The unmothering of care: childhood disability, structural violence, and the politicisation of motherhood

This article traces the intersection of gendered reproductive labour with disability discrimination, through an ethnographic exploration of families raising children with Congenital Zika Syndrome (CZS) in Barranquilla, Colombia. In this paper I will demonstrate how societal ableism intersects with the patriarchal institution of motherhood to shape the experiences of individual mothers raising disabled children. Children living with impairments caused by vertical transmission of Zika (CZS) experience structural violence due to the societal ableism, ‘familism’ (Gesser et al., 2022) and the neo-liberal health system that together limit the exercise of their right to health and wellbeing, education, and a dignified life. In the context of structural violence and the highly gendered division of reproductive labour, rather than accepting the obligation to be ‘good mothers’ (Knight, 2013), mother-carers make demands of the state to support themselves and their children. I bring together Runswick-Cole and Ryan's (2019) notion of ‘unmothering disabled children’ with theorisations of political motherhood from Latin America (Mateo Medina, 2013; Quintela and Biroli, 2022) in order to explore how structural violence against their children causes a rupture between the imagined maternal role and the reality, forcing them to reconceptualise their role from a political perspective. Based on my analysis, I have theorised the ‘unmothering of care’ as a form of resistance to both the individualisation of motherhood that is necessary to perpetuate the patriarchal gendered division of labour, and the individualisation of disability that is central to the medical deficit model of disability.