Mothering the parturient body

Abstract

Mothering the parturient body is an investigation that investigates the exercise of motherhood as a social institution, that is, the mandates that mothers go through based on the delegations imposed by patriarchal society. The work covers three stages of maternal exercise: pregnancy, childbirth and parenting. Hence, she focuses her interest on recognizing the violence exerted on the bodies of women mothers by social institutions.

Its main objective is to understand how the social mandate of being a mother affects women mothers between 25 and 35 years of age who accessed tertiary education.

The research has a qualitative approach where ethnography and autoethnography are used as a tool for data collection. In this sense, the stories of the mothers investigated serve as the main source of information to understand the feminine subjectivity of three women. after becoming mothers.

To construct the theoretical framework, the categories of institutionalized motherhood were used, which are supported by the theoretical construction around motherhood as a social mandate, anchored in turn with the development of capitalism. These two conceptualizations give way to the understanding of how motherhood responds to the sexual division of labor and is anchored to historical-moral precepts that relegate the mother to a domestic exercise dedicated exclusively to the private.

The research shows, after the analysis of qualitative data, that women-mothers take care of their children, do domestic tasks and take care of the home, which implies, even in the current era, taking care of their husband.