ABSTRACT
Maternity considered as a mandate of Nature supports the idea of an unavoidable female fate. This chapter analyses the theoretical categories that support conceptions regarding maternity and female sexuality, with the intention of updating a debate inevitably activated by the new reproductive techniques. Maternity considered as a mandate of Nature supports the idea of an unavoidable female fate. This idea is the central "argument" of its idealization. The split between maternity and sexuality is a mark of the dilemmas that affect women's psychosexual development. The woman/mother equivalence appears as an alibi in the face of this dilemma, expressing the tendency to give priority to female subjectivity through maternity, in an attempt to regulate the bonds between women and men just as an established order has determined. Special interest should be given to the relations of power-dominance that develop in the intersubjective mother/child space, which signal the force of the identifying enunciates in play.
