Multiple Motherhood: Reflections on Certain Brazilian Cases

Abstract

The fact that the upper class has adopted, over the past decades, the nuclear conjugal family as a hegemonic norm explains clearly why there is a tendency to see any deviancy from this norm as problematic. Nevertheless, by evoking ethnographic cases, I suggest that this hegemonic norm is not evenly dominant in all social layers. Thus I point out to the possibility of alternative familial dynamics which, in spite of not fitting the standard family model, enjoy popularity and even legitimacy among other sectors of society. In this case, the understanding of family life in contemporary Brazil, will require, from the observer, an effort to consider, besides the hegemonic norm, these alternative dynamics, being the circulation of children in popular groups just one example.