2014, Number 2
Gender equity and pregnancy
de Dios-Vallejo DS
Full text
Language: Spanish
References: 5
Page: 71-78
PDF size: 222.84 Kb.
ABSTRACT
In order to approach the difference between “equality” and “equity”, it is necessary to review the history of the values and principles of feminism. Historically, the first was the emergence as women, before any other modern value. The first feminists did not assume equality. They questioned about their being and existence. Gender as a sexuality-founded category and, at the same time, normative of sexuality, is part of the structural social organization and has the quality of being present and merging with other social categories such as class, age, race, ethnicity, and other social conditions. Such categories correspond with the attributes that differentiate and resemble some people from others, and can be rigid, permanent, life-lasting or transitory. Our sexuality is not an open one but one specialized in maternity and erotism for the pleasure of the others. As sexual specialists, women are expected to provide sexual pleasure to men and be the mothers of men’s children. Women’s work is subordinated to this scheme. In private and public spaces, it is a duty to take care and support the development of others, of the family and community. The trace of the body, assimilated as biology, as nature, embodies maternity for several reasons: • Some of the maternal processes occur to women in their body and implicate –as in gestation, delivery and lactation– the biological, social and psychological metamorphosis, in act, of the woman. From here comes the symbolic conclusion that woman produces life. • The ideology of maternity has parenting as a fundamental principle. • Female sexuality is, socially and culturally, a function of maternity. • As a historic category, maternity does not refer only to biological or social facts, it also has to do with specific cultural facts and processes.REFERENCES