THE MOTHER'S BODY AND THE CULTURE OF MATERNITY

THE MOTHER'S BODY AND THE CULTURE OF MATERNITY. Beginning with the assumption that maternity is a historically and culturally constructed concept, this article attempts to examine changes in maternity between the 1800s and the 1900s, in the context of the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic of today. This is a situation in which a radical displacement is evident: from a vision of the world based on the Muslim religion and on the mental structures of a unviersal empire, to a vision that is, by contrast, modern, secular, and nationalist. In such an environment, the modalities of the social construction of power undergo transformations, politicizing private lives, or rather families, gender, and parental roles, to the point of causing important changes in traditional patriarchal structures. Maternity is modified by being perceived as a purely private function, aimed at guaranteeing the continuity of paternal descent, to the point of becoming a social function geared toward generating and shaping the future citizens of a national State.