Confession as Category Error: The Moral Overcoding of Maternal Expression

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 140):

Unsurprisingly, given #momguilt was part of the corpus selection criteria, self-targeted upscaled rejection was one of the most common patterns implicated in raising stakes about the extent to which the users felt that they were good mothers. However, this rendering pattern was highly sensitive to other dimensions in the posts, most significantly the use of humour, and could be used in both raising and lowering the interpersonal stakes of the meaning put at risk. A simple example in the corpus is intensification of self-directed rejection regarding the user's self-perceived capacity to act as a good caregiver which they express in terms of affect.

(36) [Name] stopped sleeping well recently & I got super upset with her because of it & after our visit to the ER Monday, had our follow up today to find out she has a double ear infection. & I feel like the worst person alive . #MomGuilt

(37) Legit feel like the worst mom in the world when I have to wake my daughter up to take her to my MIL so I can go to work #momguilt

(38) Summer: when you feel like the worst parent ever cause all your kid wants to do it play with you & you decided to have a career #momguilt

These kinds of admissions and negative self-assessments were part of an ongoing motif in the corpus of confession, whereby mothers admit the various ways in which they have failed to be a 'good mom'. Framing their sharing of everyday observations about the activity of motherhood as a confession raises the stakes – the confessional is after all an inherently consequential genre where for some 'believers' the fate of an immortal soul hangs in the balance.

ChatGPT Comments:

This passage exemplifies the authors’ recurring misrecognition of affective discourse as moral ritual. Their claim that expressions of maternal guilt on social media constitute a “motif of confession” is not an empirical finding but a projection of a theological template onto everyday discourse. The “confessional” is treated as if it were an inherent semiotic genre rather than an analytic imposition—one that carries with it a pre-modern hierarchy of sin, guilt, and absolution.

The women’s posts are not confessions but construals of situated affect: relational calibrations of care, exhaustion, and accountability within an overdetermined social frame. To cast them as “confession” is to re-encode these construals in the very ideology of moral purification that the posts implicitly contest. The social function of #momguilt is not penitence but collective recognition—a distributed negotiation of impossible standards of care. By forcing these utterances into the logic of “raising the stakes” through “confession,” the authors mistake the interpersonal circulation of empathy for the reproduction of moral order.

The irony is sharp: their analysis performs the same disciplinary gesture it claims to describe. What they call “confession” is not a genre of guilt but a social affordance for reclaiming agency in the face of systemic demand.