Subjective and discoursive configurations of mothering: embodied motherhoods and emancipatory activisms

Abstract

This article tackles two proposals of civil society belonging to Maternal Activist Movement in Argentina. The goal is to describe and analyse what kind of rhetoric are placed in contexts of both subjective and discursive re-appropriations of mothering, especially at a time of gender activism in Latin America. To that end, ethnography is used as a methodology of analysis that points to (multi)situated knowledge, to recognition of mothers as individual cultural creators, and to identification and interpretation of these gender biases that are included in language and are reproduced in discourses. As a tool, the Critical Analysis of Discourse allows to attend textualities of varying semiotic nature (conversations of physical reality and online narratives) and to clarify the elements of power and inequality that they replicate, sometimes implicitly, other times explicitly. The results show that motherhood continues to be a field of disputes between sociocultural processes that deploy on it some technologies (including gender technologies) and the re-appropriations of meanings carried out by subjectivities in their personal and collective experience.