Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. In this paper, I examine the theoretical debates concerning “medicalization” in relation to the empirical trend toward increased demand for “natural” options for childbirth. Many feminist theorists have argued that medical intervention in pregnancy and childbirth is both unwarranted and disempowering and devalues women's own abilities and experiences. Further, it is argued that medicalization (of seemingly natural events) is particularly damaging for women and other marginalized people. In this paper, I explore the claims (of both providers and consumers) concerning medical care for pregnancy and childbirth among privileged populations and ask why rejection of medical care for pregnancy and childbirth is not proportional to disadvantage. It appears to be the case that criticism of medical intervention in pregnancy and childbirth is strongest among privileged women and is expressed consistently as preference for “natural,” “traditional” or “normal” approaches and practices. Reverence for the natural, I argue, is a political claim that asserts social position, identity, and resistance. I consider this political claim to be embodied and demonstrated in the occurrence of a physical and psychic duality, a “split subjectivity,” that is exacerbated by the sharpness of the public-private divide in women's lives. Résumé. Dans cet article, j'examine le débat théorique sur la médicalisation à la lumière de la vogue actuelle croissante des options plus naturelles pour l'accouchement. De nombreux auteurs féministes ont soutenu que les interventions médicales durant la grossesse et l'accouchement étaient injustifiées et qu'elles privaient les femmes de leur autonomie, tout en dévaluant leur expérience et leurs aptitudes naturelles. De même, la médicalisation (de phénomènes apparemment naturels) est, selon certains, particulièrement néfaste pour les femmes et les groupes marginalisés. Dans cet article, j'explore les affirmations (à la fois des prestataires et des bénéficiaires) concernant l'assistance médicale durant la grossesse et l'accouchement parmi les populations favorisées et je soulève la question de savoir pourquoi le rejet de l'assistance médicale durant la grossesse et l'accouchement n'est pas surtout le fait des milieux défavorisés. Il semble, en effet, que les critiques envers les interventions médicales durant la grossesse et l'accouchement proviennent surtout des femmes de milieux favoriséset que ces dernières manifestent de manière constante une préférence pour les approches et les pratiques «naturelles», «traditionnelles» ou «normales». La révérence envers le naturel est, selon moi, une revendication politique afin d'affirmer sa position sociale, son identité et sa résistance. Je considère que cette revendication politique est incarnée et démontrée par l'existence d'une dualité physique et psychique, une «subjectivité divisée» qui est exacerbée par l'acuité de la division entre le monde public et le monde privé dans la vie des femmes.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".