“My Mom got Bitter”: Expectations of Maternity Performances Negotiated through Talk-in-Interaction

Abstract

The post-structuralist conception of identity, from an ethnomethodological perspective, brought deep changes to the way gender and language relations are established. Gender is thus taken as a social construction, which needs to be (re)negotiated in every and each new interaction and, since it does not exist outside discourse, it does not have a fixed and stable status. To understand how gender identities are interactionally negotiated , and here considering specifically the aspects related to maternity, I present the importance of Conversation Analysis, through the qualitative analysis of naturalistic interactions between a psychologist and candidates for vasectomy and tubal ligation, which occurred at a public health center in the south of Brazil. What is shown, through the analysis of three excerpts of interaction, is that small perturbations in the performances of maternity trouble the notion of a stable maternity, which gives us a practical idea of the concept of agency.