Being a mother now or later? Exchanges on gender and rural youth based on ethnographies in northwestern Patagonia and northern Entre Ríos (Argentina).

Abstract

We present an exchange that proposes points of agreement and disagreement based on common questions about two research papers that address the issue of gender in youth trajectories and formative experiences in different rural contexts. These investigations, developed in northwestern Patagonia and the north of the province of Entre Ríos in Argentina, take contributions from cultural studies, rural studies and gender, from an ethnographic approach. In the article we focus on the analysis of the hegemonic discourses on pregnancy and maternity in young women and rural students, considering how the hegemonic discourse of secondary schools, health institutions and families of young people is intertwined in the territories.

We point out that the view focused on the prevention of "adolescent pregnancy" as a problem that is sought to be avoided among young people coexists with institutional support for women who are actually pregnant, although with particularities and tensions in each territory. Young mothers do not necessarily stop being students or being considered young, being even named and differentiated as young by the adult generations within the family space when parenting is shared with the grandparents. Likewise, although we find differences between the different territories and their institutions regarding the importance of postponing or not pregnancy to enable other projects, between the meeting points of both investigations we point out that motherhood is constituted as a mandate of femininity.