The "loving mother"

An anthropology of the political economy of emotions

Abstract

This article focuses on the drawings of the figure of the affectionate mother in contemporary times. For this, we analyzed the narratives of two generations of women from the same family: that of mothers (1940-1950) and that of their daughters (1970-1980) after they became mothers. The in-depth conversations with women from different regions and social classes in Brazil, dealing with their experiences of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood, took place between 2020 and 2021. , it seemed interesting to invest in its description in order to point out its plurality and porosity. In this pursuit, when we see that the contours of the caring mother are offered by a range of discourses and practices that go far beyond the private world and a familist logic, we suggest that its production takes place through “a political economy of emotions”. This economy is allied to State projects and neoliberalism, which depend on the mother figure for their sustenance, albeit in ways disguised as amorousness and psychic income. It was found that the emotional grammars that inform the mother figure in the last four decades are crossed in Brazil by race/color; social class; gender and generation; thus giving plural ideas of anger and affection, as well as mothering, here taken as an action, as a verb, and not as an institution.