Mothering and Teaching: The Construction of the Teacher-Mother in the Discourse on Teaching in Brazil

Abstract

The discursive network about women’s aptitude for caring and teaching has historically consolidated the idea of ​​a natural inclination of women to educate children and young people. Such discourses, associated with the phenomenon of urbanization, acted in the process of “feminizing the teaching profession” in Brazil, especially from the 19th century onwards, when the entry of women into the job market became an imperative. In this context, teaching emerged as a way of justifying women's transition from the domestic to the professional sphere, without it being necessary to remove them from their primary destiny: mothering and educating. In the meantime, the aim of the article is to map the discursive functioning responsible for the constitution of the teacher-mother subject in discourses about teaching in Brazil. To do so, we will mobilize an enunciative network that spans the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, in whose materialities we will analyze the way in which relations of knowledge and power first produced the woman-mother and the way in which this woman-mother then offered conditions of possibility for the teacher-mother: a born, maternal and loving educator. The theoretical and methodological basis of the research is anchored in Foucauldian Discursive Studies.