Mothering in the Context of Poverty: Disciplining Peruvian Mothers through Children’s Rights
Metadata
Show full item recordAuthor/Creator
Date
2019-09-10Type of Work
13 pagesText
journal articles
Citation of Original Publication
Aufseeser, D. (2019). Mothering in the Context of Poverty: Disciplining Peruvian Mothers through Children’s Rights. Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, 3(1-2), 13. https://doi.org/10.20897/femenc/5919Rights
This item is likely protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. Unless on a Creative Commons license, for uses protected by Copyright Law, contact the copyright holder or the author.Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Abstract
This article explores discourses surrounding poverty and mothering in the context of Peru. It specifically
suggests that claims in the name of children’s rights provide a more morally acceptable way to discipline
economically disadvantaged mothers. Mothers are framed as ‘bad parents’ when their children fail to
experience so-called ‘global childhoods’, spent in school and the home, and not in paid work. However, in
Andean culture, children begin working alongside their parents at a young age as they learn to become active
members in society. Rather than recognising motherhood as socially constructed, internationally-funded
NGOs and government officials emphasise a need to teach mothers about the cultural dangers of work.
However, I suggest that in doing so, poverty is reframed as a cultural problem, of which mothers are to
blame. This overlooks significant economic inequality as well as different conceptions of motherhood and
childhood. The article examines how mothers negotiate competing demands in the context of discourses of
global childhood, and is based on field work conducted over 14 months in 2009 and 2010, with follow up
research in 2011 and 2014.
The following license files are associated with this item:
- Creative Commons