Lisa Folkmarson Käll

Coherence of pregnancy planning within couples expecting a child

BACKGROUND joint planning and decision-making within couples have evident effects on the well-being of the family. The purpose of this study was to investigate the level of pregnancy planning among pregnant women and their partners and to compare the coherence of pregnancy planning within the couples. METHODS pregnant women and their partners were recruited from 18 antenatal clinics in seven Swedish counties between October 2011 and April 2012. Participants, 232 pregnant women and 144 partners, filled out a questionnaire with questions about pregnancy planning, lifestyle and relationship satisfaction. 136 couples were identified and the women׳s and partners׳ answers were compared. RESULTS more than 75% of the pregnancies were very or rather planned and almost all participants had agreed with their partner to become pregnant. There was no significant difference in level of pregnancy planning between women and partners, and coherence within couples was strong. Level of planning was not affected by individual socio-demographic variables. Furthermore, 98 % of women and 94 % of partners had non-distressed relationships. CONCLUSION one of the most interesting results was the strong coherence between partners concerning their pregnancy and relationship. Approaching these results from a social constructivist perspective brings to light an importance of togetherness and how a sense and impression of unity within a couple might be constructed in different ways. As implications for practice, midwives and other professionals counselling persons in fertile age should enquire about and emphasise the benefits of equality and mutual pregnancy planning for both women and men.

Bodies, Boundaries and Vulnerabilities : Interrogating Social, Cultural and Political Aspects of Embodiment

Bodies, Boundaries and Vulnerabilities : Interrogating Social, Cultural and Political Aspects of Embodiment

Marking the Unmarked : Theorizing Intersectionality and Lived Embodiment through Mammoth and Antichrist

This article confronts the notion of intersectionality with its conditions of materiality and embodiment. Understanding intersectionality as an overarching framework for analyzing power imbalances, we locate the body at the core of intersectionality as the site or situation where intersectional identities emerge and are made manifest. Our point of departure is that identities are always embodied, socially, culturally, spatially, and historically situated, and in continuous relational becoming. Considering the relevance of the body in intersectional structures of domination, our analysis aims to elaborate on the ways in which categories of identity are inscribed precisely as bodily markers and reinforced through embodiment.

Sexual Difference as Nomadic Strategy

Lisa Folkmarson Källs article “Sexual Difference as Nomadic Strategy” deals with Rosi Braidottis attempt at rethinking sexual difference and female subjectivity in terms of nomadism. It explores how the idea of nomadism can function as a framework for understanding sexual difference which takes into account the multiple ways in which difference is configured, experienced, and contextually given meaning. Braidottis account of sexual difference as nomadism captures difference in three interrelated dimensions, namely the difference between man and woman, differences between women, and differences within each woman. In all three dimensions, the central issue at stake is to bring forth an understanding of identity as a site of difference. Such an understanding allows Braidotti to locate sexual difference at the very core of subjectivity and recognize difference as constitutive of identity in a more fundamental way than as marking out its external limits. According to Käll, Braidottis tripartite understanding of nomadism further opens up towards a rethinking of sexual difference beyond the confines of a strict exclusionary binary relation between man and woman. It locates sexual difference as a central element in the identification and becoming of subjectivity while at the same time recognizing that sexual difference is not the only central element, but one which intersects with others.

Performativity and Expression: The Case of David Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly

Through a reading of David Cronenberg’s 1993 film M. Butterfly, this chapter brings Judith Butler’s idea of the performativity of gender into conversation with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s writings on the expression of embodied subjectivity. The chapter brings out how the portrayal of the two protagonists in Cronenberg’s film, Song Liling and Rene Gallimard, on the one hand illustrates Butler’s contention that gender identity is performatively constituted through a stylized reiteration of bodily acts that produce the illusion of an inner core on the surface of the body and on the other hand points to the limitations of a strictly performative framework. The character of Song Liling is portrayed in such a way as to also provoke questions of how to account for subjectivity or a felt sense of self that cannot be captured by third-person descriptions nor reduced to a product of reiterated performative imitation. Challenging Butler’s simplistic account and dismissal of expression, the chapter turns instead to the account of expression offered by Merleau-Ponty and argues that this provides a non-reductive way of understanding subjectivity as embodying both a first- and a third-person perspective in interrelation and of rethinking the relation between interiority and exteriority without reducing one to the other.

Vulnerable Bodies and Embodied Boundaries

A body, and especially a body considered as a whole, is a mass distinct from other masses. It occupies space, and as a geometric figure, it is three-dimensional having length, breadth, and thickness. Its dimensions and its weight can be measured. To be a body is thus to have boundaries, to be singularized and exclusive of other bodies. However, this view of the body is clearly not as simple and straightforward as it sounds. Even though a body is a mass distinct from other bodies, it nevertheless receives its distinct dimensions and forms only in relation to those other bodies from which it is distinguished. Bodies are thus in their very singularity and exclusivity intimately interrelated with one another. The boundaries distinguishing one body from another are also what constitute their connection. Bodies are interconnected both insofar as they share one another’s distinctive lines of demarcation and insofar as the shared boundaries between them make them parts of one whole. Thus, bodies are exclusive of one another only by virtue of their mutual inclusion within each other’s boundaries and in the world. Further, even though the dimensions and borders of a body can be measured, they are by no means fixed and unchangeable; rather, bodies continuously materialize in new ways as their boundaries are drawn and redrawn, reinforced, transgressed, and altered.