In the Beginning

In the beginning…. July 22, 2009 · Leave a Comment

I’d like to use this blog throughout the remainder of my time in the graduate program, as a place to collect thoughts, notes and links for ongoing and future projects, or just a place to think “out loud” about readings or concepts that I come across in my studies. Ideally, I’d like to keep this blog after the MA and into the PhD, and invite fellow students and professors to comment.

The birth narratives I’ve found so far July 23, 2009 · Leave a Comment

The following are links to blog entries by women who are recounting their birth experiences, which I’ve been calling “birth narratives.” This isn’t an exhaustive list, obviously, but rather a collection of links I’ve been able to find after searching for several days. I was surprised at how hard it was to find birth narratives, and I wonder if I’m just not searching correctly. I searched for several days in a row, because blog search engines, as far as I know, search through the tags of that day. What I found striking is that every one of these entries is, in one degree or another, are natural birth experiences, except for the last one. I thought this was kind of odd. I figured that when I started searching around for birth narratives, that I would find an equal number of “medical” and “natural” birth narratives, and maybe even more medical narratives. The reason for this, I guess, is because medical birth is more common nowadays than “natural” birth. I know that my search isn’t very scientific and not exhaustive, so maybe the fact that I have a lot more natural narratives is just a sampling error. I would like to hypothesize, however, based on my mini survey of the blogosphere, that a more scientific and exhaustive search would turn up more natural narratives than medical ones. I’m not sure how to test this hypothesis, but I do think it is worthy of a closer look. How does one “scientifically” and “exhaustively” search the ever changing blogosphere?

http://hulalula.wordpress.com/2009/07/07/birth-story-part-2-labor-delivery/ http://birth-joy.blogspot.com/2009/02/joshuas-home-waterbirth.html http://chazandginger.blogspot.com/2007/11/how-it-happened.html http://littlebabybat.livejournal.com/18959.html http://www.blogcatalog.com/blog/harvest-of-daily-life- 1/df11e2634f7dfb685eeb166d4eef4fdf http://www.givingbirthnaturally.com/childbirth-experience.html http://okaypeanut.com/2009/07/06/my-birth-story/ http://candchaney.blogspot.com/2009/06/birth-story-colin-michael.html

Some thoughts on the proportion of natural vs medical narratives July 23, 2009 · Leave a Comment

I would like to look further into whether more women blog about birth narratives who have had a natural birth, or if it is more equal than my initial search has revealed.

If more women who have had natural births are blogging than women who have had medical births, what might be some reasons?

-women who have had natural births remember their births better than women who have medical births. This can be investigated both by literature searches and interviews. A literature review might look at the influence of pain on memory, of medication on memory, of satisfaction in birth experiences, linked of course with natural vs medical methods, of the influence of expectation on memory, how deviation from the expectation affects satisfaction, etc. I could also interview women at varying degrees out from their birth (3 months, 6 moths, a year, 5 years, etc) and try to determine if women who have had natural birth experiences have a better memory than those who had medical births, and if that is linked to possible lack of medication or better satisfaction. (A paper by Marianne Sassi Matthias might fit in here, will have a blog entry to link to soon).

-women who have natural births might be more likely to blog. This is unlikely, but possible, but also hard to investiage. How to link the choice to have a natural childbirth with the personality characteristic that makes someone want to blog? But, I had to mention it. Perhaps women who have natural childbirths are more likely to be involved with activism, which would go hand in hand with blogging? This might fall in line with natural chidlbirth narratives as a ‘rhetoric of resistance.” (I hope to link to a discussion of a paper by Amy Koerber here, and a blog entry about “rhetoric of resistance” and childbirth later).

-Women who have natural childbirths might be more focused on the process of birth and thus more likely to blog about it, and women who have medical births might be more focused on the end product of birth (the baby) and less likely to recall or blog about their birth experiences. This could be researched through a literature review (again I think Matthias brings up a good point that I will discuss later and link to) and through interview.

Other possibilities? I will add them as I think of them.

Why I find this fascinating July 23, 2009 · Leave a Comment I typed in “childbirth” at google.com and the first page, and most of the second, is filled with pages that discuss what I would call the process of labor. The information seems to focus on the physiology and biology of labor, and the types of procedures to expect in the hospital. Early labor, false labor vs real labor, the loss of the mucous plug, what the uterus does during a contraction, all focus on the process the woman’s body will undergo. Labor and childbirth are presented as discreet, mechanical phases. Episiotomies, vaginal exams, C sections, fetal monitoring, all discuss the procedures that are done to the woman’s body, in an attempt to explain what to expect when you go to the hospital.

Mixed in with these results are videos of real childbirths and images, and on the second search results page, there’s one link to a page about doulas, and another to unassisted birth. The interesting thing to me, though, is how discreet, factual and neutral all this information seems to be. It all reads just like the information I read in my “What to expect when you’re expecting” book and my booklet from prepared childbirth classes. Which is to say, it seems like something you’d read out of a biology textbook.. This information is good if you can’t afford to go to a childbirth class, as it covers pretty much the same information.

However, I am personally not very interested in the medical view, or biological and physiological interpretation, of birth. I don’t really need to know what my uterus does during a contraction, or how the “stations” of the baby relate to my pelvis. First of all, this information really isn’t all that helpful to me, as I’m sure during the pain and excitement of childbirth I won’t be thinking “now my cervix is dilating and effacing and the baby is descending into the pelvis.” Second of all, none of this information really tells me anything about childbirth. It doesn’t tell me what a contraction feels like, how much pain I will be in, what my emotions will be at the time, or whether or not I will be hungry, will I use the bathroom at all during this process…etc. In essence, these authoritative, informative views do not allow me to insert myself into the description of childbirth, in order to be able to in some way imagine what the whole process will be like. Many sites even admit “you just don’t know until you get there,” as if to make up for the fact they are poorly preparing you for what is ahead.

No one really talks about what childbirth really is. I’ve only known one other woman in my lifetime personally who had kids. Both times were C sections, and when I asked her about the experience, all she really had to say was how she was prepped for surgery, what the surgery itself entails, and that she and the baby ended up being healthy. I asked my mother, when I learned that I was pregnant, about her childbirth experience. She told me about epidurals and inductions, but nothing about pain or emotions. It’s almost as if these women, my friend and my mother, were just recycling all that they had ever heard about childbirth, and not actually reliving their own experience.

In “The Mask of Motherhood,” Susan Mauchart explains part of the reason that women these days, in our own culture, are so ill prepared for the pain and life changing experience of childbirth is because we don’t tell each other about it. Motherhood has been made so invisible in our culture that even we don’t talk about it amongst ourselves. She terms this as a betrayal.

I was in search of real information about childbirth, and all the searching through web pages wasn’t helping at all. Were women talking about their childbirth experiences? How were they talking about them? I initially thought to search through discussion forums, but I decided against that, as what I wanted to read was an unadulterated account of childbirth. Discussion forums seem limiting, to me, as there is a limited amount of space (whether real or imagined- after all, discussion entries are usually short) and they are usually guided and moderated, thus authority is inflicted on those who participate. I decided to search for blogs, where women were retelling and discussing their birth experiences. I thought a blog was a perfect site for this discourse, as a blog is really an instrument of personal agency. In a blog, a person can say whatever they want, the account can last for as long as they want, and a person also has a choice in how insulated from the outside world they want to be- through making their blog accessible to only a few private viewers, and comment moderation. It seemed a safe space for women to talk freely about their experiences.

My initial hope was to find a variety of birth narratives, and divide them along the lines of “medical” and “natural” birth. I wanted, that is, to find a variety of women with a variety of childbirth experiences who discussed their childbirth experiences in and out of the hospital, with and without pain medications, etc. Then, I planned on comparing that discourse to the institutional discourse. Did women who have “medical” childbirths recount their childbirth in a medical way? Did women who had “natural” childbirths phrase their experience within the rhetoric of natural childbirth? Moreover, and more importantly to me, could I insert myself into these narratives and gain a better understanding of childbirth, and what I’m in for?

Could a “personal agency of web 2.0” allow for women to make visible that which our culture has made invisible? Could we finally start telling each other about childbirth? Could a “personal agency of web 2.0” allow me to participate, even in an imaged way, in the process of childbirth?

What I found was extremely interesting. Blog entry after blog entry were by women who had varying degrees of natural childbirth. Some women had given birth in the hospital, but without drugs, and others at home with midwives in attendance. This was interesting, because I searched the blogosphere for days, and I could not find a birth narrative by a woman who had a completely medical birth. My search of the blogosphere was in no way scientific or exhausting, rather it was a precursory glance. I searched using many search engines and many blog providers, however, and I could not find one birth narrative by a woman who had a c section or epidural.

Why? Is it because medical childbirth is so commonplace in our society, that women don’t think it worthy of blogging about? Is it because women like my friend and mother, who had medical births, couldn’t remember much about them? Is it because women who have natural childbirths are in some way more likely to be bloggers? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I think they are worthy of further study. Is the rhetoric of natural childbirth a rhetoric of resistance? Do women who have natural childbirths in some way feel that they are bucking the system, and that they need to be heard? Where and how does the discourse of our culture, the rhetoric of childbirth, intersect and interact with personal discourse of childbirth? This is something I hope to explore further in the future.

Initial Impressions of the Narratives July 23, 2009 · Leave a Comment

While these narratives do discuss the process of labor and are structured around the process of labor in the sense that the “beginning” is before labor or pre-labor, “the middle” is labor and “the end” is baby born, what is different about these narratives vs. websites I had seen is that the process is described from the mother’s own point of view. Instead of talking about the process her body was going through during labor, the mother discusses her subjective experience. These are fascinating and emotional narratives, replete with plenty of pathos. I can definitely insert myself into these narratives, much like reading a story and being able to get into the head of the characters. This isn’t a cold, neutral and mechanical view of birth.

The exception is the one narrative that was a planned C section. There was of course no labor process for the woman to recall, and her focus was the baby, not the process her body was going through. The details of the surgery are quite scant, probably reflective of the fact that she was not an active participant in what was happening to her, and that she was focused soley on the birth of a healthy baby.

One thing that always sticks out to me is the few instances of women talking about their “failure to progress.” I wonder if this is because we have been taught that labor is a discreet, mechanical process, and when our own subjective experience doesn’t meet those expectations, we feel failure. Instead of feeling that our culture’s view of childbirth is wrong, we feel wrong. I wonder if this is something women in other cultures feel. Is this a natural emotional response in childbirth, by that I mean universal, or is this “imposed” by a cultural, medical rhetoric of childbirth?

Words used to describe non medicalized birth July 24, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Below are some words I’ve pulled out from websites that endorse natural childbirth used to describe non-medicalized birth. I’m sure there’ s more, but these seem to be the most common, and I hope to add to this list over time. I’ve presented them in a sort of free floating, “tag cloud” format:

conscious births, natural birth, normal birth, safe birth, free, gentle, natural process, rite of passage, superior outcomes, lower risk, high satisfaction, supported, safe, empowered, undisturbed, beautiful, natural, normal

What the women are saying July 28, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Are women using the same words to describe their experiences with natural childbirth as the activist sites do? More clearly, do women’s discourse mirror the institutional discourse? Here are some tags I’ve pulled from the narratives I have read. These are the women’s own words:

natural, nature, pain, strong, hard, pleased, difficult, hard, surreal, strange, painful, tired, hurt, tortue, panic, relief, intense, exhausted, odd, amazed, elated, happy, beautiful, challening, amazing, awesome, miracle, sacred, proud just to compare, here are some tags for the one medical birth narrative I have (the C section): scary, nervous, weird, strange, awkward, happy, proud, blessing

One interesting thing to note: websites that endorse and argue for natural childbirth (what I’m calling “institutional” discourse) break up their discussion of natural birth. There is a discussion of the benefits of natural childbirth, then usually a discussion of the process of labor. On the other hand, when reading these birth narratives, these women do not stop in the middle of their experience to go on a tirade about the benefits of natural birth. Their experience is tied to the process of birth, and their discourse reflects that. It is intimate and of the moment, not abstract at all. Thus, it would be difficult to compare the women’s discourse to institutional discourse if I expected the women’s discourse to reflect exactly the structure of institutional discousre. Instead, taken together, the “benefits + process” of the insitutional discousre can be compared to the women’s experience.

The Rhetoric of Labor July 29, 2009 · Leave a Comment

An interesting difference to note between sites dedicated to childbirth and the narratives of women who have given birth is the way labor is discussed and described.

In my pregnancy advice book and my prepared childbirth class, labor is discussed in much the same way you would expect a biology textbook to describe labor. The phases of labor are broken up into discreet units (pre, early, active, transition, pushing, placenta and so forth), and each phase is associated with distinct biological and physiological processes (loss of mucous plug, bloody show, timing of contractions, etc.) I was surprised that www.birthingnaturally.net, a website dedicated to natural birth, also described labor in such a way. The language used in this medical narrative of childbirth, then, focuses on labor as composed of discreet phases, a focus on the mechanical process of labor.

Therefore, my childbirth class is much like a health class. I’ve learned all about the biology and physiology of labor. I find it interesting that labor and birth are described this way to women. After all, I don’t care much about the physiology of labor. I care about how I will feel, what I can expect. I wonder, then, how would women talk about labor? Would they describe things like loss of mucous plugs, bloody show, would they mention transition phase and such? IT seems to me that this textbook description of labor is more helpful to a doctor or a nurse, or some other health care giver, and not to me, as the woman who will potentially be on the receiving end of all this biology.

While my analysis hasn’t been exhaustive or necessarily even scientific, I can see some differences in the way women themselves describe labor. Time and time again in these narratives a pattern emerges that is complementary to the medical narrative, but also wholly different. It goes something like this: medical narrative: Pre labor, early labor, active labor, transition labor, pushing, delivery of placenta birth narrative: nesting instinct and experience of contractions, describing the awareness of the onset of labor and either the trip to the hospital (for those giving birth in the hospital) or the calling of the midwife, describing what they were thinking and feeling emotionally, describing the actions of the people around them, such as family, the midwife, the nurses etc, the processes of setting up (hooking up to monitors or getting birthing pool ready), then the focus is turned inward again and the woman describes her physical ordeal of birth as well as her emotional ups and downs during this time, then a brief discussion of emotions after the birth. These narratives focus not only on physical sensation, but on emotions, thoughts and relationships.

Needless to say, you can compare the women’s narratives to the medical narrative and guess when she was in early labor or transition. What I find interesting and plainly obvious is how much more rich, both in information and in emotion, these birth narratives are. While of course every woman’s experience is different, there seems to be a plain pattern to all women’s experience. Instead of distilling this down into its medical essence, however, as the medical narrative of labor does, it may be more beneficial and informative to impart some of the actual experiences of women during labor to women who are expecting.

I feel that reading these narratives gives me much more knowledge and empowerment of what to expect during labor, and some information about how to gauge my own experience. Instead of focusing on whether or not I’ve lost my mucous plug or have bloody show, I can pay attention to my focus- is it outward, or inward?

I wonder if this medical narrative is the reason that women often feel at some point during labor that they are not “progressing” far enough (definitely a medical term) and feel like they are failing, or that they want to give up. Is this feeling a natural feeling to experience in this transition to mother, or is this imposed, an artifact of the medical narrative on the birth narrative?

An article by Kim Hensley Owens August 3, 2009 · Leave a Comment

In looking for some scholarly support for my understanding of personal agency and blogging, I came across an article entitled “Confronting Rhetorical Disability: A Critical Analysis of Women’s Birth Plans,” by Kim Hensley Owens. It is published July 2009 Issue of Written Communication.

While Owens is looking at birth plans in her article, I think a lot of what she says can be applied to women blogging about their birth narratives. Owens looked at birth narratives online and interviewed or surveyed subjects about writing their birth plans, and what role ultimately the birth plans served for them in their birthing experience. Here I’d like to summarize and highlight some main points in this article and discuss how it might apply to a personal agency in blogging about birth experiences.

“In hospital childbirth, technological authority has come to supplant bodily authority.” (248)

Here, Owens is discussing the trend in hospital birth to privilege technological expertise over the woman’s subjective bodily experience. She posits than one reason a woman might write a birth plan is to try to reclaim “bodily authority” or to somehow combat the “technological authority” overruning her experience. When technological authority, which in this case I take to mean the data from technology (fetal monitors, etc) and the expertise of the hospital staff, override a woman’s bodily authority, or her experience of what her body is going through, what we’re talking about is the loss of a woman’s agency to the medical establishment. I wonder if blogging about her birth experience somehow allows a woman to reclaim some of her agency that is lost in this experience or perhaps an attempt to “re-privilege” bodily authority. The birth narratives I have collected have mostly included natural birth experiences, so the latter might be more accurate.

“…the process of writing a birth plan…can nonetheless empower women.” (249)

Owens discusses in her article that birth plans are not as legally authoritative as some women might wish them to be, and ultimately not be of much help in a hospital birth setting, as they are often ignored or despised by hospital staff. While the birth plan may not direct the birth experience as much as women might want it to, it can certainly still empower the women.

Similarly, blogging about her birth experience might empower a women to have the ultimate control over her birth experience- how she remembers it. I wonder if blogging can be a way for a woman to “reframe” her birth experience and deal with disappointments? Could blogging be a tool for women to deal with a loss of agency during their birth experience? Even women who have natural births at home, who may be even more empowered during their birth experience than their hospital bound counterparts, may experience a loss of agency, as I will discuss in another posting, because the body in a sense takes over during birth. Even for natural birthers, then, blogging may be a way to deal with this temporary loss of control and power.

“Technology can serve to silence women and to supplant, rather than to supplement, bodily knowledge.” (251)

In the hospital setting, technology dis-empowers women, as discussed earlier. In blogging, a woman is using technology to reassert her agency. In a way, she is using technology to battle technology. This is interesting in that web 2.0 technology is widely available and very “usable” for most people, a certain kind of grassroots or public technology, while hospital technology represents another kind of technology, one only accessible to the “elite,” trained doctors and medical staff.

In discussing the supplanting of bodily authority with technological authority, Owens says “This shift in the hierarchy of knowledge is one reason that some women have begun writing birth plans.” (251)

Indeed, it might be argued the same reasoning could apply to blogging.

“…many women come to believe in the potential of bodily knowledge, which leads them to try to resist childbirth as a technologically mediated event.” (251). Here Owens is discussing the reason why many women write birth plans- to try to resist childbirth as a “medicalized” situation in need of technological intervention- which is how doctors and hospitals usually view birth. Birth plans are thus a form of resistance. I wonder if blogging about natural childbirth is also a form of resistance- or that natural childbirth itself is a form of resistance that is expressed through blogging.

As Owens later writes, “Add to this the numerous technologies brought to bear on the birthing body, and it is not difficult to see why women must feel they must write a birth plan to insert agency into this process.”

Here, women are using a certain technology, a writing technology, to combat medical technology. Similarly, it may be that blogging, a web2.0 technology, is being used by women as an “agency enforcing technology” to combat the “agency undermining technology” of the medical establishment.

“…most of the women I surveyed and whose online birth narratives I read found their birth plans of little help.” (251)

The birth plan is an attempt by a woman to exert some agency over the birth experience. If this fails, could blogging about the birth experience be an attempt to “complete” their agency, by making up for the loss of it during the birth experience?

“For…many women, birth plans are equated with natural childbirth. One implication here is that “natural childbirth” is…an aberration.” (252)

This might explain why I found more blogs narrating natural childbirth than medical birth. It could be, that if blogging is used as a discourse of resistance, then it would make sense that more women blog about their natural childbirth experiences than women with medical birth experiences.

“…by writing birth plans, women seek to triumph over this loss of rhetorical power.” (266)

Owens discussing the “rhetorical disability” of women’s birth plans. I read this to mean that a woman’s attempt to control her birth experience, through the use of a birth plan, is often ignored or overriden, resulting in a “rhetorical disability” because they are largely silenced in this process and are seen as having little control or power.

If birth plans are a way of women trying to “triumph over this loss of rhetorical power,” I wonder too if blogging serves the same purpose? I wonder if blogging about birth later is a way for women to try to resolve this “rhetorical disability” they experience during birth?

Finally, Owens states “Additionally, the collective power of birth plans, shared over time with medical staff, might lead to enhanced understanding of birth and real changes in birth practices.”

Owens is discussing here that over time, women writing birth plans may help to change birth practices in the hospital, even if they seem to serve little purpose now. I find this quote especially salient in light of web 2.o and personal agency. Over time, women blogging about their birth experiences may help to change the discourse surrounding birth. It may be, that overtime, participation in the aggregate – one woman contributing her voice to many- may help us to shift how we talk about birth, which will help to change how we view birth, or more importantly, how we view the woman in birth.

Blogging and “reframing” August 4, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Marianne Sassi Matthias, in an article entitled “Problematic Integration in Pregnancy and Childbirth: Contrasting Approaches to Uncertainty and Desire in Obstetric and Midwifery Care,” published in 2009 issue of Health Communication, discusses several differences in the way expectation, uncertainity and problems are handled in two contrasting forms of materinty care. While Mattias discusses several aspects of what she calls “problem integration,” what I found most interesting, and perhaps most applicible to a discussion of personal agency, was what she called “reframing.”

Women who had unexpectedly had C sections instead of vaginal delivery, were able to cope by reframing their experience. Instead of focusing on the delivery as the most important aspect of birth, these women shifted their focus on the end product-the baby- as the most important aspect of birth. In this way, these women were able to deal with the stress of an unexpected surgery, and the disappointed at “failing” a vaginal birth. However, one woman in the study, a home birth advocate, was unable to reframe her experience and maintained that the delivery process was just as important as the end product-a healthy baby, and thus years later was still dealing with the emotional trauma of having had a C section isntead of a natural, vaginal birth.

This started me thinking about another reason women might blog about their childbirth experiences. Blogging might serve as a way for women to “reframe” their experience, or to emotionally cope with the inability to reframe, or even a way to resist reframing.

I was struck when reading these narratives how the women who gave birth in the hospital were not always as detailed about the process of birth and seemed to focus more on the baby. The natural homebirth narratives seemed more focused on details leading up to the birth and the labor itself than the medical narrativess (whether the birth at the hospital was natural or not). I wonder if this might be evidence of the “reframing” that Mattias discusses. Could women who had birth in a medical setting, whether the birth was natural or not, be focusing more on the birth of the baby in order to deal with dissapointment at their birth experince, while women who gave birth at home are focusing on the delivery in order resist reframing? As stated elesewhere in this blog, women who are birthing at a hospital experience a loss of agencyin many ways: the technology of the hosptial and the agency of the staff and doctor almost always preclude and eclipse any personal agency a woman has in her birthing experience. In my search of childbirth preparation materials, time and time again I was reminded by the author that the most important thing about birth is the delivery of a healthy baby, and that is what I am supposed to focus on. Obviously, according to Matthias’ article, not every woman is able to reframe her experience to focus solely on the baby, and should they have to?

Perhaps women blogging about their birth experiences are resisting the cultural discourse telling them to reframe, and are instead exercising their agency to reclaim what they feel is a very important aspect of birth- the labor and delivery process.

Social captial and participation August 4, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Barbara Ley, in an article called “Vive Les Roses!: The Architecture of Commitment in an Online Pregnancy and Mothering Group,” published in the 2007 Journal of Computer- Mediated Communication, discusses the technical and social architecture of an online discussion forum, and how those architectures foster commitment among its members. One of the key ingredients for commitment to occur, was the generation of social capital. Ley defines social capital as the “‘material’ that keeps social structures such as support groups together and determines their strength” (1390).

I felt that this discussion of social capital was interesting and pertinent to the discussion of blogging and personal agency, because it reminded me of the concept of participation discussed in Convergence Culture. In order to get people to participate in a larger discussion, they must be interested and emotionally invested. What is going on in the discussion has to be personally meaningful to them, and they need to feel that their participation, their contribution, matters. It seems that any discussion of personal agency on the web is tied to the ability to participate in the larger discussion, by creating and investing in social capital.

The structure of a discussion forum seems quite accommodating to the generation of social capital- people can contribute to discussion threads and message privately; the whole structure is similar to one large conversation.

But what about a blog? It is easy to view a blog posting as decontextualized, a lone voice crying out in the wilderness. However, blogs generate a sense of interconnectedness as well, and have great capacity for generating social capital as well.

Not only can people comment on an individual posting, but most bloggers keep a list of links on their site to websites and other blogs they find interesting and personally meaningful. Thus, perhaps by looking at the websites and blogs an individual blogger links to, we can view their posting as part of a larger conversation.

I took a look at the blogs on which I found my original birth narratives, and categorized their sites according to the types of sites/blogs they link to. I was trying to answer the bigger question, why might these women be blogging about their birth experiences? Are these personal blogs to keep in touch with family, or might these blog entries be an attempt to enter into a larger conversation, perhaps one involving activism and natural birth?

Three of the sites seemed purely personal- I could find no outside links to any kind of birthing sites. Two were what I would call “activist” sites- these narratives were posted on a blog that seemed entirely geared toward promoting natural birth. The last two were a combination of personal blog and activism- these blogs appeared personal in nature and had links to other personal blogs, but also links to sites about natural birth.

I think that this is important for two reasons. First, I think that any discussion of agency should be linked to motivation. Is it enough to say that these women are participating in a larger discourse- possibly one of resistance, or should we take a look at why these women are blogging. I do not wish to “co opt” another woman’s discourse and claim she is resisting a cultural discourse of childbirth, when she might simply be trying to keep in touch with family and friends. Therefore, I think that any discussion of discourse on blogs should take into account evidence of motivation, and this leads to my second point, that the motivation, the agency, of an individuals discourse on the web is linked to social capital. Not only do people generate social capital by participation on the web- blogging, posting and such, but they contribute to social capital by linking their site to sites they find personally meaningful. Any time we discuss participation on the web, it is important not to decontextualize it, but it is necessary to look at the larger picture- how these people link themselves to other conversations.

Some Final Thoughts August 5, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Trying to wrap up this project is really impossible. This is, I believe, a very rich area of inquiry, and there are many, many ways I think this project can be interpreted and pursued. I think I have done a good job of raising a lot of interesting questions and I hope to shape these into future areas of inquiry. Really this blog is just a collection of thoughts and ideas that I collected as I went through this class and the readings, from our class discussion and looking at natural birth websites and blogs. In order to sort of conclude things for now, however, I decided to try to address some common threads in the class wiki, as applies to this project.

Participation/Motivation

One common area of discussion in our class wiki has been on trying to understand why people participate in web 2.0- what motivates them. I have done a lot of thinking about this and how it applies to my project. Why would any given woman decide to post on the Internet what has to be one of the most intimate events in her life? I think that there are many possible reasons. Some women keep up blogs in order to keep in contact with friends and family, so posting about her intimate experiences is a way to share her innermost thoughts and feelings, and one of the most life changing events in her life. What is interesting to me is that these blogs are not private. It is possible to make a blog private and invite users, so a woman who is keeping a blog just for personal reasons could make it to where only her friends and family see it. However, this might run contrary to why people blog in a larger sense- to “put their voices out there,” for lack of a better term. Other women who blog in this area seem to be connected to a larger conversation- one of natural birth advocacy. It could be that by blogging about their own experiences, they are adding their voices to the collective, hoping that the more people who talk about this, the more it becomes known, that some changes may occur in the health and legal systems concerning this area. Some women may simply blog out of loneliness- hoping to connect to others with similar experiences. It is really difficult to say without actually contacting these women and talking to them, but I think that clues to their motivation can be gleaned by looking at their site- at their social capital, as I have said before- and look at the links they provide on their page, to try to find out what is meaningful to them, to identify what conversation they see themselves contributing to. Any of the motivations for blogging about one’s birth experience could be the same for anyone participating in any web 2.0 endeavor. A sense of connectedness, of belonging, is definitely part of it. But also, just being heard in a world where so many of our voices often don’t seem to count, is part of it as well. Motivation for participating in web 2.0 is possibly a collage of reasoning: social conventions, loneliness, empowerment, and availability would all seem to coalesce to create an ideal situation for participation. In any case, it is clear, that a prerequisite for participation is that the subject material be personally meaningful.

Expertise/Authority

It has been debated on our class wiki whether we are creating a new authority on web 2.0 or destroying conventions of authority all together, whether or not we are creating new expertise or abandoning it in favor of community. I like to think that we are not so much destroying authority, but trying to place it within everyone’s reach, and trying to at the same time, create a new expertise, one that doesn’t rely on ivy league degrees and book learning, but on experience and social construction of meaning. In these blogs, I found a rich source of information about childbirth. Not about the biological and physiological process of birth, not some high school health class interpretation of what it would be like to be a brand new mother, but something richer and more real. Narrative after narrative describing what it felt like to give birth, what happened and how, gave me a real understanding, I think, of what childbirth is and what it means. I feel more prepared after reading a handful of blogs than I do after taking a hospital sanctioned childbirth class. And who am I to believe? A medical establishment’s interpretation of what childbirth is, what is most important during that process? An establishment whose authority is centered in education and training, whose experience is based around what the practitioners encounter, not their patients? Or a handful of women, describing the visceral reality of birthing a human being? I think that at one time I might have privileged the medical establishment’s view of things, as ludicrous as that seems now. But now I live in a world where real people can have authority, and expertise, because they claim it on the Internet, where most of traffic everyday in thought and emotion. Our information now comes from one another’s experience- not one or two experiences, but the collective impression of hundreds of individual encounters. We must still have the old authority and expertise, but it must be carefully balanced with what we really know, from what we and others like us experience.

Individual/Community

Does a person start a blog in order to express themselves, or to participate in a community. No one is an island, but is the primary function of web 2.0 individual expression or communal understanding? I would argue that some axis exists between the individual and community, and the answer is somewhere on that continuum. These women are expressing themselves, claiming their experiences, but they are doing it for all to see, and by not making their blogs private, are adding their voices to a collective. We can not lose site of the individual on the web, and we cannot privilege the aggregate over the single person. But I wonder if the web is overturning that old psychological rule- that people act differently in numbers than they do singally? IS it really a sort of mob rule on the Internet, or is it the first time we have a better, thinking collective?

Knowledge generation

I agree that one of the most important functions of the web is for knowledge generation. Not in the sense of rewriting encyclopedias so that no one really remembers what is real anymore, or that what is real is only what is agreed upon (but any good social constructivist would argue that is how it is anyway). But in the sense that together, discussing, posting and participating as a group through the experience and will of the individual, we are learning a lot more about what it is to be human. I had no real idea about what birth was. I thought “you go to the hospital, you get an epidural, out comes the baby.” A classic American view of birth. After watching “The Business of Being Born,” I thought “these women are nutcakes. No one does this. It’s a fluke.” But after surfing the web and reading so many different viewpoints of birth and experiences, I realized that those who birth are the people I should be talking to, and listening to about birth, not those deliver. There is a big difference. I know so much more now not just about birth, and all its incarnations, but about the social, economic and political influences that dictate what birth is like in this country, and more about being a woman and mother than any feminist rhetoric ever taught me was possible.

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Uncategorized disciplinary rhetoric and resistance August 4, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Amy Koerber discusses rhetorical ageny and resistance in breasfeeding in her paper “Rhetorical Agency, Resitance and the Disciplinary Rhetoric of Breasfeeding,” published in the 2006 issues of Technical Communication Quarterly. I feel that a lot of what she discusses in this paper can be directly applied to childbirth. Here I pull out what I believe are some main points relevant to my own discussion. “Although disciplinary power, as Foucault described it, is less visible than the more obvious forms of power that preceded it…its ultimate effect can be to heighten the visibility of subjects’ bodies in relation to institutions such as medicine” (88)

Although this paper discusses breastfeeding, I thought this quote could equally apply to childbirth and how a woman loses agency during labor and delivery at the hospital. In a sense, while a woman is birthing at a hospital, indeed through her entire pregnancy, her body’s “visibility” is definitely heightened, while at the same time, her personal sense of control and power is undermined. The medical establishment views a pregnant body as an almost pathological condition, or at least a potential pathological condition, and all the technology and education of medical staff is brought to bear on that body. However, how a woman is feeling, what she is thinking, and how she perceives her condition is hardly ever, if ever, considered.

Thus, I believe that the discourse surrounding pregnancy and childbirth can be seen as a disciplinary rhetoric. Not only are pregnant and birthing women told repeatedly what they can and cannot do, there is a subversive, and more persuasive, element of interaction inside the medical sphere that undermines a woman’s sense of authority in her own experience.

I have personally found this to be frustrating and somewhat scary. At first I felt that I could resist outright authoritative discourse, people and sources that told me to “do this, don’t do that.” However, when I go to the doctor’s office and everything has to do with the state of my body, it is much easier to find myself giving control of my experience over to the doctors and the technology. It is largely the things that are not said, the things taken for granted and performed on my person, that are the most subversive type of discourse.

“…the disciplinary power of breastfeeding discourse lies not in any single message about what women should do, but in the mixed messages that circumscribe what their bodies can do” (88) “…disciplinary power can be understood as not only dictating what subjects should do, but also as producing the very rhetorical situations in which they act by specifying what their bodies can do” (89).

I found this particularly salient when thinking of the discourse surrounding childbirth. I have been attending a birthing class at the hospital I plan to give birth, and they outline three distinct versions of childbirth, “rhetorical situations” if you will. The first is a “natural childbirth,” and a video, the instructor and a guidebook outline exactly what that entails at the hospital and what the laboring woman is allowed to do, a more medical view of birth, discussing the various pain medication options and interventions a woman might expect to experience or make use of, and the C section. By watching this video, it is clear that according to the medical establishment, there are three acceptable ways to give birth, and all of these occur at the hospital. One thing I found to be quite interesting were the disconnect between what was said in the video, at what is practiced in the hospital. The video used by the hospital to teach us what it will be like giving birth outlines all manner of possible things such as: laboring in a tub, changing positions, using a midwife or doula, and birthing balls, to name a few. However, after the video ends, the nurse then gets up and says “even though the video says this, we don’t do that…” then crosses several of those “options,” off the list. So, all that is remaining is a purely medical birth situation, and we are told exactly what we can do during childbirth: lay in the bed and have everything done to us.

“…the acts of resistance…begin as active selection among discursive alternatives” (88)

While natural childbirth is sort of presented as a “discursive alternative” in medical rhetoric, I think it really is an alternative that is brought to bear by cultural rhetoric. We are all vaguely aware that such a thing exists, but it is viewed largely as an aberration. Women who decide to opt for a natural childbirth, whether at the hospital or at home (or in a birthing center) are choosing a certain alternative, albeit one that is hardly encouraged and barely visible. I believe that women who opt to have a natural childbirth are resisting the current cultural and largely medical discourse surrounding childbirth. I also believe that women who choose to blog about their experience are further resisting this discourse by contributing their own.

“…the long standing tendency for women to see far more examples of bottle-feeding mothers than breastfeeding mothers often leads breastfeeding women to doubt the capabilities of their own bodies” (92) “…pregnant women often take a breastfeeding class offered by the hospital where they plan to give birth. However, this in itself is not enough to make breastfeeding a normal activity…” (92)

This is directly applicable to birthing. Cultural norms show us images of women birthing in hospitals, usually given drugs and hooked up to various technologies. We have hardly any idea of what a natural childbirth might look like. So, even though the medical community, if even through a sponsored video presented in a childbirth class, admits such a thing exists, we have no real cultural reference for it. It is difficult to have natural childbirth in the US because for one, it is so hard to assert one’s agency while at the hospital, but also because most of us don’t know how, because we barely know it exists. I remember my reaction when I first saw “The Business of Being Born,” a documentary showing home births in the US. My first reaction was one of fear and disgust, largely because everything I was seeing in this documentary was contrary to what I had been raised to see, and think, about childbirth.

“…to challenge physicians’ authority some interviewees emphasized the unique perspective that the distinctly non medical knowledge of an organization such as La Leche League provides to breast feeding women…” articulating a “need for alternatives to mainstream medical discourse” (93).

Here, breastfeeding women seek out non medical discourse in order to be able to empower themselves to breastfeed. I think, that in a way, women who are blogging about their natural childbirth experiences do so out of a recognized need in our culture for a non medical discourse of childbirth. By putting their voices, their experiences, out there, these women are helping to form a discourse of childbirth that is based in women’s experiences, something badly needed in our maternity care system. In this way, I believe, the discourse of natural childbirth is a discourse of resistance.

“…rhetorical agency, defined as negotiation among competing alternative discourses, grants individuals some ability to reject discursive elements that they find problematic” (94).

One reason that many women decide to give birth at home is because they know that at the hospital they would have no control over their birth experience. In this way, birthing at home is a way for them to exercise agency and “reject discursive elements that they find problematic.” I also believe that blogging about their natural birth experience is a way for them to exercise their agency, to get the word out, so to speak, about natural birth, to challenge cultural assumptions about how women should give birth.

“…resistance might initially involve a form of rhetorical agency in which subjects simply occupy preexisting subject positions, but the effects of this agency-the acts of resistance- can disrupt the sense established by disciplinary rhetoric, exceeding the boundaries of these subject positions in unpredictable ways.” “Some of the most striking examples offered by interviewees in this regard are those describing instances in which they shocked medical authorities, friends, or acquaintances by defying preconceived notions of what women’s bodies are capable of doing.” (96) “Recalling that disciplinary rhetorics define what subjects can do as well as what they should do, these women can be seen as disrupting sense by accomplishing things that disciplinary rhetorics dictated they could not do.” (96)

I remember my reaction, my very shocked reaction, at watching “The Business of Being Born,” and watching women give birth without the aide of technology or hospitals. I didn’t know such a thing was possible. I also had no idea that you could choose not to have an epidural; in my mind, that is just what happened when you gave birth. This quote really illuminated to me, that in the US, the disciplinary rhetoric surrounding childbirth has really warped our sense of what women’s bodies are capable of doing, and that natural birth, in all its incarnations, is really a form of resistance, because it challenges and reshapes our assumptions of what is possible in childbirth.

“…resistance is not just a question of an individual selecting bits and pieces from various competing discourses. By consulting La LecheLeague, which resists mainstream medical discourse as well as broadly accepted social and cultural norms, a woman is empowered to resist the cultural norm that forbids public breastfeeding…at the moment she actually breastfeeds in public by herself for the first time, a woman is forced to act in a space where the counter-discourse of a La Leche league does not prevail. It is at this moment, I would argue, she has the potential to disrupt meaning and sense.” (97)

Just a breastfeeding woman seeks help from a La Leche League member in her acts of resistance, so does a woman seeking natural childbirth, in the form of a midwife or doula. “…indivual resistant acts…might over time have a profound impact in the lines of sense established by disciplinary rhetoric…if enough women continue to disrupt sense by violating cultural norms that forbid public breastfeeding, these norms will eventually change.” (99)

I think this can also apply to a rhetoric of personal agency regarding childbirth. I believe that over time, enough women blogging about heir natural experiences will reshape our discourse surrounding childbirth, and will expand our sphere of understanding regarding what a birthing body is capable of. I also hope that with this expanded understanding comes a re-granting of agency, so that a woman who decides to give birth in a hospital can have a natural birth and control over her birth experience.

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Uncategorized Social captial and participation August 4, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Barbara Ley, in an article called “Vive Les Roses!: The Architecture of Commitment in an Online Pregnancy and Mothering Group,” published in the 2007 Journal of Computer- Mediated Communication, discusses the technical and social architecture of an online discussion forum, and how those architectures foster commitment among its members. One of the key ingredients for commitment to occur, was the generation of social capital. Ley defines social capital as the “‘material’ that keeps social structures such as support groups together and determines their strength” (1390).

I felt that this discussion of social capital was interesting and pertinent to the discussion of blogging and personal agency, because it reminded me of the concept of participation discussed in Convergence Culture. In order to get people to participate in a larger discussion, they must be interested and emotionally invested. What is going on in the discussion has to be personally meaningful to them, and they need to feel that their participation, their contribution, matters. It seems that any discussion of personal agency on the web is tied to the ability to participate in the larger discussion, by creating and investing in social capital.

The structure of a discussion forum seems quite accommodating to the generation of social capital- people can contribute to discussion threads and message privately; the whole structure is similar to one large conversation.

But what about a blog? It is easy to view a blog posting as decontextualized, a lone voice crying out in the wilderness. However, blogs generate a sense of interconnectedness as well, and have great capacity for generating social capital as well.

Not only can people comment on an individual posting, but most bloggers keep a list of links on their site to websites and other blogs they find interesting and personally meaningful. Thus, perhaps by looking at the websites and blogs an individual blogger links to, we can view their posting as part of a larger conversation. I took a look at the blogs on which I found my original birth narratives, and categorized their sites according to the types of sites/blogs they link to. I was trying to answer the bigger question, why might these women be blogging about their birth experiences? Are these personal blogs to keep in touch with family, or might these blog entries be an attempt to enter into a larger conversation, perhaps one involving activism and natural birth?

Three of the sites seemed purely personal- I could find no outside links to any kind of birthing sites. Two were what I would call “activist” sites- these narratives were posted on a blog that seemed entirely geared toward promoting natural birth. The last two were a combination of personal blog and activism- these blogs appeared personal in nature and had links to other personal blogs, but also links to sites about natural birth.

I think that this is important for two reasons. First, I think that any discussion of agency should be linked to motivation. Is it enough to say that these women are participating in a larger discourse- possibly one of resistance, or should we take a look at why these women are blogging. I do not wish to “co opt” another woman’s discourse and claim she is resisting a cultural discourse of childbirth, when she might simply be trying to keep in touch with family and friends. Therefore, I think that any discussion of discourse on blogs should take into account evidence of motivation, and this leads to my second point, that the motivation, the agency, of an individuals discourse on the web is linked to social capital. Not only do people generate social capital by participation on the web- blogging, posting and such, but they contribute to social capital by linking their site to sites they find personally meaningful. Any time we discuss participation on the web, it is important not to decontextualize it, but it is necessary to look at the larger picture- how these people link themselves to other conversations.

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Uncategorized Blogging and “reframing” August 4, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Marianne Sassi Matthias, in an article entitled “Problematic Integration in Pregnancy and Childbirth: Contrasting Approaches to Uncertainty and Desire in Obstetric and Midwifery Care,” published in 2009 issue of Health Communication, discusses several differences in the way expectation, uncertainity and problems are handled in two contrasting forms of materinty care. While Mattias discusses several aspects of what she calls “problem integration,” what I found most interesting, and perhaps most applicible to a discussion of personal agency, was what she called “reframing.”

Women who had unexpectedly had C sections instead of vaginal delivery, were able to cope by reframing their experience. Instead of focusing on the delivery as the most important aspect of birth, these women shifted their focus on the end product-the baby- as the most important aspect of birth. In this way, these women were able to deal with the stress of an unexpected surgery, and the disappointed at “failing” a vaginal birth. However, one woman in the study, a home birth advocate, was unable to reframe her experience and maintained that the delivery process was just as important as the end product-a healthy baby, and thus years later was still dealing with the emotional trauma of having had a C section isntead of a natural, vaginal birth.

This started me thinking about another reason women might blog about their childbirth experiences. Blogging might serve as a way for women to “reframe” their experience, or to emotionally cope with the inability to reframe, or even a way to resist reframing.

I was struck when reading these narratives how the women who gave birth in the hospital were not always as detailed about the process of birth and seemed to focus more on the baby. The natural homebirth narratives seemed more focused on details leading up to the birth and the labor itself than the medical narrativess (whether the birth at the hospital was natural or not). I wonder if this might be evidence of the “reframing” that Mattias discusses. Could women who had birth in a medical setting, whether the birth was natural or not, be focusing more on the birth of the baby in order to deal with dissapointment at their birth experince, while women who gave birth at home are focusing on the delivery in order resist reframing? As stated elesewhere in this blog, women who are birthing at a hospital experience a loss of agencyin many ways: the technology of the hosptial and the agency of the staff and doctor almost always preclude and eclipse any personal agency a woman has in her birthing experience. In my search of childbirth preparation materials, time and time again I was reminded by the author that the most important thing about birth is the delivery of a healthy baby, and that is what I am supposed to focus on. Obviously, according to Matthias’ article, not every woman is able to reframe her experience to focus solely on the baby, and should they have to?

Perhaps women blogging about their birth experiences are resisting the cultural discourse telling them to reframe, and are instead exercising their agency to reclaim what they feel is a very important aspect of birth- the labor and delivery process.

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Uncategorized An article by Kim Hensley Owens August 3, 2009 · Leave a Comment

In looking for some scholarly support for my understanding of personal agency and blogging, I came across an article entitled “Confronting Rhetorical Disability: A Critical Analysis of Women’s Birth Plans,” by Kim Hensley Owens. It is published July 2009 Issue of Written Communication.

While Owens is looking at birth plans in her article, I think a lot of what she says can be applied to women blogging about their birth narratives. Owens looked at birth narratives online and interviewed or surveyed subjects about writing their birth plans, and what role ultimately the birth plans served for them in their birthing experience. Here I’d like to summarize and highlight some main points in this article and discuss how it might apply to a personal agency in blogging about birth experiences.

“In hospital childbirth, technological authority has come to supplant bodily authority.” (248) Here, Owens is discussing the trend in hospital birth to privilege technological expertise over the woman’s subjective bodily experience. She posits than one reason a woman might write a birth plan is to try to reclaim “bodily authority” or to somehow combat the “technological authority” overruning her experience. When technological authority, which in this case I take to mean the data from technology (fetal monitors, etc) and the expertise of the hospital staff, override a woman’s bodily authority, or her experience of what her body is going through, what we’re talking about is the loss of a woman’s agency to the medical establishment. I wonder if blogging about her birth experience somehow allows a woman to reclaim some of her agency that is lost in this experience or perhaps an attempt to “re-privilege” bodily authority. The birth narratives I have collected have mostly included natural birth experiences, so the latter might be more accurate.

“…the process of writing a birth plan…can nonetheless empower women.” (249)

Owens discusses in her article that birth plans are not as legally authoritative as some women might wish them to be, and ultimately not be of much help in a hospital birth setting, as they are often ignored or despised by hospital staff. While the birth plan may not direct the birth experience as much as women might want it to, it can certainly still empower the women.

Similarly, blogging about her birth experience might empower a women to have the ultimate control over her birth experience- how she remembers it. I wonder if blogging can be a way for a woman to “reframe” her birth experience and deal with disappointments? Could blogging be a tool for women to deal with a loss of agency during their birth experience? Even women who have natural births at home, who may be even more empowered during their birth experience than their hospital bound counterparts, may experience a loss of agency, as I will discuss in another posting, because the body in a sense takes over during birth. Even for natural birthers, then, blogging may be a way to deal with this temporary loss of control and power.

“Technology can serve to silence women and to supplant, rather than to supplement, bodily knowledge.” (251)

In the hospital setting, technology dis-empowers women, as discussed earlier. In blogging, a woman is using technology to reassert her agency. In a way, she is using technology to battle technology. This is interesting in that web 2.0 technology is widely available and very “usable” for most people, a certain kind of grassroots or public technology, while hospital technology represents another kind of technology, one only accessible to the “elite,” trained doctors and medical staff.

In discussing the supplanting of bodily authority with technological authority, Owens says “This shift in the hierarchy of knowledge is one reason that some women have begun writing birth plans.” (251)

Indeed, it might be argued the same reasoning could apply to blogging. “…many women come to believe in the potential of bodily knowledge, which leads them to try to resist childbirth as a technologically mediated event.” (251). Here Owens is discussing the reason why many women write birth plans- to try to resist childbirth as a “medicalized” situation in need of technological intervention- which is how doctors and hospitals usually view birth. Birth plans are thus a form of resistance. I wonder if blogging about natural childbirth is also a form of resistance- or that natural childbirth itself is a form of resistance that is expressed through blogging.