Letters to me or about me? Autoethnographic notes of an unsilenced puerperium

Abstract

After nearly a decade of researching births and maternity hospitals, I became a
mother. I remember that, during my PhD, I was questioned by the women I lived with about my sensitivity to their maternal experiences (Carneiro, 2015), as I had not yet lived through what they told me. I had no children and I had not given birth. A few years later, after the birth of my second child, I started to write and publish some reflections about life in the postpartum period, but now about my own experience, from a series entitled Letters from a puerperium. I wrote about myself, about childbirth, about the baby and, above all, about being protected, in a personal and confessional, but also anthropological tone, as my reflections dialogued all the time with the theory put or still in tessitura, as well as with the local culture about the maternal. My gaze fell on the puerperium and its interfaces with ideas of the body, sexuality, friendship, politics, domesticity, loneliness, fatigue and, more recently, a
pandemic. These Letters were published on a virtual social network and, therefore, sparked dialogue with other women. Starting from them, I intend to discuss how and how much they worked as a personal diary and field diary; as a space of drainage and self-reflection, all at the same time; but also as a place of intellectual production and socio-anthropological perspectives on contemporary motherhood. A look coming from the home and the domestic as a space that invents life.