Birthing Bodies Delivering Power in Anglophone Literature of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Abstract

This chapter examines four fictional narratives of childbirth in order to put forth some reading guidelines of birthing scenes at the intersections of gender, race, sexuality, and class according to the reproductive justice framework. Studying the narratives of deliveries in Anglophone literature reflects issues about physical motherhood, power, and the perception of bodies socialized as feminine. Despite the ordinariness of birth in societies, this crucial event is seldom recounted in literature. In most cases, an ellipsis or a summary comes to conceal the process of labor. The feminine body, conceived as obscene, is currently erased or dehumanized, and women’s voices are silenced. Birthing bodies, even more when they are racialized, are made mere objects of the obstetrical Western male power and gaze. Cultural and religious representations have considerably shaped the narratives of intimate feminine bodily experiences, notably through the decorporealization of the process of childbirth, and the devaluation of the materiality of motherhood. Reproductive justice allows us to care about specific forms of social oppression in childbirth and to question maternal ambivalence toward the desire to have a child or not. Shifting from an audience’s to a participant’s point of view, from fictional narratives to autobiographical ones, from male focalization to first-hand experience, enables us to discover poetical and political reappropriations of birthing that can change our perspectives on power and maternal bodies.