THE MATERNAL KNOT IN INFORMATION SCIENCES
AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC FANZINES AS MEMORY AND GENDER DEVICES
Keywords:
maternal knot, fanzine autoethnography, academic motherhood, information sciences, memory deviceAbstract
Jane Lazarre argues in her work that the more children you have, the more ferociously you destroy your independent soul. This assertion, published in 1976, remains painful and relevant half a century later for those of us who mother while pursuing science—women scientists. This work stems from that discomfort/pain to ask what happens when a social scientist in the field of Information Science decides to narrate her motherhood not in an indexed journal, but in four autoethnographic fanzines produced during a postdoctoral stay in South America. In this vein, the work analyzes the fanzine as a counter-hegemonic informational device that records memories that the conventional academic circuit does not accommodate: the body that breastfeeds amidst bibliographic searches, the guilt that accompanies each conference, the network of women that sustains each submitted chapter. At the same time, it reclaims autoethnography as a legitimate method for a disciplinary field that has privileged objectivity and distance. It presents fanzines in a triple dimension: object of study, research method and political act, concluding that Information Sciences require opening and promoting spaces for first-person narratives that, like Lazarre's maternal knot, are not resolved, but inhabited.