Subaltern Maternities

To be or not to be a mother in decolonial epistemologies and black feminism

Abstract

The debate about the social and cultural construction of motherhood, its dimension of controlling the bodies and the reproduction of women, is a very consolidated ground in Western feminist theory. Not only History, but Philosophy, Social Sciences, Psychology, among other fields, have dedicated many pages to reflections on gender conditioning present in the myth of an innate and unconditional maternal love. However, just as it is not possible to conceive of a universal way of being a woman, it is necessary to understand that there is not a single way of being a mother, but plural forms of maternity, some of them subordinated and / or marginalized by the colonizing process. In this sense, the contributions of black and decolonial feminisms are fundamental to break the existing limits in a Eurocentric, white and bourgeois / liberal feminist perspective that, for a long time, remained unaware of the diversity of women's issues or even colluded with a process of domination- exploitation-oppression over their lives. Such studies thus allow to “decolonize” the view of motherhood and gender relations, for the consolidation of a feminist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist and anti-colonial epistemology. So, this is the main contribution of this article, which, through a theoretical-bibliographic analysis of practical orientation, interrogates subaltern motherhoods as a key to reading the experience of non-white women in post-colonial contexts.