Maternal counter-narratives reconsidered

Studia ethnologica Croatica, 2020

INTRODUCTION Stories about the birth of children have been recorded by collectors in Ukraine since the mid-19 th century, however these records are episodic, superficial, and sometimes even accidental. When collecting data on maternity rites, ethnographers did not notice that they were mostly recording not the rite itself, but rather the story of the rite. The recordings made by Marko Hrushevskyi (Hrushevskyi 2006), Raimund Friedrich Kaindl (Kaindl 2000), Oleksandra Kondratovych (Kondratovych 2004), Vasyl Kravchenko (Kravchenko 2009), and Liudmyla Shevchenko (Boriak 2001) proved the most informative for us. Of modern studies on traditional maternity rites, we must highlight Olena Boriak's monograph The midwife in the cultural and historical tradition of Ukrainians: between the profane and sacred (Boriak 2009) and Iryna Ihnatenko's The female body in the traditional culture of Ukrainians (Ihnatenko 2013), as well as research by Valentyna Borysenko (Borysenko 1997), Stefaniia Hvozdevych (Hvozdevych 1997), Roman Huzii and Lesia Horoshko (Huzii and Horoshko 2010). However, these researchers have not paid attention to the importance of women's narratives about childbirth. The problem of motherhood as a specifically female experience has become urgent due to the appearance of modern research conducted from a feminist perspective. Margaret Mead first drew attention to the presentation of both the male and female experience in culture (Mead 1988). Contemporary Ukrainian scientist Oksana Kis also emphasises the importance of research into women's experiences (Kis 2012, 2017). The works of these researchers show a methodological basis for research into the specifically female tradition of storytelling about childbirth, which is scarcely significant in the male experience. A precise look at the woman's experience allows us to survey pregnancy for the first time from the point of view of the immediate subject of this life event-a woman who is expecting a child. Personal narratives that reflect this experience are the subject of this article. Until recently, the main controversy in folklore has involved the concept of folklore canon-which texts can be the subject of folklore research. Folklore canon, created on the basis of genres identified by researchers in the 19th century, is still current among scholars. Moreover, before examining any cultural phenomenon, the origin of folklore pregnancy as a chronotope of paradise and carnival motifs in describing the pregnant woman's bodily experience.

2020

Several years ago, I attended a women's retreat. Women of various ages were there, mingling and chatting. Conversations varied, but there was one theme that arose repeatedly. Picking up on the trend, one of my friends turned to someone and asked, "Why is it that any time a group of women get together, they end up talking about childbirth?" That question has stayed with me, and the longer I contemplate it, the more I find that most women feel compelled, at one point or another, to talk about their birthing experience(s). Regardless of whether the experience is good or bad, for most, it is unforgettable. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have famously asked, "Is a womb a metaphorical mouth?" (227). While they ask this question within the framework of sex and gender influencing use of language, I argue that not only does having a womb influence one's experience of the world and consequential story, but the carrying of a baby within that womb prompts a woman to share her story. Furthermore, evidence suggests that fewer interventions during birth increases the likelihood of a positive birth story. Birth has been happening since the early beginnings of mankind; yet, despite its prevalence, every birth story is somehow unique. Every pregnancy, labor, and delivery simultaneously share similarities which bind women together and differences which individualize them. Today, perhaps more than ever, women need to tell their stories of pregnancy and childbirth because those stories are largely being told for them in the dominant culture of the Western world. However, I recognize that much of my research focuses on women in dominant culture, which often concentrates on middle-class white women. The reality is that women of color and women in poverty continue to be underrepresented in studies. It is, therefore, invaluable to encourage all women to share their birth narratives to rectify homogenization and to allow them to represent the multifaceted experiences that exist. Women's perspective and influence on childbirth has been largely replaced by male influenced and dominated modern medicine. Furthermore, fictional, farcical representations of birth are being spoon-fed to the public and often taken as fact. Speaking and writing of their pregnancy and childbirth experience can be a way for women to reclaim the agency they have lost through the media's portrayal and the medicalization of birthing in which patriarchal agenda and technological knowledge have superseded women's ancient wisdom and practice of child birthing. The medicalization of pregnancy and delivery and the glorification of science over female experience and knowledge has not only devalued natural childbirth but it has also significantly silenced women and their stories through the framing of pregnancy as illness. Pregnancy is called a "condition" in the same way that a terminal illness is called a condition. Rachel Westfall explains, "The inability of women to conceal pregnancy in its later stages, the potential for fluid leakage, and the uncertain nature of the timing and outcome of delivery, are all reflected in dominant societal discourse regarding the fragility and unpredictability of the pregnant body. This discourse in turn reinforces the medicalization process" (264). Convincing women to think of themselves as delicate and in need while with child has been key, for only then will women allow someone else to direct their diet, exercise, delivery, and recovery process. As Ann Luce et al. explains, "By medicalising childbirth, the medical establishment rendered both women and midwives as passive agents in the birthing process. The female body, thus, was reduced to an inferior status, and childbirth was now something that was 'performed' on a woman, rather than something women performed'" (3). This narrative of pregnancy as sickness ironically turns women, who have traditionally been portrayed as powerful, life giving figures in mythology and tribal cultures, into helpless patients unable to give life without the influence of

This essay reads the conflict, ambivalence and guilt that pervade what I call " maternal chronicles " —a heterogenous set of autobiographical texts centering on the experience of mothering—as symptomatic of the postfeminist turn in Span

Women: A Cultural Review, 2020

In 1977 Adrienne Rich wrote, 'It is hard to write about my own mother. Whatever I do write, it is my own story I am telling'. Two years later, Michelle's Citron's film Daughter Rite, struggled with the same problem. It was, she later wrote, a daughter's film, 'incapable of imagining the mother's story'. The difficulty of imagining and conceptualising a specifically maternal subject, is an issue that has continued to preoccupy feminist scholarship, becoming in the past ten years once more an urgent political and theoretical topic. At the same time a number of female filmmakers have returned to the issues raised by Citron's film, using techniques which, like hers, also ask us to question the relationship between narrative, memory, and the various forms through which their claims to truth are made. Here I discuss two: Stories We Tell (Polley, 2012) and The Arbor (Barnard 2010). Both concern quests to recover the mother as subject, very different from the nurturing and devouring figure of Citron's film. Both manipulate and question footage that claims a direct, indexical relation to 'truth'; both construct a story which employs techniques of narrative fiction, yet operate through processes which challenge the authority of such narratives. In this article I explore the two films, to ask how far they succeed in bringing the maternal subject into view, and in so doing successfully challenge conventional notions of what a subject is and can be.

The society has an official story of birth that is endlessly repeated by institutional narratives and mass media communication. We can call it a “dominant fabula”. Fabula is the story of hospital birth as a unique culturally appropriate option that a woman has at the moment she gives birth to her child. In a globally connected culture, the dominant fabula gained competitors and thousands of different expressions of maternal subjectivity in form of birth stories, started circulating undermining the credibility and the authority of the official scenario. Through wide spread birth storytelling women become conscious of the choices and they acknowledged their rights in childbirth. Until recently, nobody thought of systematic psychological and physical abuse of childbearing women as a violation of basic human rights. Thanks to the flow of information and narratives, birth is becoming a whole different story. (Conference paper, unpublished in English)

maternalhealthandwellbeing.com

Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering, 2016

Please note the conversation is NOT in final format. The final/complete conversation may be found in my edited collection Maternal Thinking: Philosophy, Politics, and Practice, Demeter Press, 2009. The book also contains 15 plus chapters on the importance and impact of Ruddick's work http://demeterpress.org/books/maternal-thinking-philosophy-politics-practice/ A word about this interview. Our initial conversation took place in my apartment in the