Paper Short Abstract:

Through the lens of house biographies, this paper explores how women's and motherhood's identities are being reshaped in the conditions of post-flood displacement and house reconstruction in central Mozambique, and how the entanglement between home-making and ways of mothering become a social infra

Paper Abstract:

The act of home-making is a clearly gendered process: everyday routines of social and spatial ordering, linked to the sense and materialisation of care, belonging, coping and legitimation, are connected to women's identities.

Under conditions of enforced material, social and symbolic disruption of the everyday and the domestic, such as displacement, a more volatile and symbolic notion of home emerges. In these contexts, women are usually the ones who reconfigure domestic spaces, places and identities, and have fewer opportunities to return to a mobile life. Waiting for a house, caring for a house or rebuilding a house also reframes motherhood and femininity within an altered home-house-place nexus.

This paper proposes a critical reflection on how, under conditions of both material and perceived immobility, ways of being a mother and a woman function as social infrastructure to reshape life trajectories. The cases presented are drawn from six months of ethnographic fieldwork in post-flood central Mozambique, where I immersed myself in the lives of women undergoing processes of re-ruralisation, moving from an urban life to a non-cash, rural economic and social environment within a highly structured and politicised resettlement site. The notion of social infrastructure is conceived here as a floating and immaterial enabling condition for changing identities under imposed inertia, in contrast to the highly structured materiality of the resettlement camps provided by the state, in order to build social ties and trust and to direct life trajectories.