How to Naturalise a Moral Order: A Short Lesson in Analytic Smuggling

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 142): 

In contrast, lowering stakes involves tamping down the level of controversy or significance of a meaning. Due to the nature of the corpus, which tended to feature outpouring of complaints attracting the #momguilt hashtag, such tempering of stakes was not a common pattern. Generally, it occurred in posts which moderate a meaning that might be interpreted as too scandalous for the context, for example admitting that you don't love your children.

(51) "I've got a confession...there are some times I don't love being a mother. It's not that I don't love my kids, I just don't love some of the things that motherhood has brought into my life." [link to a blog post with the title 'Hey, Mama. It’s All Going to Be OK.' @User #selflove #lonliness #momguilt

(51) contains a range of resources lowering the stakes of the ‘confession’. The quantifier ‘some’ reduces the scope of possible times the user doesn’t ‘love being a mother’. The user then rejects what the implicated position that this might mean that she does not love her kids. In another move mitigating this putative high-stakes position, the user tempers the stakes, downplaying the stakes of her confession via the focusing adverb 'just' which further specifies its limited extent. The title of the linked post is another example of reducing stakes: the address ‘Hey, Mama’ [warms] the proposition to follow that ‘It’s All Going to Be OK.’. It invokes the persona of someone who offers comfort and consolation in response to the vulnerability invoked by the high-stakes confession.

ChatGPT Comments:

In their discussion of “lowered stakes” in #momguilt posts, Doran, Martin & Zappavigna argue that linguistic softening — some, just, comforting blog links — tempers the supposedly scandalous admission that a mother may not love every moment of motherhood.

But this reading hinges on a foundational assumption they never interrogate:

That such an admission is inherently high-stakes, dangerous, and in need of mitigation.

This is not an observation about the discourse.

It is a reproduction of the very maternal ideology being studied.

Rather than examining how the post constructs a value, they smuggle in that value as given:

• Ambivalence toward motherhood is treated as objectively transgressive.

• The “stakes” are assumed to precede the discourse that is said to modulate them.

• Stake-management is conflated with stance-management — as if linguistic softeners always reduce risk, rather than potentially reframe the boundaries of legitimacy.

A key distinction collapses:

• value systems (behavioural normativity)
  vs.

• meaning systems (semiotic construal)

The result: they analyse how mothers manage shame while quietly enforcing the conditions that make shame mandatory.

Ironically, the very move they celebrate as “lowering stakes” may instead raise the stakes of solidarity, inviting others into a normalised space of maternal ambivalence. The interpretable risk is produced in the discourse — not prior to it.

In short:

The authors claim to describe a moral order

while actively performing and policing it.

That is not analysis.

That is ideology rendered as method.