Entweder – oder? Mutterschaft zwischen Fundamentalismen und vielschichtigen Praxen

Abstract

In Germany, motherhood is “fundamentally” discursive: the model of the “good” mother – as well as her darker side – is morally and politically overloaded. No longer are only the children’s wellbeing and woes dependant on her, but the entire nation seems to be dependant on the performance of specific norms of motherhood. However, in the daily practice of motherhood, these phantasmagoric images fall apart – the daily life of family and the mother is more affected by variegated, absolutely stubborn, and unequally differentiated configurations as well as the appropriate “identities” of mothers. In our contributions, we sketch this situation foremost as the result of processes of reflection that are very much due to the second wave women’s movement, but also to the differing traditions in the GDR and the BRD. Moreover, the current “economic restructuring of the social” is an important basic condition of today’s discourse surrounding motherhood. The contribution also sketches aspects of family and the social-political regulation of motherhood. On the one hand, we diagnose a diversification of images of motherhood, images that, on the other hand, are highly contradictory. Individually, mothers recognize these conflicts – for example, between the “good mother” that completely loses herself in her constant availability to her children, and the “good mother” that, because of her career, sees her children as human capital. We show this by pinpointing exemplary pressure points. The contribution closes with a demand for the societal reevaluation of care-based relationships and thus with a critique of the fetishization of autonomy.