Marking and erasing: Classed practices of visibility in mothering Israeli children with invisible disabilities

Viewing visibility as a category of social analysis, which implies recognition through relationship and has properties of strategy and field, we conceptualize mothering practices of children with invisible disabilities as processes of ‘marking-and-erasing.’ Based on interviews with Israeli mothers during COVID, we ask: What practices do mothers use to mark and erase their children's disabilities? What practices are marked as good mothering? How do these processes of marking and erasing negotiate classed ideals of normativity for children and mothers? Our findings indicated that low-income mothers mark disability to acquire professional support for children's disabilities, claiming this as their ‘proper’ mothering role, whereas middle-class mothers erase disability through intensive mothering, marking it as theirs. The negotiation of visibility of disability and mothering relationally reveals that the social construction of invisible disabilities works through material and symbolic links in the private-public nexus.