LAUSR

This article introduces the concept of “care obfuscation”, developed from interviews with 32 UK-based academic mothers about their experience of the transition to parenthood. Care obfuscation refers to the workplace conduct of hiding, underestimating or denying the impact of caregiving responsibilities on professional performance, reflecting the broader dismissal of care and care work in modern neoliberal society. The article outlines the empirical and theoretical contributions of care obfuscation to higher education research and motherhood studies. Specifically, it draws from theories of neoliberalism, “good” motherhood and cruel optimism to investigate how and why obfuscatory behaviours vary in direction and intention across different parental experiences, professional activities and levels of seniority. Whilst, as a practice, obfuscation can help academic mothers project the image of the “ideal worker”, obfuscation can also offer temporary relief from the emotional challenges which arise from being held against conflicting professional and personal expectations. Through advancing an alternative framework by which to consider the silences that come with mothering in academia, this work on obfuscation deepens the study of care exclusion, revealing how such exclusion is often non-quantifiable and even perpetuated by those at-risk of exclusion. In advocating for further theorization of obfuscation, this paper calls for the development of initiatives that seek to heighten not merely the productivity levels of academic mothers but the visibility of academic caregivers and caregiving.