excess weight and – not excess weight but the weight you gain during the pregnancy – the bodily changes, growing breasts and all. I did not feel that it was that wonderful. I was mainly thinking how to get rid of it and then the extra kilos did not go away as fast as I wanted. I am talking about really small figures here, but it was still (a big deal) for me. I am used to having an athletic figure, so somehow seeing it change [. . .] I wanted to go back (to that figure), even if it took a bit longer. I am pregnant again, and I kind of think, ‘Gosh, I cannot take this phase again’, the phase where you get a softer figure. (Valtia, specialist)
The heavier, softer body made itself known through the senses and becomes a new sociomaterial reality for women that demanded harsh embodied identity work to feel ‘right’ again. We observed that the body’s material agency was framed as having the affective power to make women feel inadequate, while the signs of pregnancy (e.g. body fat) are visible to themselves or others. Thus, the interviewed women strove to transform their postpartum bodies – often constructed as abnormal and imperfect – back to their pre-pregnancy shape through dieting and exercise. In doing so, they normalised the fit pre-pregnancy body while marking the heavier maternal body as abject (Gatrell, 2019; Kristeva, 1984). Successfully completing the pregnancy project signified, to oneself and others, self-control, work ethic and competence, while clothes that no longer fit served as everyday material symbols of failure to conform to the normative and appropriate embodiment of a professional woman and mother (e.g. Bartky, 1988).
During pregnancy, childbirth and the postpartum period, women may experience the fleshiness of their bodies as especially evident, beyond mere weight gain or changes in body shape. Childbirth often results in physical damage, such as loose joints, torn muscles, urinary incontinence, stretched skin and various pains, all of which are felt and experienced deeply throughout the body: I think I am halfway through my recovery. Since my first boy was born (6 years ago), my back has gone into kind of a ‘safety lock’ over ten times [. . .], due to diastasis recti abdominis. I am seeing a physiotherapist and doing exercises. The following year will tell me how I will recover. (Viivienna, manager) I think I still have to accept that I don’t have the energy I used to and that I do have pain. It feels like my hips are kind of dislocated. (Saunia, researcher) There is still some work to do on my pelvic floor. (Varmia, director)
The pains and dysfunctions discussed in the interviews were the kinds not typically visible to others and therefore easier to hide in the workplace, positioning the sensing, aching flesh as the ‘absent present’ within organisations. The presence of flesh, which encompasses biological elements such as skin, muscles, organs and bodily fluids, disturbs the rational order of organisations, which are typically shaped by cultural norms (Harding, 2020; Harding et al., 2022; Huopalainen and Satama, 2019b); thus, fleshy, body dysfunctions do not fit the ideals of professionalism – health, fitness and control – and flesh is taboo in organisations (Harding, 2003; Harding et al., 2022), perhaps even more so to oneself. These physical dysfunctions required women to engage in additional embodied identity work – physical and emotional – to reclaim their pre-pregnancy body. At times, interviewees described having to accept that ‘full recovery’ might not be possible due to the permanent nature of their bodily changes. Changing foot sizes, dislocated hips, and stretched skin illustrate the agential materiality of a body that lies beyond one’s control and may manifest itself as a form of ‘body grief’.
Good luck to anyone (recovering) from the C-section (and to others) for understanding that it really doesn’t make sense to start running again for quite a long time. I cannot partake (anymore) in those (organisational running clubs). (Cassandra, consultant) Especially when you’re just going back to work after maternity leave, because at that point not all my clothes usually fit me yet. I’ve always gained like twenty extra kilos during each of my pregnancies, and that weight definitely doesn’t just disappear in a few months. There’s a certain feeling . . . not because there’s anything wrong with having a ‘mom belly’ or a maternal body, but I still feel like it’s not entirely me. (Anna, specialist) My shoe and clothing sizes grew due to pregnancy, so none of my old shoes or clothes fit me. It has been one of the depressing things related to motherhood. (Kisara, researcher)
The fleshiness of (postpartum) bodies and reproductive health discourse seem to have no natural place in organisations. This distinction is partly upheld by a medical discourse that views pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding as natural, effortless and easy to recover from and in which bodies that fail to achieve these norms (physically or mentally) are shameful: Well, the baby phase with my firstborn was really tough mentally. I have thought that having a child has been the biggest crisis of my life. [. . .] I had (hormonal) postpartum depression. (Oodessa, expert) We’ve had quite a challenging time with breastfeeding journeys. With my first, I was almost on the edge of collapse, like . . . how well did I even really manage in the end? I felt this intense anxiety about whether I was a good mother, because I couldn’t fully breastfeed. (Anna, specialist)
The embodied identity work described by our interviewees indicates that the post-partum phase was entangled with discourses about the ideal mother and professional. Culturally, motherhood is portrayed as biologically and emotionally natural and an easy transition, with parental leave framed as a break filled with the love and togetherness of mother and baby, which puts normative pressure on women in terms of idealised bodily functioning. Our analyses revealed drastically different experiences – ‘crises’ and ‘trauma’ – where the fleshiness of the body made itself known. The body that was unable nurture or recover according to culturally expected norms had the agency to influence the interviewees’ embodied identities, not only as mothers but also as professionals, which called into question the boundaries between public and private identities.
Feeling like you’re really disappointed in your own work performance . . . I was talking to someone about this, and they said, ‘Your baby is just one year old – many people haven’t even returned to work at that stage. You’ve already accomplished so much by now’. If your confidence completely crumbled during that year with the baby, and your body didn’t perform in the way you expected – you didn’t manage to meet those expectations, your body failed you or whatever the reason may be – of course, that shows up quite clearly in your work life as well . . . I have quite a bit of trauma and am sure that my mental health will be poor next year as well (Motherhood changes) your professional identity, your identity as woman, and then you have all the motherhood-related cultural assumptions and expectations and then your own assumptions. (Kisara, researcher)
A traumatic motherhood experience left a lasting mark that demanded intense embodied identity work to align with professional expectations upon returning to work. Bodies and minds are not two distinct substances but are intimately connected by the ‘inflection of mind into body and body into mind’ (Grosz, 1994: xii). Table 2 summarises our findings.
Types of embodied identity work among professional mothers.
Discussion
Our study explored how mothers in Finland engage with materialities (e.g. maternal bodies, clothing, makeup, hair and other objects) to negotiate their postpartum identities in professional contexts. As Pullen and Rhodes (2025: 3) note, ‘our lived bodies cannot escape the facticity of their materiality’, a reality that resonated with our study participants and their experiences of inhabiting stretched and unruly maternal bodies positioned by themselves (and others) as abject in the workplace. Messy or leaky maternal bodies disrupt the ideal of impermeable, bounded bodies within masculine organisational settings. Women’s reproductive bodies remain ‘other’ in normative work contexts (Gatrell, 2013, 2014, 2019) and are often subject to scrutiny, self-discipline and intense embodied identity work with the goal of conforming to workplace norms (Mavin and Grandy, 2016, 2025). We have illustrated how women pursue such careful conforming and controlling of maternal embodiment using business attire and appropriate makeup, self-disciplining softer maternal bodies and navigating situations to perform or achieve the right embodied identities in the right bodies. Bodies are always constrained by surrounding norms and social structures (Young, 2005), yet our interviewees revealed how agential materialities, including aching body flesh, ‘no makeup’ makeup and ‘mess’ at home held surprisingly strong affective power (Harding, 2020; Harding et al., 2022) that profoundly shaped lived experiences and understandings of professional female embodiment and connected materialities.
The empirical context of motherhood – in which the body–mind relationship undergoes multifaceted transformations and material changes in an intensely short period of time – enabled us to identify three forms of situated embodied identity work: performing professionalism, bordering to maintain professionalism and reclaiming the pre-pregnancy body. These themes reflect how mothers, in connection with various materialities, work on and with their bodies to ‘keep up appearances’ while navigating and, at times, micro-resisting normative professional expectations postpartum (Gatrell, 2013; Huopalainen and Satama, 2019a). The first theme, performing professionalism, speaks to how women rely on clothing and makeup to signal organisational belonging and convey competence and self-control – practices shaped not only by external organisational pressures but also by internalised gendered norms. Performing professionalism is not specific to motherhood but is common among women in general (Pratt and Rafaeli, 1997; Rafaeli et al., 1997; Rippin et al., 2016). In particular, we show the affective power of makeup and illustrate how natural bodies and plain skin are perceived as naked, shameful matter ‘out of place’ (Douglas, 2003). The naked body lies, both literally and symbolically, behind the mask of ‘the professional’ (Pérezts et al., 2014), which is constructed by makeup affectively and materially to cover natural skin with the veneer of professionalism. Adding just a hint of makeup to achieve the ‘no makeup look’ conforms to normative Finnish professional embodiment and seemed to boost or energise many mothers.
The second theme, bordering to maintain professionalism, demonstrates how mothers engage with materiality to create or reinforce boundaries between home and work. Maintaining boundaries focused specifically on hiding material traces of motherhood in women’s bodies and homes to appear more professional at work. Clean, professional attire and a well-groomed appearance served as symbolic markers of professionalism (Lawrence and Phillips, 2019) that distanced interviewees from the perceived ‘messiness’ of motherhood (Gatrell, 2014). Simultaneously, mothers also felt compelled to ensure their (in reality, messy and out-of-control) homes appeared impeccable, neat and orderly. These practices align with masculine-coded norms of professionalism (Harding, 2003; Kristeva, 1984), while reflecting internalised gendered ideals about domestic perfection.
The third theme, reclaiming the pre-pregnancy body, highlighted mothers engaging in intensive efforts to reshape or conceal the visible and invisible material transformations of their postpartum bodies. Such transformations, including under-theorised, body-related aspects, such as engaging with make up, and even taboo bodily dysfunctions, such as pelvic floor problems and reduced muscle strength – material and maternal realities often rendered invisible in professional settings. These aspects, frequently experienced as abject materialities (Höpfl and Kostera, 2003), surfaced in subtle practices of concealment, negotiation and physical rehabilitation were integral to mothers’ embodied identity work.
Theoretical contributions
Taken together, our findings bring into focus the nuanced ways in which materialities possess agency and exert significant affective power in shaping embodied identity work as mothers strive to make their maternal bodies ‘right’ (Trethewey, 1999) with gendered organisational norms. Our research offers new theoretical insights into (1) the affective agency of materialities in identity work, (2) stigmatised and abjected dimensions of embodied identity work and (3) micro-resistance and alternative maternal femininities. We discuss these three contributions below.
The affective agency of materialities in the negotiation of embodied identity work
As Haynes (2012: 496) notes, women are often expected to present themselves in ways that demonstrate professional status, control and credibility, which aligns with existing literature on embodied identity work (Mavin and Grandy, 2016, 2025). Our study participants largely conformed to – and rarely questioned – limiting gendered workplace expectations about looking professional and feminine (Jammaers et al., 2024). While materialities such as neat clothing and the right kind and amount of makeup are vital to middle-class professional embodied self-presentations and curated identity performances, most OMS research treats these materialities as passive objects of human manipulation and assumes human ‘domination over the material that opposes resistance and enjoys obedience’ (Gherardi and Perrotta, 2014: 146). Our study problematises such traditional views by illuminating various forms of agential materiality connected to the lived maternal postpartum body.
While materiality and identity have primarily been studied from discursive or static perspectives in OMS (e.g. Pratt and Rafaeli, 1997), less scholarly attention has been given to the agentic, fluid and affectively charged aspects of materiality and embodiment in identity work (for exceptions, see Harding, 2020; Harding et al., 2022). We extend the embodied identity work literature by teasing out the multiple agential roles and affective power of materialities in embodied identity work, thereby demonstrating that professional mothers engage with and, importantly, are always co-shaped by material objects (beyond their control), such as body flesh, professional attire and the colours and chemicals in makeup. In our study, agential body flesh acts specifically as disruptive matter that is ‘out of control’. We have also illustrated the affective power and considerable agency of materiality in shaping how professional mothers feel about themselves postpartum.
Moreover, while growing new materialist research investigates how materialities possess agentic power (Li et al., 2025; van Amsterdam et al., 2022), we extend this perspective through a nuanced demonstration of how agential materialities enter everyday ‘negotiations’ of maternal embodied identity work. In our study, the presence of material practices (e.g. wearing makeup or professional clothing) – or, in some cases, the intentional absence of them (e.g. not wearing a bra) – contributed to the reinforcement of material-discursive gender norms, while also occasionally challenging them. We therefore suggest a theoretical shift from human-centred agency in embodied identity work (Jammaers and Ybema, 2023; Mavin and Grandy, 2016, 2025), where humans are currently assumed to be ‘in control’ of appearance and body work, to a more dynamic, affective, relational and materially co-constituted process in which identity work is not as human-controlled as we often tend to assume.
Stigmatised and abjected dimensions of embodied identity work
Stigmatised aspects of fleshy motherhood (Gatrell, 2013) remain under-theorised in the embodiment literature. Accordingly, we add to theoretical discussions by preparing the stage for unspoken and silenced dimensions of mothers’ embodied identity work, such as urinary concerns, sudden changes in foot size, dislocated hips and stretched skin, and their profound impact on one’s sense of self. Postpartum bodies are notoriously unpredictable, leaky and hard to manage (Pimentel and Bel Hadj Ali, 2025), and our study captures the participants’ efforts to control (or their failure to control) their stigmatised bodies and the discomfort of being unable to contain these bodies when they spill over. In so doing, we show the radical agentic fleshiness of bodily materialities beyond one’s control. These unruly, unmanageable materialities challenge the view of body flesh as something controllable or merely discursive (Harding et al., 2022). Meanwhile, our participants framed stretch marks, softer breasts, loose joints and ‘extra flesh’ not only as deviations from normative beauty but also as unwanted abject materialities (compare Mavin and Grandy, 2025), even threats to their maternal and professional identities. While many mothers described reshaping the fleshy materiality of their bodies to overcome some of these taboos through dress, exercise or cosmetic routines, they expressed concern about these bodily marks and changes that contributed to a strong urge to eliminate this ‘extra’.
Thus, while becoming a mother expands women’s identities to include motherhood, many seemed to struggle with accepting the profoundly changed bodies or ‘extra’ flesh that come with this new identity. In addition to previous findings on body grief (De Luca and Bustad, 2023; Fox and Neiterman, 2015), we also interpret the postpartum period as causing a sense of loss and mourning related to permanent or uncontrollable bodily changes. Our nuanced findings shed light on the embodied identity work negotiations of, for example, ageing employees, people with disabilities or professional body workers, such as dancers after retirement. Our findings call attention to how stigmatised materialities profoundly shape embodied identity work over time and extend their influence to the professional self. While becoming a mother is often framed as a beautiful, positive experience and extension of self-identity, our study underscores the complexities professional women face in embodied identity negotiations and raises the following question: What changes are necessary to foster more positive attitudes towards the diversity and richness of female bodies in the workplace and society at large?
Micro-resistance and alternative maternal femininities
We theorise micro-resistance as a form of embodied identity work. While motherhood introduces new constraints, our study suggests that it also offers intriguing opportunities for subtle, situated acts of micro-resistance. Whereas previous literature on micro-resistance (Alkhaled, 2021; Wasserman and Baikovich, 2024) has explored how fashion objects are added to the body, we draw attention to the removal of materiality as a form of micro-resistance. We argue that such micro-resistance manifests as mothers’ embodied identity work, in which material items (e.g. bras, dresses or makeup) are loosened or deliberately removed from the body. These ‘dematerialising acts’ function as micro-resistance that challenges hegemonic professional femininities. In rejecting organisational beauty standards, mothers can make space for alternative maternal femininities that do not require hyper-regulated, tightly controlled bodies, thereby allowing their flesh to move more freely and naturally. We also acknowledge that, among our interviewees, this resistance was not always oppositional but rather emerged incidentally, due to reasons such as practical constraints (e.g. fatigue, lack of time or new priorities), a growing sense of confidence or simply detachment from normative pressures. As such, motherhood may offer a temporary reprieve from prevailing beauty norms.
Limitations and suggestions for future research
Motherhood serves as a reminder to everyone that we are all fleshy, organic beings. Together with the growing body of literature on motherhood (Gatrell, 2019; Höpfl and Kostera, 2003; Huopalainen and Satama, 2019a, 2019b; Katila, 2019), we identified persistent apprehension about acknowledging the physicality of the maternal body within OMS. Arguably, Höpfl and Kostera’s (2003) call to ‘restore the (m)other to the text of organization’ – issued two decades ago – remains profoundly relevant today. Future research might continue to explore the ‘new materialities’ turn – what Harding (2020) refers to as material-identities perspectives – that builds on new materialist theorising (see also Kontturi and Jalonen, 2018). How do we, as professionals, ‘materialise’ through the co-constitution of varied materialities in the situatedness and relationality of others? How do the materiality of dress and the gendered body vibrantly intra-act and move in everyday performances? What makes possible different manifestations or embodied compositions of identity or ‘professionalism’ (Adamson and Johansson, 2016)? Moreover, how can we shift even further away from the human-centred identity literature to explore insights from the emerging post-humanist debates in new materialist and organisation studies (see, e.g., Baxter, 2021; Bell and Vachhani, 2020; Harding et al., 2022)? We observe the gendered construction of mess as matter that is largely considered out of place (Douglas, 2003) for professional women, but is it allowed for men? Further studies of materialities, such as mess, dirt, flesh, fluid and tissue, are needed to understand how unpleasant materialities interact with our embodied identity construction.
We also need more in-depth studies on the nuanced lived experiences of individuals from different socioeconomic backgrounds, classes, ethnicities and age groups to move beyond our focus on white, middle-class, privileged women in heterosexual family structures. What roles do flesh, material clothing, and attire play in identity negotiation in contexts other than knowledge-intense work? To develop a more inclusive working life for all bodies and genders across sociocultural contexts, one might, for example, study pain and bodily suffering in relation to gender through stigmatised aspects. Inclusive workplace includes normalising abject embodied experiences, such as disabilities, pregnancy, menopause, breastfeeding, hypogonadism, androgenetic hair loss, postnatal embodiment and all the conditions that affect how we feel in our bodies, at work and beyond, to ensure that different embodied experiences in organisations are acknowledged and normalised.
Conclusion
The often hidden, vulnerable, abject and inherently material aspects of embodied identity work risk being overlooked in disembodied organisations. Without a nuanced understanding of embodied identity work and agential materiality, we run the risk of under-theorising critical, often abject or sensitive, lived experiences in organisations. Through our research on professional mothers, we advocate for ‘embodied and personal accounts of what it means to be a human being in today’s increasingly “dehumanized workplace”’ (Boncori, 2018: 21). The complexities of motherhood – fluid, unpredictable and materially grounded – should be acknowledged within the workplace as integral aspects of embodied identities, including the normalization of female and maternal bodies and the fleshy realities that come with them. This includes recognising the presence of children and the inevitable material traces associated with childbirth and childrearing, such as stains on work attire or visible tiredness on one’s face, along with understanding motherhood as an ongoing processual journey, one that is entangled with and spills over onto professional working life. This kind of research might challenge the prevailing notion that organisational cultures should be devoid of flesh or child-related elements (Garcia-Lorenzo et al., 2023; Riad, 2007), and such shifts are crucial to shaping more inclusive, humane and socially sustainable organisations.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We are deeply grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their generous and insightful comments, which significantly strengthened this article. We also extend our warmest thanks to all the mothers who participated in our study. Your heartfelt accounts of being professional mothers, sharing both the immense joys and the profound vulnerabilities and pains, were invaluable. This work would not have been possible without your openness and trust.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
