Crafting the unsayable: Making meaning out of racialised maternal health‐care encounters

Abstract

AbstractThere are persistent and profound racialised inequalities in maternal and reproductive health in the UK. Yet in multiple settings, these disparities have been blamed on class or ethnicity, individuals and communities rather than the structures within which they live. In this study, we draw on narratives told within a ‘slow‐stitch’ craft workshop, organised in southern England for racialised women with reproductive trauma, to show how processes of racialisation and racism shape experiences of maternal and reproductive healthcare. Experiences of reproductive trauma were multiple and cumulative. The burden of knowledge of racialised disparities was carried into health‐care spaces, with plans made in advance to self‐manage in risky spaces. The constant management of racialised stereotypes and subsequent strategies of bodily and emotional containment ultimately was not protective and there was little agency over levels of care received in health‐care spaces. Perceptions surrounding racialised bodies shaped treatment, whilst proximities to whiteness afforded alternative realities. Taking a phenomenological approach we analyse race as a sensory, spatial and relational constellation haunted by long‐standing histories of fraught inequality. Bringing together in the crafting circle a group of women racialised in different ways enabled the sharing of “unspeakable” stories surrounding racism and reproductive trauma, and allowed race to be brought into being as a form of solidarity and connection.