BETWEEN THE MOTHER AND THE NANNY:

Marks of racial and gender relations in care work in Early Childhood Education

Abstract

Care relationships are part of the curriculum in Early Childhood Education, are foreseen in legal documents, and also occur in everyday actions within this context. Caring for babies and young children reenacts, in different ways, attitudes considered feminine and, primarily, maternal, but also involves functions historically assigned to enslaved Black bodies, who were held responsible for taking care of children. This article draws on material collected in the doctoral thesis “Curriculum and Motherhood: Race, Gender, and Care in Early Childhood Education” to produce a theoretical composition using Black feminism, Collins' (2022) concept of images of control, in dialogue with the representations of Black women narrated by Lélia Gonzalez (2019), and discussions on motherhood with the following purposes: a) to problematize how gender and racial relations are intertwined in the subjectivation processes of teachers in this field, producing them as women who are desirably mothers and/or nannies, depending on the color of their skin; b) to argue that the act of caring itself is constructed as a subaltern action due to its characteristics and the professionals responsible for carrying it out.