Paper Short Abstract:

Networked Matrescence highlights mothers’ embeddedness in biomedical & mobile internet assemblages, networks that help doula them (or not) through the complex transitions to motherhood, shaping practices & subjectivity, infrastructures & relationships, through pregnancy, birth, early parenthood.

Paper Abstract:

Anthropologist Dana Raphael described Doulas, those who most frequently interact with the new mother during the sensitive time of Matrescence, or “mother-becoming”, as “the most influential and supportive in assisting her to accept and acquire her new identity” (68). Since the arrival of mobile internet in December 2018, semi-private WhatsApp groups have become fundamental to experiences of matrescence in the social and physical isolation of early motherhood in Cuba. Introducing the concept of “Networked Matrescence”, I describe how online networking practices shape contemporary matrescence, allowing the “dis-embodied” and deterritorialized formation of emergent identities of Cuban motherhood and the creation of alternative care infrastructures to support breastfeeding, a form of collective digital doula-ing through postpartum life. Through collaborative ethnography, I describe young women’s networked health activism in Cuba, a novel response to their/our everyday experiences as mothers and patients in a post-colonial socialist state constrained and exhausted by the continued pressures of US imperialism on national sovereignty. Online communities created and maintained by Cuban mothers are key sites for understanding the negotiation of mutual expectations of care and surveillance, and constructions of risk by mothers and a public health system politically invested in the (re)production of spectacular global health metrics. This ethnography of Cuban Networked Matrescence shows how digital ethnography illuminates the intimate global networks of relations that sustain – and challenge – women’s health and everyday social reproduction of households, nations, and expansive social justice projects like the Cuban Revolution.