Abstracts Anthropology

Toda la responsabilidad. Narrativas (contra)hegemónicas y resistencias desde las maternidades solas* por elección: un análisis etnográfico

by Rosa María Frasquet Aira

Families headed by women who decide and plan maternity alone –outside the normative two-parent, heterosexual conjugal scheme– are an emerging social reality. In order to clearly differentiate them from those who did not seek to be single mothers, but found themselves with this circumstance, the scientific community named them Single Mothers by Choice (SMBC). The present research is an ethnographic approach to the legitimization strategies and narratives deployed from deployed from these solo* motherhoods by choice, from a feminist and intersectional perspective. It pays attention to the ways in which, in the process of becoming MSPE, they dialogue and strategically position themselves in relation with discourses of modernity that intersect them –such as individualization or feminism –, and transforming their identities, negotiate with choice and autonomy narratives. In this process of normalization of their non-conventional motherhood, they develop (counter)hegemonic narratives with which they distance themselves from stigmatizing notions that traditionally have been mobilized in order to sanction women’s manifestations of sexual and reproductive autonomy, like the “irresponsibility” socially attributed to single mothers. The present work analyzes the complexities, tensions and paradoxes arising from the redefinition of motherhood as an autonomous project in relation of coupledom, and the new rationalities emerging in this disassociation process. Emerging rationalities that aim to reveal new balances in gender relations on the one hand, but also reassure the concentration of social responsibility for childbearing and family in the mother figure, on the other. This research pays special attention to the strategies and discourses of those SMBC that resorted to Assisted Reproductive Technologies, since it’s they who most tend to group in order collectively construct narrative resources that will enable them to legitimate their family form and decisions, investigating how they deal with the anonymity required in gamete donations, and about the strategic uses they draw upon.