Negotiating mothering identities: ethnographic and intergenerational insights to gender and social class in a high-poverty US context

Abstract

This manuscript draws from a 4-year feminist ethnographic study of eight young girls and their caretakers in a high-poverty, predominantly White, urban community in the USA. Themes of mothers, mothering, and motherhood were dominant across 4 years of data generation and in this article I focus on the girls' and mothers' narratives to explore implications of such themes on the participants' intergenerational identity construction. Bakhtin's concept of answerability is employed in the analyses of the girls' relationships with their mothers and sociocultural theories of identity construction through narrative are used in close-up analyses of participants' discourse and writing. Implications for educators and educational researchers include tending to intergenerational ethnographic understandings of gendered and classed nuances in young children's relational practices and working to engage the strengths of those practices rather than against them.

Keywords:

• social theory
• cultural studies
• femininities
• social class
• childhood
• girls
• motherhood
• ethnography