Woman as a subject of childbirth: Physical, technological and institutional aspects

Abstract

Childbirth represents a specific meeting point between nature and culture: it is a biological event in which the main actors are social beings, a natural process which has been given a special cultural status through the process of scientific-technological translation. The complex nature of childbirth also raises twofold challenge to woman in labour. On the one hand, the flow of dramatic bodily changes that is mostly beyond her control represents a threat to her embodied subjectivity. On the other hand, the fact that labour is turned into an object of medical knowledge, practices and techniques in contemporary society usually implies its reduction to medically guided physiological process that does not rely on women?s subjective involvement in any relevant way. This brings up the question of whether a woman manages to be the subject of a process that is happening to her and that is primarily technologically mediated and externally regulated? I will think of the birth experience as a complex process which relies on the interaction between the constantly changing embodied experience and medical knowledge and techniques that woman is subjected to. Based on the analysis of the birth narratives, I?ll try to follow the flow of this experience and numerous changes that women as subject is going through in local obstetrical context which bears a number of institutional specificities.