The Standardized Transition to Parenthood: How Standardized Practices Produce Gendered Subjects at the Transition to Parenthood

The transition to parenthood in Austria is constituted through a set of standardized practices that includes medical care, legal processes, public discourses on women’s health and decisions around public aid affect every pregnant women and most of their partners.In Austria the transition to parenthood leads to more traditional role configurations and to an increase in unequal distribution of labor. However, since young women in Austria are in general highly educated, have full access to the labor market and value and demand gender-equality, it seems crucial that throughout all levels of education women experience a retraditionalization of gender roles during the transition to parenthood. A focus on standardized practices is a sufficient way to show how even highly educated, career oriented and breadwinning women become non-working mothers in a traditional relationship after the transition to parenthood. Standardized practices enforce and attenuate specific figurations of men and women. Since they are a major part of the transition to parenthood we suggest to pay closer attention to the sequence of those practices and the formations of men and women they seem to favor. Our questions are: How do standardized practices at the transition to parenthood produce gendered subjects? Which formations of women and men do they enforce?

We answer those questions by deriving practices from 40 interviews with men and women during pregnancy and 40 interviews with men and women six months after birth. In addition we collected documents used in those practices. Within an ethnographic interpretation process lead by the theoretical principles of new materialism we derived sets of activities and participants, which later on where categorized into practices. The focus of our paper is on four processes of retraditionalization of the relationship between mothers and fathers during the transition to parenthood and how they are embedded into standardized practices.