Abstract:
Modern technology has played a significant role in the process of motherhood construction, causing the concept of motherhood to be complex and transcend humanness. These require a new kind of conceptual framework which includes not only social meaning construction but also the constructed maternal ontology. This study aims to explore the significant role of technology in the process of motherhood construction and trace the human-technology operation which allows motherhood to extend beyond human ontology. The researcher presents a new analytical tool through a post-humanistic perspective and actor-network theory and employs the qualitative methodology of techno-maternography in order to understand the human and non-human actors incorporated in the construction of motherhood. The case studies involve maternity-related technologies, namely assisted reproductive technology, material technology and supportive network technology. The research proposes that these maternity-related technologies have multiple ontologies and each of them presents the productive capacity to be an actor helping humans overcome their own biological, economic and socio-cultural limitations and construct motherhood. Technological operations play a big part in constructing techno-maternity as an ontology whose form is flexible, depending on the engineering heterogenous elements. Techno-maternal ontology, therefore, can be spatial ontology, material ontology or network ontology. The study of technological operations in the process of motherhood construction shows that both human and non-human actors may collaborate in constructing, regulating and changing motherhood. Motherhood, which used to be human-centric and subjective, becomes objective as well and multiple ontological things may form a co-constitution. Motherhood is thus a thing based on constructivism and relativism which is no longer limited to social constructivism.