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This paper describes how Kukama Kukamiria women politicized their motherhood and care labor actions to question the inadequacy of State policies, putting ties and care between humans and non-human beings in the center of their practices for surviving the pandemic after several oil spills.

Paper long abstract:

Indigenous people and women were significantly affected by the Covid-19 pandemic in Amazon countries. The intercultural health policies arrived late without correspondence to specific needs and were vectors of contagion. In places where hydrocarbon concessions overlap with indigenous territories, the situation was even worst. Decades of oil pollution have deteriorated the environment and the health of indigenous communities. Despite this, indigenous people have organized themselves and taken measures to care for and protect themselves. This paper describes how Kukama Kukamiria women in the lower basin of the Marañón River in the Peruvian Amazon, especially in the Cuninico community, politicized their motherhood and care labor to question the inadequacy of State policies in toxic environments.

Women first organized themselves like “Kukama mothers” or “native mothers” in different organizations to survive the severe damage caused by an oil spill in 2014. Their organization corresponds to women's role of care for children and family members in their communities: feeding and healing are attributes for conviviality. During the pandemic, mothers cared for others based on previous experiences, the knowledge of the grandmothers, and the power of a non-human being, the “mother” of the plants that live in the Amazon forest. They also participate in national public spaces to share their family and community experiences and critics the policies of care and health, putting ties and caring between humans and non-human beings in the center of their actions and claims.

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Fatherhood, the neglected counterpart of motherhood, paradoxically functions as both a site of transformation and reinforcement of parental gendered norms. This paper illustrates how Dutch men negotiate, contest, and reaffirm past and future ideas and practices around motherhood and fatherhood.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I do not focus on motherhood but rather its neglected counterpart, fatherhood. For a long time, a strong motherhood ideology has dominated parenting in the Netherlands, meaning that women mostly stayed at home with their children whilst fathers were economically providing for their families. From the 1980s onwards, women slowly entered the labour market, but still today, mothers are typically expected to (at least partly) take care of their children (Knijn and Selten 2002; Du Bois-Reymond, 2009). While recent research has demonstrated that both parents consider gender equality an ideal and that fathers are spending more and more time with their children (Harthoorn 2019), in practice, the model of fathers working full-time and mothers working part-time prevails (Boterman 2020, 257).

Based on interviews with 65 fathers who have diverse backgrounds in terms of age, class, ethnicity, race, sexuality, level of employment, and family constellation, I investigate how they negotiate, contest, and reaffirm ideas and practices around the past and the future of motherhood and fatherhood in the Netherlands. On the one hand, a generational change is detectable as the research participants contrast their fathering with that of their own fathers. On the other hand, they express essentialist views on motherhood and fatherhood that are contrary to discourses that perceive to change the gendered underpinning of parenthood. Overall, I will show the paradoxical ways in which fatherhood functions simultaneously as a site of transformation and reinforcement of gendered parental norms.

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Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the paper examines how Singaporean middle-class mothers negotiate and reconcile educational desires for their young children. It shows how mothers' educational work is increasingly entwined with sentiments of uncertainty and guilt in relation to children’s future.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores intensive motherhood and educational desires in contemporary Singapore. Singapore’s education system is globally renowned for its high academic standards and for producing students who excel in international assessment tests and rankings. At the same time, there has been a shift of attention in education policy towards social-emotional competencies and well-being. While a top-notch education is still considered absolutely crucial to foster a competitive and competent population, childhood is supposed to be happy and stress free. In this context, parents, mothers in particular, are expected to perform task-oriented educational work, but also to cultivate their children’s desire to learn. While it is well established in previous research that the intensification of parenting is highly gendered, with mothers more involved in their children’s education and development than fathers, there is a lack of ethnographically grounded studies on the complex and contradictory demands surrounding motherhood, in Singapore and beyond. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper suggests that ‘mother work’ in the domain of education and learning is shaped by sentiments of uncertainty, fear and guilt in relation to children’s future. These sentiments, in turn, are entwined with and fuelled by a deep-rooted narrative of national survival, reproduced in the form of ‘twenty-first century skills.’ By highlighting the complex emotional and moral dimensions of mothers’ educational work and desires, the paper attempts to contest simplistic interpretations of ’Asian motherhood’ and ‘Asian parenting cultures’.

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We draw on ethnography in Ireland and Sweden. Dominant pandemic logics demand “good care” is synonymous with social distancing. We draw on interlocutor’s experiences with pandemic-era reproduction to argue that such logics are not in the best interest of mothers or children (born and unborn).

Paper long abstract:

Care is central to the COVID-19 pandemic. Spatial and physical separations are imposed in the name of care. Reproductive health care access is limited to distance patients and practitioners. Social distancing recommendations guide us to “stay-away” from those we care for most. Yet our ethnographic research on abortion in Ireland and reproduction in Sweden suggest that pandemic logics of care based on distancing and isolation are in tension with enactments of care associated with “mothering” (Branicki 2021; Ruddick 1980, 1989; Mol 2008). Limiting abortion access may mean a woman must raise a child she cannot care for. Distancing children may negatively impact their social development. In this paper, we problematize normative assumptions around care ethics and motherhood (Gilligan 1982) to explore how interlocutors navigate these tensions in their reproductive considerations, desires, and practices. We argue that to be “good mothers” our interlocutors enact care for their children (born and unborn) which subverts and opposes the dominant logics of pandemic care of government and public health mandates (Stevenson 2014). In doing so, they spark questions about the ethics of “good pandemic care” and the types of people, bodies, and experiences, pandemic restrictions “care for.” The dominant logics of “good pandemic care” are not universally equitable to “good care” in mothering. We engage with a broad understanding of mothering, which includes the decisions not to have children.

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Contemporary maternal literature from neoliberal societies engages in various ways in challenges faced by young mothers. Some of these works reveal promising potential for the empowerment of mothers in their ability to construct social networks based on ambivalence and vulnerability.

Paper long abstract:

Paradoxical discourses of women and the good mother in neoliberal societies lead to ambivalent

experiences of maternity in young mothers. Contemporary literary representations of the maternal

have shown a variety of ways of dealing with this maternal clash. Based on research into national

trends from German, Anglo-Saxon, Dutch and Swedish literature, this paper draws a cartography of

contemporary women’s writing on maternity in neoliberal societies and relates their trends in

maternal representations to neoliberal ideologies of parenting and the self. The corpus crosses

generic boundaries in its incorporation of novels as well as poetry and the relatively new genre of the

maternal memoir (the so-called momoir).

In a postcritical way I have examined how these maternal literatures can work as affirmative

technologies in constructing empowering maternal networks. The second part of the paper seeks to

find potential maternal empowerment through Johannes Völz’ (2019) reflections on literature’s

renewed engagements with neoliberal networked selves. Maternal novels tend to focus on

problematic motherhood, which categorizes them as literary examples of failed connections of

mothers to their social networks, resulting in a questionable resistance potential. Conversely, the

momoirs and maternal Dutch poetry engage with readers by importing social networks into the text.

Ambivalence and vulnerability serve as identification techniques through which these works create

material connections between reader and text. Regardless of their tendency toward essentialist

maternity, they transcend the political potential of the novels’ problematic maternity through their

construction of social networks in which vulnerability serves as a resistance to resilience.