Introduction

Across the world, mothering is interwoven with women and concepts of femininity (Chodorow, 1989, Glenn, 1994; Arendell, 2000). However, the ideology of intensive mothering and maternal practice is more pervasive and damaging for women who live in fundamentalist patriarchal cultures like Iran (Afary, 2009, Amini and McCormack, 2021) than in more westernised countries.

In this chapter, by employing a biographical approach, I seek to answer how biographical research increases attention to race and ethnicity and the differing experiences of mothers by providing a counter-narrative against the mainstream narrative on agency and ethnicity. My central questions are how older Iranian women feel about being a mother, specifically a ‘good mother’, what meanings they ascribe to mothering, how mothering conflicts with their other identities, such as being a woman and a wife, and how Iranian mothers engage with and respond to the dominant ideology of mothering.

Mothering is a multifaceted and complex concept that comprises both mundane practice and symbolic meaning. In this book chapter, I consider mothering as a gendered and bodily practice, addressing both the materiality of mothers’ bodies together with their social realities and gender as social practices and socio-political structures. However, I explain that women also negotiate cultural meaning and symbols to shape gendered mothering experiences and its bodily practice. This approach enabled me to not only focus on cultural processes but also emotional dynamics, gendered bodies and any non-discursive forms of power and constraint. Moreover, it provides more room for the reflexive self to show how Iranian mothers engage with and respond to the dominant ideology, and correspondingly the experience of mothering is not limited to the passive result of socialisation.

Mothering not only reflects socio-cultural structures and changes, but is also an agent of transformation, connecting personal lives and kinship with larger-scale historical processes. As a key site where family, religion, culture and economy converge, mothering encompasses and relies on norms developed by individuals, families and the gender order of the society. These norms also shape the stigma around mothering experiences such as ‘good mothering’, and highlight the importance of the cultural meanings and symbols in shaping mothering experiences.

Mothering is a gendered practice, as both femininity and gender identity have mothering at the centre. Connell (1987) highlights that social relations of gender are organised in relation to the reproductive division of people into male and female.