This chapter examines how contemporary transnational intimacies—the transnational connections through which the figure of the global mother is staged in dominant cultural narratives in the West—are imagined through white femininity, and more specifically through the nationalized white female body. Drawing on the Diana phenomenon, it considers the construction of global motherhood and its role in the New Labor culture of 1990s in recasting the image of Britain through logics of humanitarianism, community, and the international. More specifically, it considers how the discourse of global motherhood, embodied in the figure of the white celebrity woman such as Princess Diana and others, functions as a tool for a cosmopolitan renationalization of the national self. It shows that such renationalization obscures the geopolitical violences and neoliberal policies that result in children being abandoned or deprived in the Global South. The chapter also discusses the discourse of international adoption, transnational struggles over maternities and modernities and how they are imbricated in a politics of “compulsory heterosexuality,” and how infantilized cosmopolitanism is enacted through transnational white femininity.
