Overview

Much of the theoretical production on maternity historically developed from a feminist perspective has focused on the identification of maternity as a source of oppression and subordination of women. It is true that it is very necessary to give name and form to all the myths, beliefs, norms and stereotypes that have identified women with nature and with their biological capacity for procreation, relegating it to the domestic and private sphere. But it is also necessary to go further.

Maternity is much more than a patriarchal institution. Forty years ago, Adrienne Rich proposed to distinguish the potential transformative experience of motherhood from the oppressive institution of maternity. Nowadays we hear voices that speak to us of feminist motherhoods, even of revolutionary motherhoods, that is, of motherhood as a locus of power, as a source of agency for social change.

The conceptualisation of motherhood as an agency seeks to rescue the power of the woman seized by patriarchy. Overcoming the patriarchal definition of maternity implies eradicating it from the private domain - apolitical -, endowing it with meaning and capacity for agency, putting its socio-political dimension in the foreground.

In this seminar I intend to reflect on the transforming potential of what I have called the "motherhoods for peace", certain maternal practices and behaviours that break with the dominant discourses on maternity and that form a rhetoric of their own, far from the heteropatriarchal ways of conceiving the world.

Bio Note
Magda Sancho Moreno - I am Magda, woman, mother and worker-researcher for peace. PhD candidate at the International Peace, Conflict and Development Studies Programme at the Universitat Jaume I in Castellón, I finished the Master of this programme in 2015. My research focuses on 3 topics that fascinate me: peace, maternities and feminist studies. And it arises from the reflection on my own experience of motherhood, while reflecting on how my way of being in the world has changed with the experience of motherhood and decided, encouraged by my ignorance, to research on how maternity can contribute to peacebuilding cultures. 

Recommended Readings: 

Green, Fiona Joy (2015) “Re-conceptualising motherhood: Reaching back to move forward”. Journal of Family Studies 21 (3). Taylor & Francis: 196-207.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/288685640_Re-conceptualising_motherhood_Reaching_back_to_move_forward
 

[Recommended readings are available in open-access. If you experience difficulty accessing them, you can request them by email: gw@ces.uc.pt]

[Within the Gender Workshop Series VIII that takes place between October 2017 and June 2018]