Rachelle Chadwick

Negotiating risky bodies: childbirth and constructions of risk

Policy makers, practitioners and researchers have identified risk as a key concept in relation to maternity care and childbirth. There is however a lack of research exploring women’s discursive constructions of risk and childbirth in relation to sociological risk theories. In this article we explore pregnant women’s everyday negotiations of risk in relation to the self-chosen plan to birth either at home or via an elective Caesarean section. We use sociocultural risk theories to contextualise our findings. This article draws on data from a study conducted in 2005–2006 in which we interviewed 24 pregnant middle-class South African women who were planning a home birth or elective Caesarean section and used social constructionist discourse analysis to analyse the data. We found that women’s risk constructions were related to three different conceptions of birthing embodiment: technocratic bodies, vulnerable bodies and knowing bodies. Women who planned Caesarean sections were committed to biomedical constructions of risk and birth. Woman who planned home births shifted between endorsing and subverting biomedical models of risk. They also resisted definitions of birthing bodies as inherently abject (unclean, polluting, unruly) and constructed the process of giving birth as risky in medicalised settings. In such settings, the birthing body was constructed as vulnerable to objectification, loss of dignity and shaming. Women who planned to give birth at home constructed an alternative approach to birth which emphasised embodied ways of knowing, relational connection and empowerment over normative and medicalised risk constructions. In the process, biomedical risk definitions were destabilised.

Technologies of gender and childbirth choices: Home birth, elective caesarean and white femininities in South Africa

Since the 1970s, feminist research has provided a powerful critique of biomedical models of childbirth. While this critique has been extremely important, it has to some extent led to the neglect of other forms of power. For example, there has been little research which has explored childbirth as a way of ‘doing gender’ in which normative or resistant forms of gender and femininity are (re)performed. Drawing on the Foucauldian notion of ‘technologies of power’, we argue that gender is a form of disciplinary power which shapes the choices that women make in relation to childbirth. Drawing on pre-birth interviews with 21 white, middle-class pregnant South African women who were planning on either a home birth (n = 12) or an elective caesarean section (n = 9), we show how three central technologies of white femininity shaped and regulated women’s childbirth choices. These included: a patriarchal optics of childbirth, the ‘natural childbirth’ ideal and the ‘good mother’ imperative. The article concludes that women’s childbirth choices are heavily shaped by gendered technologies of power and that the decision to have a home birth or an elective caesarean section intersects with scripts of ‘doing white femininity’ in South Africa.

Embodied methodologies: challenges, reflections and strategies

This paper focuses on the methodological challenges of ‘embodying’ qualitative research. While a substantial literature exists on theoretical aspects of the ‘turn to bodies’, there is little work which has grappled with its methodological implications. This article provides a brief overview and critique of approaches to embodied qualitative methodologies developed in the social sciences over the last decade. The paper also articulates theoretical-methodological strategies that could be useful in the effort to develop ‘embodied methodologies’. The theoretical-methodological strategies outlined include: theorising the embodied subject, problematizing transcription and using poetic representational and methodological devices. These strategies are discussed in relation to a research project exploring women’s narratives of childbirth and shows their use in tracing and representing the sensual body in qualitative analysis.

Ambiguous subjects: Obstetric violence, assemblage and South African birth narratives

Obstetric violence is gaining recognition as a worldwide problem manifesting in a range of geopolitical contexts. While global public health attention is turning to this issue, there has been a lack of theoretical engagement by feminist psychologists with the phenomenon of obstetric violence. This paper contributes to the literature on obstetric violence via a feminist social constructionist analysis of “marginalized” and low-income South African women’s narratives of giving birth in public sector obstetric contexts. Drawing on interviews conducted in 2012 with 35 black, low-income women living in Cape Town, South Africa, the analysis focuses on obstetric violence as a relational, disciplinary, and productive process that has implications for the construction of women’s subjectivities and agency during childbirth. The findings focus on relational constructions of violence and agency in women’s narratives, including (a) the performance of docility as an act of ambiguous agency and (2) resistant bodies and modes of discipline. Framed within a Foucauldian approach to power and using the concept of assemblage, I argue that obstetric violence needs to be conceptualized as more than isolated acts involving individual perpetrators and victims. Instead, the analysis shows that obstetric violence functions as a mode of discipline embedded in normative relations of class, gender, race, and medical power.

Making the childfree choice: Perspectives of women living in South Africa

This article explores heterosexual childfree women’s decisions and the ways in which they negotiate their childfree identity in the context of pronatalist expectations. A convenience sample of seven women living in South Africa were interviewed about their rationale and experience of being childfree (black = 5; white = 2; age range 22 to 53). Findings following thematic analysis of interview transcripts indicated that the participants’ reasons for making the childfree choice included: familiarity with mothering duties and activities, personal career and academic goals, and practical reasons associated with finances, or not having a suitable parenting partner. The women reported that they used various strategies to negotiate pronatalist sociocultural expectations, including playing along, passivity and active resistance through active adoption of a strong pro-childfree stance. The findings corroborate feminist theoretical views that women are active agents who negotiate pronatalist sociocultural norms and expectations and engage in active reproductive decision-making.

Doing homebirth like a man? Constructions of masculinity in South African men’s narratives of homebirth

Abstract The intersections between homebirth and masculine identities have not been widely explored. In this paper, we focus on the construction/contestation of masculinity in South African men’s narratives of planning and experiencing homebirth. Drawing on 20 interviews conducted with a sample of 5 men and couples in 2013–2014, a narrative analysis found men constructed ideal masculinities and ways of being a man in relation to homebirth. The paper focuses on the multiple representations of masculinity constructed in men’s talk about homebirth and traces their efforts to articulate a masculine perspective of birth. Men grappled with the meanings of ‘being there’ as a man during labour/birth and articulated alternative modes of being a man that valued and accommodated relationality, passivity and containment. Men thus articulated ways of being present and passive during homebirth that challenged normative constructions of masculinity. The notion of selfless masculinity emerged as a key masculine ideal in which giving and service during birth was constructed as integral to being a good father and man. However, competing forms of normative masculinity constructed in men’s narratives meant gender tensions remained in the continued salience of traditional masculine meta-narratives, such as being the ‘breadwinner’.