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JaneMaree Maher
Centre for Women's Studies and Gender Research, Monash University
'Rethinking Women's Birth Experience: Medical Frameworks and Personal Narratives'
This paper emerges from my on-going research into birth experience and lay support people in the birth room and presents findings from two recent projects interviewing birthing women and midwives. In the contemporary health experience of individuals in developed countries, individual responsibility for health outcomes has become an increasingly prevalent aspect of public health discourse. The proliferation of information sources for health information, for example, in programs like Good Medicine and magazines like Good Health, as well as via the Internet, has also led to an increasing expectation of individual self surveillance. In response to these trends, general understandings and definitions of health have become increasingly medicalised. I contend that the 'healthy body' has become synonymous with the 'managed body', where discourses of control drawn from biomedical certainties are emphasised and privileged. I am specifically interested in how this may impact on women's birth experiences where accurate and plentiful medical information cannot prepare women for the psychical or affective aspects of the giving birth. Recent Australian research indicates that women's
dissatisfaction with birth 'service delivery' is increasing. In this paper I consider what role the internalisation of medicalised frames for corporeal experience may play in this marked dissatisfaction level. I ask whether feminist theories of embodiment can be usefully used to
contest prevailing models for understanding women's experiences of birth.
Bio: JaneMaree Maher, PhD, teaches and researches in the Centre for Women's Studies and Gender Research, School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University, Melbourne. Her research interests include feminist theories of embodiment and women's work.
Recent publications include: 'Up In the Stirrups Again: Narratives of Birth and the Transition to Motherhood.' Meridian, Vol 18 (2): 207-226, 2002. 'Visibly Pregnant: Towards a Placental Body', Feminist Review Vol 72:95-107, 2002. 'Narratives of Support: Midwifery Tales from the Delivery Room', Nursing Inquiry, Vol 9 (1): 37-42, 2002. (with Dr Kay Souter). ' “We Don't Do Babies”: Reproduction in David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers', Journal of Gender Studies, Vol 11 (2): 119-128, 2002. 'The Promiscuous Placenta: Crossing Over', Contagion: Historical and Cultural Studies, Alison Bashford and Claire Hooker (eds). London, Routledge, pp.201-216, 2001.
<janemaree.maher@Arts.Monash.edu.au>