Differentiations and articulations between feminine bodies and pregnant bodies in (the magazine) <i>Pais & Filhos</i>

Abstract

This article is part of a research based on the fields of Gender and Cultural Studies that approximate to post-structuralist theories, especially those of Michel Foucault. The research problematized some of the ways in which different discourses, from medicine to physical education, have invested on the woman body to educate it as a pregnant body. We have examined issues of Pais & Filhos magazine, from 1968 to 2004, using methodological strategies of discourse analysis. From
the resulting analyses, we have focused on a movement that allows for visualizing the emergence of a logic according to which education of pregnant bodies has intensified to produce different positions of subject: an affective, caring mother (one who takes care both of herself and of her child); a sheltering and protective mother. We have argued that this educative process may be understood as an important dimension of a more comprehensive contemporary process that we have defined as “politicization of the feminine and the motherhood”.