https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i4.028
When Care Becomes Evidence: Maternal Riskification and Algorithmic Surveillance in Helen Phillips’s Hum and Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel
FATIMA SHAHZAD¹
LIU LIHUI¹
RIDA SHAHZAD²
¹ College of International Studies, Southwest University, Chongqing, China
² Government College Women University, Faisalabad, Pakistan
Abstract: Contemporary speculative fiction increasingly places motherhood inside systems that promise safety while converting intimate life into data. This article reads Helen Phillips’s Hum (2024) and Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel (2025) together to examine a more specific problem than technological surveillance alone: the transformation of maternal care into evidence against the mother. Drawing on Sharon Hays’s account of intensive mothering and Helen Thornham’s concept of algorithmic vulnerability, the article proposes “maternal riskification” as a name for the process by which ordinary acts of care, exhaustion, refusal, or self-preservation are translated into indicators of maternal negligence or dangerousness. In Hum, May’s attempt to remove her family from continuous digital mediation culminates in the public and institutional recoding of her protective decision as negligent parenting. In The Dream Hotel, Sara Hussein’s decision to adopt a sleep technology after the birth of her twins produces the dream data later used to classify her as a future threat and separate her from her family. The comparison reveals two related forms of judgment: retrospective, viral riskification and anticipatory, predictive riskification. Where older forms of mother-blame punish a perceived failure after the fact, these novels imagine systems that make maternal failure permanently inferable from data. Their most unsettling insight is therefore not that mothers are watched, but that no maternal choice remains outside interpretation: refusing surveillance can look irresponsible, while accepting care technologies can generate the very evidence through which a mother is governed.
Keywords: Maternal Riskification; Algorithmic Surveillance; Intensive Mothering; Algorithmic Vulnerability; Contemporary Speculative Fiction; Digital Motherhood
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