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A Space of One's Own?: Catholicism within Single Mothers Discourses, Guadalajara, Mexico

Kathleen M. Murphy
University of Texas at Austin

Paper Abstract

This paper will analyze two kinds of discourse permeated by Roman Catholic influence in Guadalajara. Guadalajara, Mexico's second largest city, is known even by this predominantly Catholic nation's standards for its loyalty to the Church hierarchy and orthodox Catholicism. The first discursive variant was voiced by Catholic nuns who run shelters for unmarried mothers in Guadalajara, in their descriptions of the shelters' regimes of rehabilitation and surveillance. In the spaces bounded by the shelters' walls, single mothers embark upon their routes to redemption, which depend upon their embracing prescribed maternal practices, and accepting their sexuality as a highly marked space within female moral identity. This Catholic discourse is both accommodated and contested by middle class single mothers in Guadalajara, who are also self identified Catholics. Through their conversations about gender and sexuality, these single mothers express ideas which often articulate with 'traditional' Catholic sexual ethics. Yet, their narratives have also been penetrated by tropes of individual control, female sexual agency and ecologically informed definitions of what is 'natural' and appropriate procreation. Their talk demonstrates the significance of other transnational processes and movements, such as capitalism, feminism, and environmentalism, in Guadalajara, an historically constructed 'Catholic space.'

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