New female subjectivities: Professional women who do not want to be mothers

Abstract

This article constitutes a first research advance on the relationship between professional work and non-motherhood as a life project in professional women workers in the city of Rosario, Argentina. One of the relevant aspects of this research revolves around the way in which these new feminine subjectivities are constituted, transgressing the places that the capitalist and patriarchal system had reserved for them. The complexity and transversality that characterizes gender studies required a dialogue with various social disciplines, among them, Psychology. In this sense, we outline here some theoretical considerations from the field of Psychology and Gender which, in relation to the first empirical information, contribute to the understanding of the problematic of study. In the first place, the ways in which the gender subjectivities of the professional women studied are constituted will be investigated, distancing them from other more traditional logics of subjectivation, fundamentally with regard to the place occupied by professional work and its relation to non-motherhood. Secondly, it proposes an approach to the possible meanings of the non-desire to be a mother in a society symbolically ordered on the basis of the myth of motherhood.