Embodiment and Disembodiment in Childbirth Narratives (original) (raw)

How do women experience childbirth today? What role does the body, their body, occupy in the way they describe it? And to what extent may technology and medical practices be considered as determinant in the shaping of this experience and the positioning of the body within it? While it is true, as many analysts maintain, that western medicine establishes and assumes a body/mind or body/self dualism, the question we want to address here is how the medical practices surrounding most births today have a performative effect on women's experiences of childbirth and cause them to separate or not that which concerns their body from other aspects of the birth: emotional, family or social. Behind this question lie several critical analyses. Authors such as Turner (1992), and contrast the body as the central object of medicine with a holistic conception of the subject based on a phenomenological or psychoanalytical approach. From their point of view, it was formerly conceivable for medicine to maintain a purely physiological approach when treating mainly acute pathologies. In recent times, however, the large-scale development of chronic diseases or long-term pathologies has necessitated a profound redefinition of medicine, based on a revised conception of subjects who are not split, as in the Cartesian tradition, but unified by their embodiment, as posited by phenomenology:

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