Education, health and ways of inscribing a kind of motherhood in feminine bodies

Abstract

This paper discusses mother's representation and identities that have been produced and circulate in tiealth education programs addressed to mother-child population. The methodological approach used is cultural analysis, whose theoretical basis is informed by feminist studies and cultural studies, from a post-structuralist perspective. This approach allows to understand health programs as pedagogical instances that produce, re-signify, and circulate certain ways of knowledge, how to live, and also as to value motherhood incontemporary times. The paper also examines ways by which the "pedagogy" engendered by a net of discourses and powers that institute these programs acts. These programs re-signify the mother-child relationship to inseribe the mother's body in a powerful regime of surveillance and regulation. Such strategy of power embodies in motherhood's exercise attributes related to a vast array of problems that globalized societies produce but doesn't know how to solve. The paper also proposes that contemporary times are engendering a new politicization of motherhood, in which health programs have important implications.