Anthropological scholarship on motherhood offers frameworks for studying the everyday lives of mothers to reveal a deeper understanding of what mothering means and how motherhood relates to broader sociocultural forms. Theory emerging from psychological anthropology explores the interplay of resilience and suffering in contexts of extreme adversity. Bringing together these bodies of work, this article engages with a lacuna in the scholarship and examines how motherhood shapes women's resilience among Rwandan genocide‐rape survivors. We elucidate how motherhood opened them to new forms of sociality in the context of postgenocide Rwanda. Maternal desire gave rise to a motherhood assemblage that fostered diverse modes of resilience, created the potential for new life possibilities, and placed limitations on opportunities. Our findings suggest that emotional experience is crucial to resilience among Rwandan genocide‐rape survivors who are mothers and point to future directions for research and health promotion among populations affected by conflict‐related sexual violence.

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This article, based on ethnographic research in Mexico and South Africa, presents two central arguments about obstetric violence: (a) structural inequalities across diverse global sites are primarily linked to gender and lead to similar patterns of obstetric violence, and (b) ethnography is a powerful method to give voice to women's stories. Connecting these two arguments is a temporal model to understand how women across the world come to expect, experience, and respond to obstetric violence—that is, before, during, and after the encounter. This temporal approach is a core feature of ethnography, which requires long-term immersion and attention to context.

Considerations of motherhood in contexts of poverty often explore how material scarcity transforms or degrades women's capacity to love or nurture their children. In this article, I focus on Xhosa mothers who live in the extreme poverty of an urban township on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa, and how they struggle with the decision to send their children to be raised by other mother‐figures. My argument reveals that the Xhosa idiom inimba offers three models for mother love, but poverty exacerbates the contradictions between the models and intensifies the moral dilemma of sending. I demonstrate how, for these Xhosa township mothers, poverty intersects with mother love in unexpected ways whereby the model itself is not remade or profoundly transformed, rather the moral stakes seem higher for the mothers who perceive mother love as crucial to their children's well‐being and integral to their selfhood as good mothers. In developing this argument, I aim to further our understandings of poverty and the complex ways that they intersect and interact with cultural models and practice.