The Shaping of Motherhood through Social Investment in Children: Examples from Canada and Mexico

Abstract

The recent global shift in state policy and politics toward social inclusion and investment in human capital has raised questions among academics about whether and to what extent these developments serve to deepen and strengthen neoliberal hegemony, or represent a move beyond neoliberalism toward a potentially more progressive post-neoliberal political space with regard to social justice concerns. As many authors, including several in this volume, note, the last decade has seen a notable shift in the direction of social spending, both in southern developing and northern industrialized states. This shift is characterized by a refocusing on social investment and regulation after years of cutbacks, in part as a reaction to the real and potential social problems associated with the deregulatory approach of the 1980s and 1990s (Jenson 2001; Dobrowolsky & Jenson 2004; Porter and Craig 2004; Peck and Tickell 2002). While a focus on promoting self-responsibility, in line with neoliberalism, characterizes this reinvestment strategy, what is seemingly new, as pointed out by Mahon and Macdonald in this volume, is the provision of state resources to empower citizens and provide them with more tools and opportunities to be successfully integrated into the market economy and become self-sufficient and self- responsible citizens (see also Porter and Craig 2004: 388). Our concern in this chapter is to elucidate the ways in which processes of post-neoliberalization that surround the education of, and investment in, children interact with the regulation and experience of motherhood in two quite different local contexts in Canada and in Mexico.