Voicing labouring bodies: women's narratives and gender violence

This paper takes shape from the debate on the role of human rights in maternity care, following several emerging cases of obstetric violence and aggressive and intolerant treatment permeating care during labour and delivery (Freedman et al. 2014). In 2015, the World Health Organization (WHO) released a statement directed at preventing and eliminating disrespectful, non-dignified and abusive behaviour by health professionals during childbirth, highlighting a physical as well as emotional and psychological violence. Early in 2019, a UN report warned against obstetric violence as being still widespread and systematic in nature, acknowledging it has not been fully addressed from a human rights perspective so far. Despite the fact that the phenomenon is gaining increasing recognition worldwide and at institutional level, there seems to be a lack of theoretical engagement on the issue (Dixon 2015). This study, therefore, explores how women’s experiences are discursively construed, specifically taking into account the stories shared on social media in English-speaking contexts (Canada, the US, the UK)—more specifically, on the websites of charities and advocacy groups, such as the Obstetric Justice Project, Birth Monopoly, Birth Trauma Association, working to expose obstetric violence and raise awareness on the issue. Indeed, social media are being increasingly used as a platform for exchanging views, writing testimonies, thus creating a (safe) site for the production of meanings. In contrast with the current little academic and scientific attention, birth stories have become increasingly common on the Internet, providing detailed descriptions of emotions, psychological states, decisions, relationships. Especially after traumatic experiences, mothers/parents seek healing by speaking up, writing, telling their stories, for a wide range of complex motivations: as a way to re-work the trauma, disrupt and resist against surveillance and abuse of their choices and bodies, re-negotiate power after a disempowering medical experience, unburden themselves, find relief. While projecting the image of suffering bodies in labour facing abuse, humiliation and unconsented medical procedures in what should be, instead, an intimate and joyful moment, these narratives allow a critical thought on practices of discrimination which heavily affect women’s agency and act like a prism reflecting dominant dynamics in society. As some critics have noted (Wolf 2013; Cohen Shabot 2016), obstetric violence is different from other forms of medical violence because labouring/birthing bodies are suffering, unruly and noisy, but they are not ill. They face a structural kind of gender violence, a form of subtler normative oppression aiming at a diminishment of women’s agency, which forces them in the cycle of silence and shame precluding social change and political action. The stories shared online (and collected over a time-span raging from 2018 to 2020) are analysed following Halliday’s (1981, 1985, 2001) systemic functional approach to discourse, which theorises language as a systemic resource for meaning-making, in combination with a feminist post-structuralist theoretical framework influenced by Michel Foucault’s work (Foucault 1977, 1980, 1989; Butler 1990; Grosz 1994; Allen 2014). Additionally drawing on a discourse analysis perspective, the article investigates emerging and recurrent patterns and themes in women’s narratives, questioning not merely power dynamics in the health-care system during childbirth but also existing power relations in society. In particular, the article addresses three research questions: 1) how women’s emotion patterns and states are discursively construed; 2) what are the most recurrent plot units or topics through which the phenomenon of obstetric violence is framed; 3) what are the underlying questions of power and gender relations and to what extent these dynamics of abuse convey covert forms of subjugation enacting practices of discrimination which represent the expression of historical, social and cultural values that are buried and disguised in the naturalised order of things. Bibliographic references Allen, Amy. “Feminist Perspectives on Power.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Phylosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, 2014. plato.stanford.edu/entries/feministpower/. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990. Cohen Shabot, Sara. “Making Loud Bodies ‘Feminine’: A Feminist-Phenomenological Analysis of Obstetric Violence.” Human Studies, vol. 39, no. 2, 2016, pp. 1-17. Dixon, Lydia. “Obstetrics in a Time of Violence.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly, vol. 29, 2015, pp. 437-454. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Penguin Books, 1977. ---. “Body/Power.” Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, edited by Colin Gordon, translated by Colin Gordon, Pantheon, 1980, pp. 55-62. ---. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Routledge, 1989. Freedman, Lynn, et al. “Defining Disrespect and Abuse of Women in Childbirth.” Bulletin of World Health Organization, no. 92, 2014, pp. 915-17. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Indiana UP, 1994. Halliday, M.A.K. Explorations in the Function of Language. Edward Arnold, 1981. ---. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. Edward Arnold, 1985. ---. “On the Grammatical Foundations of Discourse.” Grammar and Discourse: Proceedings of the International Conference on Discourse Analysis, edited by Ren Shaozeng et al., University of Macau Publication Centre, 2001, pp. 47-57. Wolf, Allison B. “Metaphysical Violence and Medicalised Childbirth.” International Journal of Applied Philosophy, vol. 27, no.1, 2013, pp. 101-11.

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