Browsing by Author "Murray, Marjorie"

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    Childbirth in Santiago de Chile: Stratification, Intervention, and Child Centeredness
    (WILEY, 2012) Murray, Marjorie
    On the basis of ethnographic work with women from different economic and educational backgrounds in Santiago, I describe the experiences of labor and birth from the point of view of women's priorities, socioeconomic constraints, and relationships with the medical system. I specifically focus on their desires expressed during the late prenatal period and their narratives of the actual birth. Class and the differences in opportunities resulting from educational and class inequalities melt down into near invisibility as vulnerability rises and women become increasingly subjected to medical decision making. The long-standing Chilean focus on child centeredness, while shown to benefit bonding, can work to obliterate women's own desires and choices by encouraging them to "sacrifice their all" for the sake of the baby. This kind of sacrifice defines the meaning of the maternal body in Chile. I suggest further analysis of these factors is essential for an understanding of the hypermedicalized Chilean context.
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    More than mothers: changing intimacies and relationships among low-income women in Chile
    (2024) Murray, Marjorie; Tizzoni, Constanza; Herraz, Pablo; Tapia, Daniela; Valdivieso, Sofia
    In Chile, low-income women who are mothers are confronted daily with a normative ideal that exacerbates them as caregivers, together with public demands and social policies that value their hyper-rationality and hyper-austerity in the management of their families. This emphasis on their reproductive roles obliterates their emerging sense of intimacy and significant relations. Based on three case studies, in this article, we reflect on urban low-income women's sense of and desire for intimacy that exceeds but does not exclude their maternal self. We present our findings based on three heuristic aspects of intimacy: rooted strategies for a renovated desire for intimacy; the desire to enjoy; and life outside the house and the desire for meaningful relations. We observe that these women's efforts in their search for intimacy require them to orchestrate various strategies involving time and space management, money and relationships while resisting the normative pressures that place them mainly as caregivers.
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    Navigating Silences: The Everyday Relationship Between Chilean Mothers and the State
    (2024) Murray, Marjorie; Tizzoni, Constanza
    In Chile, social policies are founded on the notion of women as primary caregivers burdened with the main responsibility for others. These policies conceptualise women as deficient, requiring their parenting to be monitored. Drawing from our ethnographic studies of specific instances of encounters with the state, this article examines how low-income mothers navigate, experience and are subjected to silence and silencing. Silences are at the basis of their relationship with a state that provides minimal, almost imperceptible care, compelling these women to manage their silence to obtain even the slightest assistance.
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    Parenting: Kinship, Expertise, and Anxiety
    (2015) Faircloth, Charlotte; Murray, Marjorie
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    Raising children in hostile worlds in Santiago de Chile: Optimism and 'hyper-agentic' mothers
    (2022) Murray, Marjorie; Tizzoni, Constanza
    Based on an ethnographic research on early mothering with a small and heterogeneous group of women living in different areas of Santiago, Chile - and a follow-up study six years later - in this article we look closely at how mothering takes place through a sense of optimism while living in a hostile world, contrasting our findings with similar research in northern countries. Rather than waiting for opportunities to present themselves, women's sense of optimism is based on their own difficult experiences of learning to cope in a hostile world, and how this requires organizing their children's education to face challenges beyond their immediate family circle. We claim the existence of hyper-agentic motherhood - one that articulates traditional maternalism, increasing societal demands on parenting and the specific take on individuation detached from institutions in neoliberal Chile. Mothering through optimism in a hostile world questions the possibility to import classed parenting models. We identify a resonance with Adrie Kusserow's description of hard individualism in which children are taught how to navigate the hostile world in the search for success, but with the difference that children in this context are brought up with the idea that mothers will be there for them in the long run, regardless of what actually takes place. This longitudinal study of parenting provides information on the usually silent processes of subjectification and emergent values that can be overlooked in times of social transformation.
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    Towards a critical social science. Interview with Didier Fassin
    (UNIV AUTONOMA CIUDAD MEXICO, 2017) Aedo, Angel; Murray, Marjorie; Bacchiddu, Giovanna