De las posibilidades maternas: maternidad institucionalizada en tiempo muerto y leche de Margarita García Robayo

Abstract

The following paper seeks to highlight motherhood as an institutionalized practice, traversed by a series of regulations and controls organized and reproduced by society. For this purpose, a hermeneutic literary analysis will be carried out using as corpus the short story Leche, from the book of short stories Primera Persona (2018) and the novel Tiempo Muerto (2017), written by the author Margarita García Robayo, born in Cartagena, Colombia. The process will be guided by three analytical categories that emerged from the reading of the works under the light of the collected theory, these are: expectations, as those behaviors and acts nominated as "natural", expected from women for being mothers; the gaze of the other, in which the censorship and rejection experienced when mothers do not comply with the rules is revealed; and feelings, as a sample of the inner world of mothers as central characters of the stories addressed.