Resumen

PINTO, Viviana. Mothers and Children in the ‘90´s: Social Representations of Motherhood in Para Ti Magazine. Opcion [online]. 2007, vol.23, n.53, pp.22-37. ISSN 1012-1587.

Gender studies award language, and consequently, discourse analysis, an important position because through them we build representations of events, societies and even our own character, shaping ourselves as subjects and helping us establish our own identities (Caldas Coulthard and Rojo, 1997). The field of study composed of sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics and critical discourse analysis, coupled with feminist studies, pays special attention to the analysis of discourse in women’s magazines because they are social circulation agents presenting representations of women. In the ‘90s, the Argentinean women’s magazine Para Ti published biographical accounts portraying supposedly real women, in which motherhood appeared to be associated with self-fulfillment, and it built a discourse around these stories that promoted attitudes and positioning. The aim of this study is to describe the different modes of representing maternity in these personal accounts and to reflect on the imagined social situations they create and disseminate through the magazine, based on the concept that identity is a construction of a social nature (Castoriadis, 2001) and that our society organizes the universe of meanings about womanhood around the Woman=Mother equation (Fernández, 1994).

Palabras clave : Imaginary meanings; hegemonic model; counter hegemony; desire for subjectivity.