Precarious beginnings: Gendered risk discourses in psychiatric research literature about postpartum depression

Abstract

The transition to motherhood in western society is particularly informed by risk-based scientific and medical discourses and, as a result, women are especially subject to rationalities and practices that are employed in the name of risk. The aim of this article is to examine the gendered risk discourses that are embedded in one aspect of medicalized mothering — the postpartum period. This article interrogates three key elements of the discursive construction of postpartum depression (PPD) in contemporary psychiatric research literature (~1980—2007). Specifically, I examine how risk-based reasoning is incorporated into the concepts of the postpartum triad and the high-risk mother, and how arguments about why PPD is a ‘significant social problem’ create a tension between the rights of the mother and those of the child. By placing women in a position to manage certain types of risks related to the postpartum period, these discourses serve to responsibilize women and structure their subjectivities in gendered ways.This analysis contributes to a growing literature that investigates how assumptions about gender, race, class and sexuality are produced and re-produced through the notion of risk.