"En Skidegod Mor" - En kritisk diskurspsykologisk undersøgelse af danske kvinders konstruktion og forhandling af moderskabsideologier

Ravn, Maria ; Høgh, Emilia Chenwei Kruse

4. semester

Psykologi, Kandidat

2025

2025-05-30

117 pages

Motherhood is a complex phenomenon both in academic research and public discourse, as culturally embedded expectations continue to shape how it is conceptu-alized and practiced. While previous studies have primarily focused on mothers’ indi-vidual experiences of motherhood, often highlighting how it is associated with moral responsibility, emotional labor and societal expectations, less attention has been paid to how women actively construct and negotiate meanings of motherhood in their eve-ryday social contexts. In particular, limited knowledge exists about how both mothers and voluntarily childfree women reflect on and position themselves in relation to cul-tural norms around motherhood in a contemporary Danish context. Therefore, this thesis examines how ideologies of motherhood are discursively con-structed and negotiated among Danish women around the age of 30. To explore this, we applied a critical discursive psychological approach that integrates poststructuralist discourse analysis and discursive psychology, embedded within a cultural psycholog-ical perspective and social constructivist epistemology. This framework foregrounds the social and discursive nature of psychological processes that is relevant for under-standing the construction of motherhood. Using dyadic interviews with two mothers and two voluntarily childfree women – interviewed in two pairs of close friends - the study investigates how meanings of motherhood emerge as participants draw upon and negotiate interpretative repertoires, ideological dilemmas and subject positions. The analysis identified four central interpretative repertoires: Natural Motherhood, Good Motherhood, Doing Motherhood and Womanhood. These repertoires both re-flect and structure dominant cultural assumptions about femininity, care, and the moral and emotional expectations placed on mothers. The findings demonstrate how moth-erhood is not simply an individual experience but a discursively constituted phenom-enon, continuously constructed and reconstructed within specific social and historical contexts. As such, the interpretative repertoires reveal motherhood as an ideological terrain in which women navigate tensions between collective norms and individual choices. By illuminating the ideological tensions women face and the social practices through which motherhood is made meaningful, the thesis contributes nuanced insights to the field of motherhood studies, particularly within a Danish context. It also offers a meth-odological contribution by demonstrating how the combination of dyadic interviews with a critical discursive psychology can capture the collective and situated dimen-sions of identity construction. These insights may help inform broader societal discus-sions about gendered expectations, family life, and the cultural conditions that con-tinue to shape women’s lives and choices.

Download
Vis denne rapport i AAU Studenterprojekter