From Natural Body to Project Body: The Transformation of Maternal Embodiment among Three Generations of Middle-Class Women in Tehran

Abstract

This study aimed to analyze the intergenerational transformation of maternal embodiment among three generations of middle-class women in Tehran. This qualitative study was conducted using an interpretive phenomenological design based on Van Manen’s approach. The participants consisted of 45 middle-class women in Tehran across three generations, with 15 women selected from each generation. Participants were recruited through purposive and snowball sampling with maximum variation in age, education, employment status, and maternal experience. Data were collected through in-depth semi-structured interviews focused on pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, childcare, bodily changes, perceptions of the maternal body, and meanings attributed to motherhood. Interviews continued until semantic saturation was achieved. The recorded interviews were transcribed verbatim, repeatedly reviewed, coded, and analyzed through interpretive thematic analysis. The interpretive analysis revealed that maternal embodiment could be understood through three cultural configurations: the “Naturalized Body,” the “Sacrificial and Invisible Body,” and the “Body-as-Project.” In the first generation, motherhood was perceived as a natural and taken-for-granted extension of womanhood, and the maternal body was rarely experienced as an independent object of reflection or management. In the second generation, the maternal body acquired moral and symbolic meanings associated with sacrifice, self-denial, and caregiving responsibility, while its embodied visibility was largely displaced into the private sphere. In the third generation, the maternal body became a site of choice, reflexivity, specialized care, body management, and identity negotiation. The findings further indicate that this transformation cannot be reduced to a simple transition from tradition to modernity; rather, it reflects changing cultural regimes of the body, modes of power, and forms of female agency. The study concludes that motherhood in contemporary Iran is not merely a biological experience, but a social, cultural, historical, and embodied process shaped through the interaction of lived experience, medical discourses, cultural norms, and modern reflexive logics.