This thesis analyses the construction of the maternal experience among women in an urban working-class milieu in Northeast Brazil. In Brazil, a society marked by strong social asymmetries yet also democratic processes, the experience of maternity in working-class milieus is increasingly organized via public health apparatuses. The health objectives of the Brazilian state are in effect a summons and solicitation for women to perform a sanitized maternal role. Not only is the public health system expanding, it is changing its modes of regulation, producing changes in familial relations and the parent-child relationship. This extension leads both to a reconfiguration of the relationship to power and the modes of the subjectification of experience. For the analysis of data issuing from ethnographic work, it is necessary to reconstitute the diverse social logics at work when a working-class woman in Recife is or is becoming a “mother”. By following the temporality of the experience of maternity, reduced here to the moments of pregnancy, birth and post-birth, this study highlights the different arrangements between women and health apparatuses.The goal of this study is two-fold: To describe the changes in familial relations in a Brazilian working-class milieu within the context of the extension of regulations; and to propose a new interpretation of these changes by linking notions about experience with these apparatuses.
Maternity in working-class Recife : issues and arrangements between regulatory apparatuses and social experience