Academic Working Mothers: Opacities, Privileges and Resistance in a Pandemic

Abstract

In order to combat the pandemic, the Chilean government has proposed interventions based on health and safety. This process has been justified by a series of discourses around control and social discipline, which appeal to self-care, family prevention and individual responsibility. We use four Life Narratives of academic mothers in order to illustrate four critical, interpretative repertoires related to State and social discourses on the pandemic: (a) a problematization of the reproduction of neoconservative positions on caregiving and the traditional family during the pandemic; (b) how the discursive emphasis on health, made invisible other problems that were common to academic working mothers and at the same time privileged their daily experience through the health exposure of other bodies; (c) how academic mothers have criticized and contradicted academic discourses on job flexibility during the pandemic and academia´s continuing demands to maintain neoliberal productivity standards and (d) a possibility of creating collective resistance.