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.

Keywords:
Covid-19; Chile; Pandemic; Women academics; Motherhood

Resumen

Ante la pandemia, el gobierno chileno implementó medidas de intervención que fueron eminentemente de carácter sanitario. Este proceso tuvo como sustento una serie de discursos de control y disciplinamiento social que apelaban al autocuidado, la prevención familiar y la auto-responsabilización. A través de la construcción de cuatro Narrativas de Vida de madres académicas, se presentan cuatro repertorios interpretativos críticos respecto de aquello: (a) una mirada cuestionadora a la reproducción de posturas neoconservadoras sobre cuidados y familia tradicional en pandemia; (b) cómo el énfasis discursivo en lo sanitario, invisibilizó otras problemáticas que cruzaron madres trabajadoras académicas y a la vez privilegió su vivencia cotidiana a través de la exposición sanitaria de otros cuerpos;(c) crítica a la contradicción de discursos en lo académico respecto a la flexibilización laboral frente a la pandemia y el exhorto a la mantención de estándares de productividad liberal y (d) una posibilidad de tejer resistencias colectivas.

Palabras clave:
Covid-19; Chile; Pandemia; Mujeres académicas; Maternidad

Resumo

Diante da pandemia, o governo chileno implementou medidas de intervenção de natureza eminentemente sanitária. Esse processo teve sustentação numa série de discursos de controle e disciplina social que apelavam ao autocuidado, à prevenção familiar e à autorresponsabilidade. Por meio da construção de quatro Narrativas de Vida de mães acadêmicas, apresentam-se quatro repertórios interpretativos críticos a respeito disso: (a) um olhar questionador sobre a reprodução de posições neoconservadoras sobre o cuidado e a família tradicional na pandemia; (b) como a ênfase discursiva na matéria sanitária invisibilizou outros problemas que as mães trabalhadoras acadêmicas enfrentavam, e ao mesmo tempo privilegiou sua vivência cotidiana por meio da exposição sanitária de outros corpos; (c) crítica à contradição dos discursos no acadêmico sobre a flexibilização laboral diante da pandemia e da exortação à manutenção dos padrões de produtividade liberal e (d) possibilidade de tecer resistência coletiva.

Palavras-chave:
Covid-19; Chile; Pandemia; mulheres acadêmicas; Maternidade

Background

With the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic and the lack of treatment experience in the world, the measures taken in some countries were serving as an example for the rest of the nations, in a trial-and-error game (FIC, 2020). Chile was not exempt from following this path and adopting the measures that were progressively assimilated in other countries, supported by the World Health Organization (WHO, 2020).

These measures include: (a) total or partial quarantines for territories, which implied the impossibility of movement of citizens and labor, economic, educational and recreational activities; (b) states of emergency that, in the case of Chile, involved reviving ghosts of the dictatorial past and the recent repression of the mobilizations of October 2019 by taking the military and forces of order to the streets and by establishing a nighttime curfew for almost the entire year 2020; (c) closure of borders, which implied complications for the migrant population who wished to return to their countries for a long time in a legal limbo, and also for the Chilean population residing in other countries; (d) closure of training centers and universities, which led to evidence of social inequality in education, in addition to the fact that the educational processes of children were added to reproductive work, especially affecting women and intensifying a triple day; (e) limitations to fundamental rights such as the right to assembly, demonstration and use of public space and (f) controls of movements between geographical areas of the country as a “health” deterrent but that in countries such as Chile accentuated the centralization of the problem leaving the regions without so much coverage.

In Chile, a health care plan sought to avoid a high rate of citizen deaths. However, it had specific effects, because being a neoliberal state, there is weak social protection, an economic format at the will of the market, which generates that an important sector lives on labor self-management, with few actions of co-responsibility and support for gender equality. Unlike other countries in the region such as Brazil, emergency policies in Chile had a health accent, which in part and tentatively tried to contain the expansion of the pandemic, in terms of health indicators and reduce the number of total deaths. However, this approach did not consider social measures in time in the face of the increase in unemployment and social precariousness and measures with gender perspectives, in the face of the increase in domestic violence and the burden of production, reproduction and care work.

Unlike Brazil and other Latin American countries, in Chile the political context of movement restrictions, curfews, and the militarization of health control cannot be overlooked, as there were similar measures taken between October and November 2019. In that instance, it was not for health reasons, but for reasons of “emergency” related to the Social Outbreak that shook all of Chile from October 18. Although technically the trigger for these protests was the rise in public transport, very quickly they became a condemnation of the neoliberal model, installed by the dictatorship and the post-dictatorship (Hiner, López, & Badilla, 2021). Therefore, the social controls of the government of Sebastián Piñera already taken in 2019 were also going to influence the substance and the way that sanitary measures took since 2020.

This intervention design from the WHO had the consequent sanitary emphasis, in countries with a long tradition of public health such as Chile, without considering the crossings of structural inequalities (Hill Collins & Bilge, 2016) that each country has, having differentiated and specific impacts by not considering a comprehensive action that contemplates these class inequities, gender, age, national origin, among others. To have legitimacy before the citizens, the various social agents began to reproduce discourses that made controls, normalization, and entrenchments of pre-existing inequalities, especially in the field at hand, which are the psychosocial effects on the bodies of women mothers. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to understand the effects of the social discourses that originated specific health measures, affecting the life and trajectory of academic women mothers in Chile.

This pandemic has caused an economic crisis in Chile, which has resulted in the at least partial suspension of multiple productive activities. However, not all productive sectors were affected in the same way. Unlike commerce, hotels and restaurants, scientific-academic activity did not stop (ECLAC, 2020). The immaterial activity that distinguishes many areas of academic work, in addition to the strong digital turn that scientific and teaching activity has experienced, has allowed it to continue its production despite the global context of crisis. The productivist and competitive academic scenario persists: thus, teaching, research, extension, and academic management should continue to function and sustain itself in a pandemic, affecting academic ones differently, exacerbating gender inequality in universities (Andersen, Nielsen, Simone, Lewiss, & Jagsi, 2020; Frederickson, 2020). Women scientists have decreased their production in greater proportion, compared to male academics (Flaherty, 2020).

Also, due to the closure of schools, strict social distancing guidelines and the intensification of domestic tasks, women assumed a greater centrality in care work (Minello, 2020), while continuing to telework.

Speeches on Covid-19 in Chile

The speeches in Chile pointed to a socio-sanitary regulation of the virus together with the containment of the economic crisis, in which dialogue and consensus with civil society has been a point of conflict. This is because it is installed on an already deteriorated relationship of the current government before the approach of the facts of the Social Outbreak in October 2019.

At the beginning of the pandemic, the perception of successfully facing the situation makes it clear that a lower assessment of the impact of the pandemic was projected. Then, the discourse changed when it reached the peak of the pandemic in May 2020, admitting “not being prepared” (Piñera, 2020). These arguments coexisted on the national and international stage, assuming perspectives that, rather than focusing on the preservation of life, seem to manage and regulate death (Nascimiento, Ciciliotti, Ruela, & Carvalho, 2020).

On the other hand, the economic discourse was another axis that guided the government rhetoric, cataloged as “the social pandemic”. President Sebastián Piñera, said at the time, “we must be aware that we face two of the worst pandemics that humanity has suffered in the last 100 years: the Coronavirus Health Pandemic, and the Social Pandemic of the Global Recession” (Piñera, 2020). Given this, aid packages and economic management strategies were belatedly presented, which failed to contain the impacts of the pandemic. Regarding responsibilities, these focused on the individual level and on restrictions on freedoms, rather than on a cultural change and the implementation of collective measures that would allow a real safeguard of overcrowding as a source of contagion. The discourses against Covid-19 were redefined as an endemic, no longer an epidemic (Canals, Canals, & Cuadrado, 2020) fulfilling two criteria: the permanence of the disease over time and the affectation of a defined population group (UC Observatory, 2020), which makes us project its presence, as part of our present and future reality.

Theoretical tools: discourses on maternity

Since the 80s, academic work in Chile has undergone structural transformations that respond to the so-called managerialization of academia (Slaughter & Leslie, 1997); transformations that take shape in a scenario of commodification, deregulation, and privatization of higher education. The academy is configured globally and nationally in an accelerated, demanding, and absorbing work space (Fardella, 2020). It is a paradox, where hyper-productive, competitive, and individualized professional performance is encouraged and at the same time promotes autonomy and the development of vocation (Anderson, 2008; Slaughter & Leslie, 1997).

Permanence in scientific work requires a commitment beyond the working day, and a willingness to take advantage of opportunities, which affects women within academia, since it has come into conflict with non-productive life and vital projects (Fardella, 2020; Berg & Seeber, 2016). The personal cost, such as the double day, the choice between a scientific career or starting a family, as well as the social pressure and responsibility for reconciling the demands of academia and family life make up the so-called work-life conflict at the university. Only very recently has attention been drawn to gender gaps within academia, such as sexual harassment or the scarce presence of women in positions of power (Robert, Pitzer, & Muñoz-García, 2018; Troncoso, Follegati, & Stutzin, 2019).

Women who have managed to join the academic world have done so without “an equal distribution of family work, the systems of male symbolic representation have hardly been altered” (Saracostti, 2006, p. 255). Women academics must meet the same standards of “academic weight”, that is, possess a doctoral degree, publication in journals with specific indexing on a par with men, who are not equally challenged to care tasks (Saracostti, 2006), continue the teaching task of pre and postgraduate adapting it online, together with the management and coordination of work teams. In the context of the pandemic, given the confinement, the closure of schools, the intensification of domestic work, the dismantling of care networks and their inability to outsource support services, the conflict between work and personal life worsened (Blithe & Elliott, 2019). Indeed, female publishing slowed down (Flaherty, 2020), the productive gap increased and the psychosocial cost of work-family conflict rose. This exposes women scientists to defection and exclusion, constituting a threat to the advances made in gender equality (Frederickson, 2020).

We must recognize that Latin America tends towards a fundamental problem when it comes to reconciling work and care for women. The disparity in terms of care has been well documented by feminist theorists such as Esteban (2004) and Izquierdo (2004). In Chile, women’s care and domestic work do not contradict the data, since only one in ten couples distribute household work equally (Comunidad Mujer, 2017). Thus, men tend to perform the most pleasurable tasks, and receive greater recognition, while women assume tasks seen as dirty, intimate, or emotionally exhausting. In hours, women assume between three and six hours a day in care, that is, 41 hours per week, unlike their counterparts who spend between thirty minutes and two hours a day (Barriga, Duran, Sáez, & Sato, 2020; INE, 2015).

Along with this gender inequality, there is social class inequality. For middle- or upper-class women, the solution for the double shift has historically been the hiring of “private house workers”. In Chile, like most of Latin America, domestic work is a poorly regulated and cheap situation (Goldsmith, 2008) and, in addition, racialized, since there is a preponderance of Afro-descendant women and indigenous peoples who do these jobs, working long hours for exceptionally low wages and with few formal labor protections. In countries like Chile, which receive significant migration flows, this type of work tends to be exercised also by migrant women, in addition, which also presents other problems since it is a sector that depends on their jobs to receive visas and stay in the country.

In the case of academic mothers, although we cannot generalize that all of them agree to the hiring of domestic workers, due to the precariousness of academic work and low salaries, many have responded to care work, through the outsourcing of such work (Martínez, 2012). However, due to prolonged quarantines and restrictions on mobility in Chile, this possibility of sporadic hiring in care - via nannies or hourly domestic workers - also vanished, beyond those women who had remarkably high resources and who could afford domestic workers “indoors”, that is, people who were going to live with them for the duration of the pandemic. Undoubtedly, the latter also caused extremely hard labor problems and violations for domestic workers. However, although there were undoubtedly some academic mothers who were able to afford services “indoors”, it was not the norm. It should be said that no academic mother of this study is in this social standard.

However, we must recognize the class privileges of academic mothers, who could continue to work from home, exposing themselves less to the possibilities of contagion of Covid-19, while other bodies - categorized as less desirable, abject, or even “disposable” (Butler, 1993) - had to continue to expose themselves publicly out of economic necessity. For example, there was a wide and diverse range of services that academic mothers paid for and that were operated around “delivery” services to the home, most populated by young men, many of them racialized and migrant. We approach this from two perspectives. On the one hand, from highlighting the “precarious life” and the ways in which our lives are intertwined as a fundamental part of any project of feminist coalitions (Butler, 2017). And, on the other hand, from the theory of biopolitics and necropolitics (Foucault, 1986; Mbembe, 2011). Here what is relevant is the State and how its discourses and practices order the bodies of citizens according to their desirability. This is relevant, since the bodies of those who worked in “home deliveries” tend to be racialized “other”, because they are migrants, poor and, in many cases, Afro-descendants.

On the other hand, in Chile, biopolitical studies show the multiple ways in which the State has constituted the differences of class, gender and race (Illanes, 2007; Rosemblatt, 2000). The dominant discourses have reinforced the association of parenting as something “natural” of women, establishing care as something proper to women and that obeys a certain feminine instinct (Badinter, 1981). This has also been reinforced through an emphasis on maternalism in public policy (Gordon, 1998, 2001).

Since the dictatorship in Chile, there has been a critical feminist perspective against religious conservatism and the reification of the hetero-patriarchal family in public policies, something that was not modified with the parties of the Concertation during the 90s (Franceschet, 2003; Hiner & Lopez, 2021; Richards, 2004). In addition, in recent years in Latin America, far-right movements and conservative evangelical churches have emerged strongly (Arguedas-Ramírez, 2018). Thus, during the last ten years, conservative social discourses have been accentuated regarding the role of women as “good mothers”, who must watch over “their children” and be the reproductive base of communities, emphasizing the importance of the “heterosexual family” as a central node of society (Stutzin & Troncoso, 2020).

We understand “motherhood” from its constrictions and social possibilities (Rich, 1986), considering the sociocultural practices that give meaning to a subject, “the mother” as an agent within particular social relations. Over time, the way of becoming “mother” has been naturalized. Any effort to critique the instinctive idea emerges as “deviant”, “sick” or “dangerous” (Palomar, 2005). From feminist positions (Ruddick, 1994; Umansky, 1996; Caporale-Bizzini, 2005) problematic axes of this notion have been revealed, opening to multiple social meanings. Feminist perspectives have allowed us to question the automatic identification between feminine and maternal, highlighting the cultural over-exaltation of the role, as well as the relegation to the private space (Rich, 1986), criticizing the homogenization of the possibilities of being women and the representations associated with motherhood (Lagarde, 2011; Sawicki, 1991).

Within intersectional feminism (Hill Collins, 2007; Lorde, 1984; Lykke, 2010) there is a critique of views associated with the privileges of white and bourgeois women, including motherhood. Some black feminists claim motherhood, precisely because it is so despised since the racist hetero-patriarchy, which labels black women as welfare queens, single mothers with multiple children of different absent fathers who “live off the state”, according to this racist negative stereotype (Davis, 2004).

Thus, we can conceptualize discourses on motherhood in diverse and situated ways, from highlighting discourses that reify “mother-wife” and maternalism in public policies, to rigid stereotyped discourses about the “must be” of “women” within hetero-patriarchal neoconservative schemes, and, finally, also coming to consider how discourses on motherhood can also be a source of resistance and love. that help formulate feminist, community, and intersectional best practices.

Methodological notes

We start from a socio-constructionist paradigm (Ibáñez, 2003) that understands that social processes do not emerge as abstract reality, but as possibilities co-constructed between diverse knowledge in use. Therefore, we place ourselves from a qualitative methodological paradigm (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005).

We follow the narrative-biographical approach as it favors self-critical reflection and shared knowledge (Suárez-Ortega, 2013; Valentine & Sadgrove, 2014). In this approach, the researcher urges a process of reflexivity on specific events; promoting that the narrator of their stories assumes control and meaning of these (Bunting & Lazenbatt, 2016). The biographical narrative creation allows to establish a joint analysis with the researcher, allowing an intersubjectivity in the creation of knowledge (Ruokonen-Engler & Siouti, 2016). The generation of life narratives (Prieto, 2012) of four academic women mothers who crossed various stages of the pandemic was promoted. This research was self-managed and was the result of the reflections of a group of academic mothers from different universities who face the initial silence of their study centers in relation to co-responsibility measures in the Covid-19 pandemic (See attached table).

Table 1
Characterization of academic research participants

Academic	Age	Civil Status	Children	Role and position	Type of University	Contract	Racial identification
Carol	39	Separate	1 of 3 years-old	Assistant Professor	Private	Indefinite Half Day	White
Joanna	45	Separate	1 of 6 years-old	Professor and researcher, coordinator of career research groups	Public	Full-time	mestizo
Loreto	43	As a couple	2 of 5 and 13 years-old	Associate Professor and Director of Academic Unit	Public	Annual, contract	mestizo
Rita	37	As a couple	2 of 2 and 5 years-old	Professor	Private	Indefinite Complete	mestizo

• Description: The main characteristics of the participants are detailed. The names indicated are fictitious. Own elaboration.

Each narrative considered between three to five meetings to generate a critical vision of the discourses related to Covid-19. In this process of narrative construction, the purpose, rather than interpreting an external fact, was to generate a diffraction of knowledge (Balasch & Montenegro, 2003), establishing critical readings of pandemic discourses and their effects on bodies.

From these narratives, a critical analysis of discourse with a feminist perspective (ACDF) was jointly developed, which implies paying attention to unequal power relations based on gender issues and at the same time a feminist view on them. Although discourse analysis does not necessarily start from a feminist perspective, it shares with feminist approaches the need to generate a critical vision of power, its forms, and effects. Following Azpiazu (2015) we proposed, together with the participants, a feminist analysis to identify the discursive constructs that established certain interpretative repertoires (Wetherell & Potter, 1992, 1996). These are understood as linguistic units that are consistent and repetitive in the discourses regarding the case studied, used by the speakers to give their own versions of events.

Interpretive repertoires of feminist academic mothers

In the narratives, as the first interpretative repertoire, an explicit critique of the conservative way in which a traditional and standardized notion of “family” is reproduced: heterosexual, composed of two parental figures, with children and living in the same space. However, the reality of most working mothers is far from this hetero-patriarchal construction of the nuclear family. In the cases you see what public policies in Chile call “heads of household” - that is, they are working and mothering without the equal work of a couple (for being separated or divorced, or for never having had). The following quote specifies the impact of the pandemic on the daily life of an academic mother without networks, contrasting with the family model that is transmitted discursively at the governmental level:

I have no family here and I am divorced [emphasis added]. My ex-husband has an “essential” job; therefore, he has not stopped working and this puts him at risk. For the same reason, he has not seen his daughter since the beginning of March [emphasis added]. He lives with his family. Before the pandemic, I had already assumed almost all of the care; my daughter’s father only had visitors once a week. She does not pay pension [emphasis added]. Anyway: since March 16 I am locked in an apartment with a little girl, without any additional help [emphasis added]. (Carol, a 3-year-old daughter, 2020)

The academic mothers emphasize that the normative discourses of the health and government authorities place the specific care work for the pandemic in the responsibility of mothers. The figure of the “caregiver mother” emerges as the one in charge par excellence of enforcing the necessary measures for proper care during this crisis; In addition to the surveillance of other bodies and their respective attentions, such as children and older adults. This is how it is installed in the following narrative:

The discourses of the political world are marked by an emphasis on physical health: for example, little or nothing was said about who must take care of children and the elderly in these periods of crisis. That remains invisible, only after many months, a minister stressed that the children must go out for a few hours. It seems that it was taken for granted that the ones who should oversee the care are the mothers. For many months there were no special permits, for example, so that separated parents could use them and move children from house to house. I sent a letter asking the women’s ministry and the children’s ombudsman, and both institutions responded that the “superior good of the child and her health mattered” and that “visits not made would accumulate.” There, implicitly, what the State responds to you is that the care corresponds to “the mother”, which is what is common, what is supposedly normal and good [emphasis added]. (Joanna, a 6-year-old son, 2020)

This narrative excerpt (2) highlights the emphasis that government measures gave to physical and non-mental health, and the invisibility of gender inequalities, such as co-responsibility in the care of children. Likewise, the work of care is once again placed exclusively in certain bodies, the feminine, regardless of whether they have other responsibilities such as work.

On the other hand, a second critical interpretative repertoire can be configured, regarding which bodies are potential for care in a neoliberal State, and which are exposed to continue the reproduction of the socioeconomic system, throwing other bodies into deconfinement and, therefore, into diseases and, even, death. This repertoire begins with a critique of mothers, the discursive emphasis on health. In the stories, the mothers criticize that the authorities only focus the emergency intervention in a pandemic in a health area, without considering the structural social inequalities of some territories that end up affecting the experiences of some groups in a denser and more specific way. In the case of Chile, this has to do with the deep socioeconomic and racial inequality that prevents part of the population from having the real option of confinement when their support is configured daily through services such as home cleaning, street trade, home deliveries, among others. The academic mothers point out a criticism of how it is emphasized from government spaces, the need to “stay at home” and “work from home”, when in a highly unequal country, it is a minority and privileged sector that can effectively follow these exhortations:

In government speeches that aim to “take care of us” and “stay at home” it is only possible for certain families. There are people who are exposed on the street and who do delivery services that allow me to be protected [emphasis added], and not be able to go out, and many of them are women… so the government’s discourses, on the one hand, invite society to take care of ourselves, but that option, only some of us can do, and, in addition, we can make it happen because unfortunately we use services that expose other bodies to the possibility of getting sick. That is a privilege. The government’s speeches present it as a general measure, when in practice we know that this is not the case. (Joanna, a 6-year-old son, 2020)

This extract from narrative (3) condenses how the government acts discursively and performatively on a social standard that is not the majority of the country. Care and self-seclusion at home to take care of the pandemic, only favors some social sectors, constituting as the quote points out, a privilege and not a right. Although mothers are in a critical personal situation, they can visualize the privilege they enjoy over other bodies.

The narratives elaborate a third interpretative repertoire, which raises the criticism of university management in the face of this pandemic crisis. In it, women mothers emphasize the contradictions that they have to cross before institutional discourses both in support of the triple day they carry out as mothers, workers and academics; but at the same time others who urge them to stay connected, “reinvent” themselves in an online way close to students in virtual classes, and to maintain the standards of academic productivity (development of articles, academic management, organization and containment of the crisis in their work teams and social transfer). The mothers expose in their narratives, the tensions they experience in the face of these multiple demands and how university action in crisis continues to persist in liberal patterns:

As a manager, I have received two instructions issued at the central level on human resource management, the first extremely focused on self-care and with a gender perspective that positively caught my attention, however, the second, already marked by performance, aimed at re-planning the year’s productivity tasks, honestly, I did not see how I could ask to re-plan this, if they are barely keeping up with what cannot be postponed, which is teaching. I have not asked for it yet, I do not see any point in it, I know that the teachers are giving everything they can. (Loreto, two children aged 13 and 5, 2020)

In citation (4) one can densely visualize the discursive contradiction posed by the university between sending instructions with gender perspectives and according to the current situation with the demand to return to productivity standards. In this way, institutional discourses emerge as a double link, pointing out that there is understanding in the face of the complications involved in assuming a triple day, but, at the same time, not modifying the standards of measurement of productivity and work performance that typifies the neoliberal university in Chile.

In the quote (5) the academic emphasizes that in this crisis she feels in the middle of “a paradox”, between maintaining the productive rhythm to which she is exhorted from the institution and following the labor rhythm, adapting to the broad demands of teleworking and reproductive tasks, or slowing down and not entering the dynamics of academic liberal production in which universities insist despite the crisis, assuming that, the costs of it will be in your own personal trajectory. It is emphasized in her story, the criticism of how these discourses of demand from the academy are not in accordance with the changes that the pandemic has subordinated in the lives of women academic mothers, pointing them out as unreasonable, a “deranged demand”:

Faced with the discourses on work, and teleworking in particular, I see a tremendous paradox… There is a crazy demand to continue producing, adapting to these circumstances and, on the other hand, every day work becomes emptier of meaning for me. I do not see that the academic production that is asked of us connects us with a solution or a way out of the current system and the problems we are experiencing. Rather, it is the care and slowing down of life that at this minute brings me back to calm. But I have internalized that it is my responsibility “to produce at whatever cost”, because they make me see it in many ways from the university spheres [emphasis added] and, at the same time, I am certain that the consequences of not producing at pace that is required, I will have to bear them in terms of personal costs. (Rita, two children aged 2 and 5, 2020)

Finally, we can visualize a fourth repertoire that we have considered as collective resistances elaborated by these academic mothers regarding the updating of gender mandates in this pandemic that has been mediated by various public, political, and academic discourses. Given the dissemination of public exhortations to carry out an individual and family treatment of the pandemic, with constant calls for self-care, self-responsibility, and care of the intramural family nuclei of the homes, which has resulted, as we pointed out, in intensification of gender roles; These women have developed various strategies and tactics that break this individualistic logic to think about collective coping actions.

One strategy employed by some feminist academic mothers has been the collectivization of demands through networks such as working mothers and academic mothers. Through this organization, it is possible to name and denounce the “triple day” of academic mothers, as well as the negative impacts of the global pandemic on their careers, weaving, at the same time, feminist networks and coalitions of resistance. However, the power of this work as a whole faces the limits such as, for example, that male academics are not listening to them or considering the problems they cross, as stated below:

I co-coordinate a network of my discipline and there are many other disciplinary networks as well. In all these groups, since day one, there has been a lot of concern about teleworking and caregiving overload on the part of academic mothers. Exhortations and support have been made explicit. Notes and opinion columns are published, we are interviewed in the media, we organize talks and virtual forums. All of this energizes me, like we are all fighting the same thing, although sometimes it is like “OK, but are we always just female academics here?”; male academics never participate in these spaces [emphasis added]. (Carol, a 3-year-old daughter, 2020)

These demonstrations are not direct resistance to these dominant normalizing discourses, but they can be understood as “daily, tactical gestures” (De Certeau, 1996) that face the discipline and ordering that was intended through the Covid-19 measures and the invisibility of situations that were promoted with them. Through these practices, academic women mothers re-appropriated the instituted space, being able to break the call for family seclusion, to generate collective contexts of support. In the following excerpt (7) the mother relates how, taking advantage of recent technologies, they have been able together with other academic mothers to articulate and overcome certain limitations of this period. Not only to contain themselves before the triple day they must cross - which is invisible in government speeches - but also to raise a criticism of these governmental and generalized practices in pandemic, in addition to being able to collaboratively face the demands of the academy, without lagging in their respective professional careers:

We have created a collective agency among several people who are aware of this intentional invisibility of the triple shift that the government does by not naming it. We organized a WhatsApp chat, taking advantage of technology, to be able not only to let off steam in the face of the difficulties of this pandemic, but also as a space for criticism of these government practices, to share ways in which we can circumvent these pressures and make academic articulation that allows us to time, not to be left behind in our respective careers within the universities. It is a small example so as not to assume this invisibility as something given, but it allows us to take a turn and enable alliances between some academic women who have little time to get along in our professional and personal lives. (Joanna, 6-year-old son, 2020)

Conclusive closure

The conjunction of both the transnational strategies that Chile followed by the recommendations of the WHO, the policies to come from a dictatorial past and from the repression during the Outbreak during 2019, and the patriarchal and neoliberal policies that already existed within the academy, place some academic mothers in a particular state of vulnerability. The concept of “family” and “woman” has crystallized with the policies of the political right and neo-conservatism in Chile, and this is not only seen at the social level but also in the policies that the State established in the face of the pandemic.

We can also observe a certain hierarchy and categorization of bodies in a pandemic: that is, the State encouraged that some bodies were cared for, and other bodies were not, those that should continue working in person and/or caring for the former. The mothers provide a critical view of this policy and how the fact that a group of essential workers kept working in person highlighted Chile’s structural inequalities, particularly in class, race, and ethnicity. They recognize in this, a certain privilege since some of them were able to sustain their work and family care on the basis that they were able to resort to these workers most exposed to the disease.

Academic mothers point out to us through their narratives the breaks of discourses, their contradictions, and gendered reproductions, as is the case of academic discourse that moves between flexibility and demand. It is clear the crossing of the patriarchal academy and the turn towards a more neoliberal university in Chile, which causes a double oppression in academic mothers: by the gendered roles that are associated and the demand for permanent productivity.

Finally, as feminist academic mothers, it is also interesting how their discourses are elaborated not only from critical but also purposeful places. Occupying intersectional frameworks of analysis, they can spin fine terms of their oppression as academic women and mothers, but also their privileges, being women of greater economic possibilities and not marked as “other” in ethnic-racial terms. They remind us that motherhood and care can lead not only to sharp criticism, but also to deep resistance and coalitions. Let us recall the words of Lorde (1984), in that sense, when she reminds us that “maternal affection” can be a radically feminist way of loving and caring for each other, more crucial than ever during these pandemic times. Finally, it should be emphasized that this work is exploratory since it was born under the context of the pandemic as a space to contain and accompany. But also, as a strategy to survive the pandemic academically, crossed by weaving feminist networks of support translated into sisterhood. (Enciso, González-Yáñez, & Chiappini, 2021). In fact, at the time of publication of this project the group is still active and relationships are still woven. This opens the window to a future analysis of an academic nature, but putting at the center the care of the participants as a priority. We consider that it is too early to make a “post-pandemic” reading, the truth is that critical analyses must continue, to dismantle the patriarchal and neoliberal academy that we are inhabiting.

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• Financing

  Núcleo Diversidad y Género: Abordajes feministas interseccionales of the University of Chile and Fondecyt Regular El trabajo científico en Chile, Nr. 1180129

• Errata

  In the article “ACADEMIC WORKING MOTHERS: OPACITIES, PRIVILEGES AND RESISTANCE IN A PANDEMIC”, published in the journal Psicologia & Sociedade, volume 34 (https://doi.org/10.1590/1807-0310/2022v34252086), on pages 1 and 16, the name of one of the authors is incorrect:
  For:
  Hillary Hines;
  read:
  Hillary Hiner

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  09 Dec 2022
• Date of issue
  2022

History

• Received
  17 May 2021
• Reviewed
  08 Sept 2022
• Accepted
  08 Sept 2022