Multilevel Marketing the American Dream: Home Videos, Entrepreneurial Motherhood, and the Digital Archives of Neoliberalism Available to Purchase

Recent documentaries like LuLaRich (2021) chronicle the experience of women who participated in the multilevel marketing company LuLaRoe. Many of the brand’s microinfluencers used digital platforms to produce videos of themselves performing an entrepreneurial vision of motherhood to recruit other women into the financial scheme. I analyze this self-branding media for how it demonstrates the ways that post-Recession flexible labor practices transformed the home into an economic zone of media production. Analyzing this visual archive of the everyday realities of neoliberalism, this article considers how these home videos allow scholars to understand the affective registers of women’s participation in social media platforms by recovering gendered and national myths at the heart of this creative labor. In doing so, this article argues that these home video practices demonstrate the ways that motherhood has become financialized as a digital commodity in response to neoliberal economic distress.