Pregnancy and Mothering as a Performance: The Cases of Mothers in Accra Ghana

Pregnancy and mothering are regulated by social norms, religion, family, medicine, media etc. In addition to local Ghanaian traditional norms pertaining to pregnancy, feminist scholarship has identified a number of global discourses that regulate pregnancy and mothering; namely the medicalization discourse, the responsibility discourse, the fitness and diet discourse and the consumerism discourse. Hinged on Goffman’s Dramaturgy, Foucault’s concepts of Discourse, Power and Resistance and Neoliberal Governmentality, this research will generally explore how both local and global discourses influence the performance of pregnancy and mothering both online and offline/ public spaces. The study will investigate the maternal experiences, patterns and practices of women before, during and after pregnancy and how different categories of women in terms of class, marital status, age etc. respond to both global and local discourses surrounding pregnancy and mothering. In addition, the study will explore why mothers respond the way they do and the consequences of their actions. Using in-depth interviews, the study will focus on women who had children during the last five years in Accra, Ghana.