Education of the caring mother and the discourse of body and sports practices on the pages of Pais e Filhos magazine

Abstract

The present article is an integral part of a research inspired in the fields of Gender Studies and Cultural Studies that approximates to post-structuralist theorizations by Michel Foucault (1998; 1997). We discuss the emergence of a logic according to which both body education, in general, and women’s body, specifically, has been intensified since the eighteenth century. We have defined this wider contemporary educative process as “politicization of femininity and motherhood” (MEYER 2002; 2003; 2006), a process that, in its extension, includes the “politicization of the pregnant body” (SCHWENGBER, 2006). In order to conduct this discussion, we have examined issues of Pais & Filhos magazine published from 1968 to 2004, using methodological strategies of discourse analysis. From the analyses resulting from that investigation, we have spotted a movement that allows for the visualization of the emergence of a logic according to which education of pregnant bodies is intensified by means of body practices, thus building different subject positions: a sports mother (the one that takes care of herself and the others), a mother that shelters and protects, a caring and protective mother who is responsible for a perfect child.