Marina Sbisà
Feminine subject and female body in discourse about childbirth
(European Journal of Women's Studies 3, 1996, pp.363-76)
This article is the result of a long-standing interest in childbirth and its meanings and
implications for feminine subjectivity. From the 1970s onwards, both my personal experience
of childbirth and my involvement in the women's movement convinced me that childbirth is
one of the more problematic among those areas of women's bodily experience which have
given rise to political and cultural struggle. As a philosopher of language, I thus started paying
attention to the cognitive and communicative aspects of discourse about childbirth. Since my
investigations had their starting point in personal experience as well as in my participation in
the ongoing debates about antenatal care, I focused my attention on discourse about childbirth
in my own life context: medical advice books addressed to Italian women and interviews with
women living in my same Italian town. However, the results of my investigations as well as
some of the problems I encountered led me to reflect further about how more general issues
regarding the representation of the female body and the construction of feminine subjects
manifest themselves in this particular discursive field. The aim of this article is to discuss my
research experience, and draw some tentative conclusions about the conditions necessary to
enable women to express a point of view of their own about childbirth.1
1. Discourse about the female body
In the history of Western culture, discourse about the female body has been exploited to give
cultural definitions to sexual difference which are functional to the subordination of women to
social control exerted by men (Pomata 1979; Jordanova 1989). Since if there is anything that
can plausibly be described as being "naturally" feminine, it is the female body, the fact that
such definitions are cultural is easily hidden behind what appears to be a description of
"nature", itself a culturally constructed concept (Merchant 1980; Schiebinger 1993).
In the feminist project of deconstructing the alleged neutrality of male-dominated cultures
1
and promoting women's own cultural elaborations, the study of dominant discourse about the
female body is useful for the deconstruction of received representations of the feminine
gender. But reflecting on the female body and on its structure and functions has also been an
important source of inspiration for feminist proposals related to the newly emerging feminine
subject (an influential example is Irigaray 1977). While there is general agreement that
received representations of the feminine gender deserve to be criticized, problems arise when
dealing with new proposals, as the charges of "essentialism" directed at Irigaray's work and
the long history of the essentialism-constructionism debate have shown (cf. Fuss 1989; De
Lauretis 1989; Braidotti 1991).
I favour a constructionist perspective with respect to gender, but am convinced that the
critique of gender does not exhaust all the issues raised by sexual difference (cf. Braidotti
1994). In my opinion, not all of what our bodies are and do can be reduced to the effects of
cultural construction. Certainly, in any discourse which represents the female body there is the
risk of naturalizing culturally constructed aspects. But in the face of traditional representations
of woman which either objectify her or endow her with some kind of diminished subjectivity,
there is a continuing need for women to produce representations of themselves which take
their own female bodies into account in ways which do not downgrade or erase, but empower
their subjectivity. Therefore, I am interested not only in the critique of discourse about the
female body, but in the production of such discourse by women, and in the conditions that
such a production should meet in order to count as the formulation of situated knowledge by
feminine subjects. These conditions might be summarized in the following three moves.
(1) First, we must deconstruct the allegedly neutral dominant discourse about the female
body. This includes detecting the rhetorical uses of the concept of nature as well as
formulating explicitly what is conveyed implicitly about the female body and the feminine
subject. Behind the gaze from nowhere which characterizes patriarchal power (Haraway
1988), we may discover subjects who are anchored in male experiences such as being a son, a
father, or a husband (or other heterosexual male partner) and who describe the female body or
define its functions according to their own needs and interests.
2
(2) Second, we have to resist the temptation to define what truly authentic feminine
discourse about the female body should be like. The feminine subject and her discourse would
be better conceived of as "nomadic" (Braidotti 1994), that is, free to move in any direction.
When presented with some representation of the female body elaborated by a woman, we
must not treat that representation as a new model, as if it were the ultimate feminist truth. If
we change the contents of our representations without changing the discourse structures
conveying them, our feminist project will make little progress.
(3) Third,
we must try to put a feminine point of view into practice. This involves
communication and discussion among women. Feminine discourse about the female body
generally belongs to what speech act theory (cf. Austin 1975, Searle 1979, Sbisà 1984b) has
called the behabitive or expressive speech act type. This consists of the expression of
subjective feelings, emotions, and opinions, and is not counted by the interlocutor as a
formulation of knowledge. If women want to be socially recognized as being competent to
formulate knowledge about themselves, they have to make their speech acts count as
verdictives (namely, formulations of knowledge) within some communicative relationship.
Thus, when women communicate in a context of solidarity, they can legitimize each other's
competent subjectivity without resorting to masculine authority. Separatist feminist practices
have been effective inasmuch as they have succeeded in enhancing this kind of
communicative relationship. Discussion is important too, since it gives room to differences
among women and confirms the verdictive as opposed to expressive status of the discourse
produced: while no one objects to the mere expression of feelings, formulations of knowledge
are
open to challenge, since they commit the speaker to responding to objections, to
counterarguments, and to questions about evidence or reasons.
I shall now try to exemplify the three moves with reference to discourse about childbirth in
the contemporary Italian context.
2. The case of childbirth
The first two moves outlined above will be used here in the analysis of a sample of medical
3
advice books for pregnant women, which provide representations of childbirth and of related
aspects and functions of the female body. Regarding move (3), I shall comment on some of
the the ways in which the sample of women I interviewed talked about their own labour and
delivery.2 I shall focus attention on discursive structures and, therefore, I shall leave aside the
many complex issues regarding childbirth itself, as an event both individual and social,
natural and cultural, physical and psychological (cf. Jordan 1983; Colombo, Pizzini and
Regalia 1985; Treichler 1990; Vegetti Finzi 1991).
2.1. Medical discourse
In Western countries in our century, antenatal care involves practices which demand a
considerable amount of time and attention from women and which are sometimes physically
or psychologically invasive (cf. Shorter 1982; Oakley 1984). Although it is in many respects
in women's own interest, it is a form of external control which may provoke resistance and
has to be made acceptable and even desirable for women. This would seem to be the principal
communicative goal of medical advice books for pregnant women.
I have examined 34 books of this type published in Italy since 1960, including those
available in bookshops in 1995 (comments on 13 books published before 1981 have appeared
in Sbisà 1984a). The books examined include 17 works originally written in Italian and 17
works translated into Italian from various languages. Most books support current practices of
pregnancy and childbirth care, reflecting how these have developed. There are also books
which criticize certain aspects of medicalization, and propose non-violent, "natural" or
"active" childbirth (such as works by Leboyer, Odent, Kitzinger and Balaskas) or even the
woman's right to make choices of her own (Kitzinger 1987). I have not considered books
about home birth, which in Italy is a marginal phenomenon restricted to a cultural élite.
The language used in these books can be described and assessed in two ways, by
investigating firstly how each text addresses the reader it is targeting (the pregnant woman)
and secondly how it represents the object being dealt with (again, the woman through
pregnancy and childbirth).
4
In most cases, the addressee is characterized as a pregnant woman by the occasional or
continuous use of the second person deixis in phrases such as: "your child", "the doctor will
inform you...", "the aim of this volume is to help you...", "the meaning that this experience
will assume for you". The pregnant woman is addressed using exercitive speech acts (Austin
1975: 151, 155-57; Sbisà 1984b), which are speech acts such as advice, commands,
recommendations, exhortations, prohibitions, permissions, and presuppose a speaker who is
"one-up", thus assigning some kind of obligation to the addressee in order to channel her
behaviour. Since this kind of context precludes challenge, when descriptive and assertive
speech acts are issued within it, they play the same role as exercitives and assign the
addressee an obligation to believe. Observation of the verbal behaviour of obstetricians
confirms the exercitive features of doctors' language (Colombo, Pizzini and Regalia 1985:
144-82).
In order for exercitive speech acts to perform their role successfully, the addressee must be
willing to accept the speaker as endowed with some kind of relevant authority. In order for
them to elicit the response aimed at, the addressee has to be induced to align her/himself with
the speaker's goals. Thus, in the books examined, we find two main types of persuasive
strategy. The first type aims at making women feel incompetent. This is often achieved by
denying legitimation to any knowledge they may have acquired from sources other than
medical discourse, in particular from other women. The same persuasive effect is reinforced
by frequent allusions to the fact that women are not usually familiar with the information
contained in the book. In the earlier texts and the more traditional ones, authors threaten
women with dire consequences (such as tremendous suffering and loss of control) if they do
not acceppt being educated about childbirth (e.g. the section entitled "The not-educated
labouring woman" in Miraglia, Orlandini and Micheletti 1960). More often, however, the
pregnant woman is promised that she will become competent once she is educated in the
author's principles (or, as in Miraglia 1992, in any doctrine other than what she might think
for herself). The second type of strategy is designed to create involvement. Many books tend
to establish an emotional link between the pregnant woman and the author who is preparing
5
her for childbirth (who tends to identify her/himself with the actual professional taking care of
the actual reader). The woman is often reassured in advance about the physical symptoms or
problems she might have, which implies that she must be anxious or worried and that the
author (as well as the professionals taking care of the reader) is capable of eliminating the
causes of her anxiety. Since Kitzinger (1980), most books attempt to create involvement by
emphasizing feelings and emotions connected with pregnancy and childbirth . They ask the
reader to devote attention to her psychological states, and provide her with suggestions as to
how she might feel.
As for the representations of the object under consideration (the woman through pregnancy
and childbirth), the books convey to varying degrees some of the classic stereotypes of
femininity: weakness, fragility, unreliability, passivity, self-sacrificing motherly love. Such
stereotypes are transmitted to the reader by means of a seemingly descriptive notion of nature
which is actually normative. For instance, whenever a woman is advised to assume a certain
body position in labour, this is justified as being the most "natural" one. A related persuasive
strategy is also used, by which something is presented as an effect of cultural conditioning
with the aim of dismissing or changing it, thereby leading the woman to discover her
"natural" attitudes and behaviour.
Three of the stereotypes conveyed are weakness, fragility and unreliability. The female
body is weak, its energy is barely sufficient for the task of childbearing. It has to be helped.
The woman's mind is weak too, so she tends to be influenced by pre-scientific and
superstitious discourse and become discouraged in the face of difficult situations. During
pregnancy, she is in a state of psychological regression: more like a child than an adult. The
female body is inherently fragile, and even more so during pregnancy, when it is prone to a
whole series of abnormalities and diseases. It is fragile during the birth too, when it has to be
cut in order to prevent rupture. The woman's mind is fragile as well, and subject to nervous
breakdowns and maternity blues. The female body is unreliable: it is not strong enough to
protect the child and, what's more, it is unpredictable. Medical care purports to make it as
predictable as possible, and may even force it to respect pre-established standards. Thus the
6
"normal" maximum length of each stage of labour varies according to the author and year of
publication, and a shorter time does not imply that doctors have discovered that women are
delivering faster, but that in their opinion, more labours are in need of accelerating
procedures.
Another well-known stereotype, feminine passivity, emerges in the descriptions of various
functions of the female body. In most of the books I examined, as well as in other contexts of
scientific discourse (The Biology and Gender Study Group 1989; Martin 1991), the
presupposition of feminine passivity is conveyed systematically with respect to fertilization.
The ovum is described as passive ("the large, plethoric ovum lies inert in the tube", "it
follows its predetermined route", "waiting to be fertilized") and is assigned passive predicates
("it is made to enter the tube", "it is made to roll down the tube"). Sperms are represented as
being active (the predicates assigned to them are action verbs in the active voice) and are even
personified and endowed with the narrative role of the hero (as defined by narrative semiotics:
Greimas and Courtés 1979). Nature has entrusted them with the difficult task of reaching the
ovum and even of "attacking and conquering" it; they undertake a long journey through the
hostile environment of the female genital organs; a few of them survive this "Odyssey"; the
first sperm who manages to touch it is the "lucky one" who will penetrate it.
In descriptions of childbirth, and advice regarding it, the representation of the woman as
passive depends on a distinction between her and the uterus (Sbisà 1984a; see also Martin
1987:78-88). The uterus is active, but its activity is not a subject's activity; it is impersonal,
mechanical. At most, it represents the forces of nature (cosmic energies, for instance) as
opposed to the will, beliefs, and actions of the individual woman (Leboyer 1978, Balaskas
1983). Sometimes, the woman is instructed to be as passive as possible; if she is requested to
act at all, it is in order to obey some received instructions (the most passive way of doing
something), which are in turn aimed at preventing her from interfering with the mechanical
functioning of the uterus, with the obstetrician's actions, or (in books proposing "natural"
childbirth) with the forces of "nature". This stereotype is the one most convincingly
masquerading as neutral. However, when its expression involves the consideration of the
7
body as a machine and of organs as mechanisms, it reveals itself as a product of maledominated modern Western culture (Merchant 1980). Moreover, it is no coincidence that
whenever something is assigned active subjectivity in a scene connected to childbearing, it is
either "male" or on the male's side: e.g. the sperm as opposed to the ovum, or the disembodied
mind (a potential ally of the doctors in their task of controlling the female body) as opposed to
the female body. Finally, the separation of the woman from her uterus (a part of the same
body in which the feminine subject is embodied) appears to make sense only from a point of
view external and extraneous to the woman. As suggested by the Latin saying divide et
impera (divide and rule), a woman separated from her uterus and a uterus not belonging to the
woman will both be easier to control.
Thus, the representation of the labouring woman as passive seems to go along with the
expression in discourse of a perspective which is not hers or even sympathetic with hers.
There are three main actors in standard descriptions of childbirth; the woman, the child and
the doctor. The midwife is not usually given an independent role; from the mid 1970s
onwards, the father is often present as the fourth actor. Authors frequently betray their
identification with one of the male actors in the scene. They speak like doctors, using medical
terminology and describing childbirth as a doctor would see it. The father's perspective differs
very little from that of the doctor: they both take care of the woman (the father is sometimes
instructed to help the doctor keep the labour under control), observe the birth from outside (as
in the opening sentence in Forleo and Forleo 1983: "The hair can already be seen"), and
experience a strong emotional identification with the child. Due to the so-called
"unmarkedness" of the masculine gender (the fact that the masculine gender can be used to
refer to both male and female beings while the feminine gender cannot be so used), the child
is referred to using masculine noun phrases3 and, therefore, typically represented as a son.
Her/his cultural "masculinity" is sometimes emphasized by representing her/his journey
through the female genital organs as the continuation and conclusion of the sperm's former
adventure (another "Odyssey"). When birth is described from the child's point of view
(Leboyer 1974), the description is accompanied by images expressing stereotypical masculine
8
emotions (the woman as a prison, the woman as something from which one has to free
oneself, her womb as the place of perfect fusional love). As has been noted also by Adams
(1994), birth appears again as a metaphor of the constitution of the (masculine) philosophical
Subject, as in Plato's Myth of the Cave (Irigaray 1974). Of course, there would be nothing
illegitimate in expressing the points of view of child, father and doctor, were it not for the fact
that their coalition erases the woman from the scene of childbirth. When some space is
conceded to her, it is limited to her feelings and emotions and does not involve full social
recognition of her as a subject entitled to issue any speech acts other than expressives.
2.2. In search of the woman's point of view.
I now take a closer look at the medical advice books written by women who have critical or
innovative positions with respect to medical care in pregnancy and childbirth. Authors such as
Kitzinger or Balaskas are far more conscious of feminine subjectivity than most other authors
in my sample. Their books attempt to be less prescriptive, giving the pregnant woman a series
of choices about what to do in each situation. Descriptions are less univocal and are
formulated as sets of hypotheses about what may occur. Nevertheless, the way in which the
pregnant woman is addressed is still prevalently exercitive. The influence the author exerts is
gentle, relying chiefly on involvement, but the woman's preliminary incompetence and
anxiety are still taken for granted. Exercitive speech acts and their presuppositions seem to be
inherent to this type of publication. Thus Kitzinger (1987) uses exercitive language when
urging the reader to make her own free choices about childbirth care and instructing her about
how to behave with doctors.
Some traditional stereotypes continue to emerge here and there. In "active" childbirth, what
is really active are the forces of "nature" to which the woman has to abandon herself.
Sometimes the rhetoric of motherly love, manifest in the earliest books and nearly dismissed
in the 1970s, is re-evoked by stressing the importance of experiencing childbirth and thus
becoming a mother.
Finally, references to "nature" are still used in order to persuade. In descriptions of labour,
9
or in advice about how to behave during labour, the way the process of childbirth is said or
presumed to function is - more than ever - taken to be the "natural" one. What is described as
"natural" here is remarkably different from the books in favour of medicalization, but
references to "nature" still have the same persuasive value. In this respect, the "humanized"
approach to childbirth can be as normative as the technological one (as noted by Treichler
1990 in the context of the U.S. and by Regalia and Terzian 1992 with reference to Italian
obstetrical practice), so that the two may even collude with each other.
Unless the communicative relationship changes radically, no real space can be given to
women's subjectivity and agency. Attempts to give women an active role or insistence on
their right to choose the kind of childbirth care they prefer may result in promoting emotional
involvement in a traditional motherly role. They become protagonists in a script of which the
meaning is predetermined. That is not to say that there is no point in amending and improving
medical advice books (Bell 1994), in promoting assessments of the validity of routine medical
practice, or in urging women to take responsible choices about the kind of antenatal care they
want. But all this is not enough to guarantee that during pregnancy and childbirth women can
constitute themselves and be socially recognized as subjects.
2.3. Women's talk.
The women who actually give birth, however, can be expected to have their own point of
view about the matter. For that reason, in my search for a feminine point of view on
childbirth, I have also devoted attention to the ways in which women talk about childbirth. I
have collected and analyzed 53 recorded interviews with 20 women at their first experience of
childbirth; all the women were interviewed in the final term of pregnancy and again about one
month after childbirth; 13 of them were interviewed a third time in the second year after the
birth (Sbisà 1992). All the women, mostly middle-class, were living in Trieste at the moment
of the birth, which took place in the local maternity hospital. They had attended the hospital's
antenatal classes learning breathing techniques and/or read medical advice books; elective
cesarean section had not been planned for any of them. Medical care during the birth included
10
oxytocin drip and episiotomy, but not epidural anesthesia; there were two emergency cesarean
sections.
In my interviews, there are evident signs of the influence of stereotypes relating to the
female body. Some of these are traditional ones, such as the definition of pain in childbirth as
"a pain which is soon forgotten". Others are acquired through the language used in hospitals,
during antenatal classes, or in medical advice books and magazines. Words used in medical
descriptions of childbirth ("fasi", stages;
"contrazioni", contractions; "rilassamento",
relaxation; "respirazione", breathing) constitute the basic vocabulary with the aid of which
women imagine their forthcoming experience. Such terminology conveys a mechanical idea
of what the body will be doing, as well as an idea that what the woman herself will be doing is
something which requires training (pushing, for example, is sometimes described as the
performance of an "exercise"). The woman's passive role in medicalized childbirth is reflected
in the frequency of impersonal constructions and of action verbs of which the woman is not
the subject: "there were contractions", "it had hardly started", "it had gone one centimetre
further", "it was opening itself", "nothing was ready yet", "they took me to...", "they gave
me...". None of the women I interviewed expressed any open criticism of the standard
arrangement of childbirth, with its separation of female bodily functions from the woman's
mental attitudes. However, about a half of the women interviewed provided incomplete,
subjective and even erroneous versions of the instructions they had received, showing a
tendency to interpret such instructions in terms of their own personal beliefs and preferences.
This can be counted as a kind of resistance (Martin 1987: 140-44), based on the age-old
feminine strategy of appearing to obey while actually disobeying.
As for the experience of childbirth, in spite of the similarities in the event the women had
experienced and in their antenatal education and care, the 20 narratives I collected each told a
different story. However, two main strategies for coping with the experience of childbirth
emerged: the first involved trying to survive the event by emphasizing the aspects that made
them feel comfortable and by bracketing its troubling aspects; the second can be described as
an attempt to live through the event by facing up to the reality of the experience as directly as
11
possible and by viewing oneself as the agent of the process of giving birth. The instructions
received in preparation for childbirth, when taken in their literal sense, proposed the first kind
of strategy, in which the subject withdraws from the the body in labour and moves onto a
mental or spiritual level from which the labour can, hopefully, be controlled. Those women
who had low expectations for the experience of labour and were already keen to forget
childbirth soon (according to a traditional belief which I have already mentioned), were most
successful in using this strategy. Those troubling or painful aspects which could not be
bracketed during the event disappeared from conscious memory soon after. By declining to
elaborate the experience of childbirth, women make sure of their own survival as subjects,
thereby implicitly accepting its received, external and male-controlled representations. The
success of this strategy is not always guaranteed, however. Some women suffer a great deal
from unsuccessful attempts to bracket the violent physical impact of labour and may feel
humiliated if they cannot do so.
The other strategy, aimed at "living" childbirth rather than merely "surviving" it, appears to
be even more difficult and demanding. It involves paying attention both to internal sensations
and to external circumstances and actively making comments or taking decisions. Some
women who describe themselves as behaving like this tend to use action verbs in the first
person, thus representing themselves as active subjects of their own labour: "I wasn't
dilating", "I continued a centimetre at a time", "I let the contraction pass away", "I opened up
suddenly". Their narratives did not express the desire to withdraw elsewhere, but rather the
intention to face up to the situation, including its painful and troubling aspects. This kind of
attitude does not imply a distinction between body and mind, but considers the female body
and its organs as the body and organs of an embodied subject ("my uterus"). The 5 women
whose narratives describe their success in adopting this behaviour throughout the birth, either
gave wholly positive evaluations of their experience, or realistic ones which were basically
positive without hiding the negative sides.
My analysis of these cases - admittedly limited - suggests, once again, that there is no point
in looking for "the woman's point of view" on childbirth. The perspectives expressed by
12
individual women differ even within the same socio-cultural context and involve
compromises with received definitions of the event. The feminine point of view on childbirth
turns out to be something which cannot be discovered, but is constructed by each individual
woman in her effort to approach childbirth as a subject situated within the labouring body. A
point of view will not be characterized
by a specific organization
of representational
contents, but by the way in which the feminine embodied subject relates to her own
experience of childbirth. The strategy of "living" childbirth (rather than merely "surviving" it)
seems to be an example of a kind of approach to female bodily experience, which, by locating
the subject in the birth-giving body, enables her to formulate situated knowledge and
therefore to produce cultural elaborations of chilbirth from her own point of view.
3. Some final remarks about the female body and the feminine point of view.
My research experience has led me to believe that the construction of a feminine point of
view on a matter such as childbirth is based on the relationship between the embodied subject
and her bodily experience. The link between female bodily experiences and feminine
subjectivity creates some problems, however, which I shall now discuss briefly. I shall put
forward four points regarding respectively: the notion of female bodily experience, its role as
a condition for the development of a feminine point of view, the interference of technology
with female bodily experiences and the role of social recognition in the construction of the
feminine subject.
First, the very notion of "female bodily experience" is puzzling. I realize that we should not
define them as experiences which it is "natural" for women to have if we do not want to fall
into the essentialist trap. Nevertheless, I am convinced that there are experiences that are
specific to women because of the body they have. What I have in mind here is simply that
there is a set of constraints on our opportunities of experience, of which we have some kind of
pre-verbal awareness. These constraints, and the opportunities they allow, do not determine
the subject and her/his discourse, but locate her/his discursive productions, whatever their
content or structure may be, and enable the subject to take a situated perspective. In this sense,
13
nobody but women (having female bodily experiences) can undertake the construction of a
feminine point of view. But the results of such a construction are open, since what is
preverbal cannot be exhaustively represented and the living experience of one's own body will
thus always be a source of countless new representations. This allows for the evolution of
self-representations in individual life, for the evolution of cultural representations in history,
and for conflicts between received representations of oneself and personal bodily experiences.
Second, the idea that a subject's point of view is feminine in virtue of her relation to female
bodily experiences might be taken to imply that women have to go through certain
specifically female bodily experiences if they are to become feminine subjects at all. I am not
suggesting that there is any one particular bodily experience among the various ones specific
to a woman which she must go through. Since her body is female, she will have to live
through at least some of them. However, she will not be able to speak and act as a feminine
subject due to the experiences she has, but rather to how she relates to and elaborates them.
Thus, I think the experience of childbirth deserves attention not because of its supposedly
crucial place in women's lives, but because of the difficulties women encounter in
constructing their own point of view about it - difficulties I attribute partly to the influence of
a perspective on childbirth external to the woman and functional to the needs and interests of
those actors on the scene who are (or count as) male ones.
Third, one might wonder whether the interference of technology with female bodily events
might not be a further obstacle for the feminine subject, hindering her encounters with certain
bodily experiences. This is too complex an issue to discuss thoroughly here. As regards the
experience of childbirth, it is certain that medicalization interferes with it and can even cancel
out some aspects of it, but, as we have seen in 2.3 above, this does not necessarily prevent the
experience of one's own labouring body from filtering through. It is not the supposed
authenticity of her female bodily experiences which is central to the feminine subject, but the
attitude she adopts towards them. In childbirth, what is relevant to feminine subjectivity is
that a woman may represent herself throughout the event as a subject situated within the
labouring body and, therefore, with her own point of view.
14
Fourth, it should be remembered that the construction of a feminine point of view is not
complete unless it is socially recognized. The full recognition of someone's subjectivity
includes the social recognition of her/his competence not merely to express personal feelings
and opinions, but also to formulate knowledge: only through such a social recognition can the
expression of a feminine point of view count as the production of situated knowledge and lay
the foundations for new cultural elaborations. In this process (which, in my opinion, is far
from being fully accomplished), differences among women are continuously emerging.
Although consensus would make further elaborations easier, the construction of a feminine
point of view and therefore of feminine subjects does not depend on all women saying the
same things about childbirth or any other bodily experience. On the contrary, debate may be
of help in confirming women as subjects, provided it is not a competition in which the
competence of other participants is challenged or rejected, but a confrontation among subjects
who acknowledge each other's competent subjectivity and criticize each other's assertions on
the basis of argumentation.
Notes
(1) I am grateful to many women (feminists, colleagues, midwives) for exchanging ideas and
for encouraging me in my research on discourse about childbirth or in the writing and revising
of this paper. To mention just some: Paola Bono, Liana Borghi, Adriana Cavarero, Bruna
Cassol, Liliana Lanzardo, Francesca Molfino, Judy Moss, Patrizia Romito, Silvia Vegetti
Finzi.
(2) The Italian word "parto" refers to the birth-giving event (when emphasis is put on the
child the word "nascita", "birth", is used instead). To translate "parto", I shall use here
"childbirth" or, when this might be ambiguous, "labour and delivery". It has to be noted also
that the related verb "partorire" differs from "deliver" (which can be used for the doctor's
intervention on the woman: Treichler 1990:129) in that it obligatorily takes the woman as its
subject. The doctor's role in childbirth is expressed by saying that a woman has had her child
15
"with" a doctor ("ha partorito con.."), or by a causative construction ("far partorire").
(3) In Italian, the category of gender is expressed in the morphology of nouns, pronouns,
adjectives and articles.
References
Adams, Alice E. (1994) Reproducing the Womb. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
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