Pragmatics and nominalists women: heterogeneous sensibilities facing childrearing and childbirth s workshops in an agrocity in the province of Buenos Aires

KUNIN, JOHANA

Kent (postpuesto por covid19. fecha original 9/2020)

Congreso; Cultural Politics of Reproduction in Latin America; 2021

University of Kent

We conducted ethnographic field work and analyze participant and non-participant women s convergent and divergent meanings and practices towards workshops in childrearing and respectful maternity care during childbirth funded by a local city hall and that took place in the peripheries of an agrocity in the province of Buenos Aires. Those peripheries are inhabited by poor migrants or by their descendants that migrated from nearby fields due to the workers? demand decrease related to OGM-soy-monoculture. Culture plays an important role in shapping the politics of reproduction. Two local doulas -trained in Argentine metropolis- tried to recrute participants to the workshop they organized with the city hall. We use the term nominalists to refer to expecting mothers or those who have recently given birth that attend the workshops, spaces where certain childrearing processes are named. While these practices do exist among non-participants, they are not theorized. From this perspective, it is asserted that women must become one with their babies in order to later search for spaces of autonomy. On the other hand, intergenerational "cohabitation" situations in the reduced spaces of the urban periphery facilitate the transmission of knowledge among the women that we identify as pragmatics: women who do not attend the workshops and raise their children collectively. The child is not conceived by them as only belonging to his or her mother. Pragmatists do not pay special attention to the processes of childbirth and childrearing, which are conceived as being natural. Both nominalists, pragmatists and the doula-teachers have their own cultural representations of pain and risk and all act and react according to their own agency.