Performing the ‘Maternal’Body: Unearthing Desire and Sexuality in the Folksongs of the New Mother

Gender has been an important tool of research and inquiry conflating folk studies and women’s studies. Construction of identity is inextricably linked to the process of gendered construction of self—a social and cultural process, which facilitates and sustains the hegemonic patriarchal structures and discursive practices. As Maggie Humm contends “patriarchal power is ubiquitous. There is deeply entrenched politics of sexuality, beginning with the reproduction of patriarchy, through psycho-social conditioning in the family, which operates in all economic and cultural structures” (Humm 11). Within the gendered categorisations of the female self, the maternal body becomes the locus of ritualised abstractions and construction of values that enable the “becoming” of the woman, in Beauvoir’s1 terms, shaping certain dominant assumptions around the mother as a fertile, nurturing, self-sacrificing body.