La cura invisibile: potenzialità e limiti della pratica della doula

Abstract

The doula accompanies the transition into motherhood by providing women and families with various forms of emotional support and practical care during pregnancy, labor-childbirth, and postpartum up until the first year of life of the child. Starting from the ethnographic analysis of the gradual emergence of such new professional in Italy, this article reflects on the limits and potentialities that distinguish the particular type of care that the doula puts at the service of motherhood, often defined in terms of “mothering the mother”. More broadly, the work also hints at a widespread resistance to the social recognition of the complexity of becoming a mother and at the arduous legitimation of emerging forms of commodified relationships of care among women. As if, even in a professional stance, both “mothering” and care were condemned to diffused social invisibility.