The Politics of Reproduction: From Midwives' Alternative Public Sphere to the Public Spectacle of Man-Midwifery

Cody, Lisa Forman

doi:10.1353/ecs.1999.0033

Cited by 16 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…Yet even outwith a social/medical model framework, the influence of Foucauldian analysis has meant that medical histories from below have frequently and explicitly focused on medicine as an oppressive force, especially in relation to histories of childbirth and psychiatry. 24 The focus on the patient as a medical construct rather than an active agent and the reliance on doctors' notes have made it difficult to respond to Porter's call to heed the patient voice and to extend medical history methodologies to those who did not and do not identify as patients. 25…”

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confidence: 99%

What is disability history the history of?

McGuire

2024

History Compass

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This article has two connected aims. First, to contour the boundaries of modern disability history through outlining its development and second, to provide a new methodological agenda for disability history. The design model of disability has outlined an important new programme to integrate the social and medical models of disability by foregrounding materials. Yet ‘disability things’ (to use Ott's memorable term) have been part of disability history's genesis since the material turn, which started the process of social historians recovering the lives of those not recorded in textual sources through objects, including prosthetics. From considering objects as things, the influence of Science and Technology Studies scholars pushed disability historians to further consider objects as agents and objects in use. These approaches have highlighted the differential levels of autonomy and power that objects and their users have in making history. However, this focus on materials has highlighted visible and recorded disability over ‘invisible’ disability, which has perpetuated its opacity and created definitional difficulties around disability demarcation. Medical history methodologies aimed at revealing the ‘patient view’ can help bring people back into focus but uphold the categories of patients and biomedicine in a way that impedes the aims of disability scholars. Focusing on exactly what is hidden is less useful than focusing on how it is hidden, and science and technology study methodologies can illuminate these processes.

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confidence: 99%

What is disability history the history of?

McGuire

2024

History Compass

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“…Certainly, birthing procedures involving forceps had deep political significance for both the (male) operators and the (female) bodies upon which the operators exercised their skill (Davis, 1995;Arney, 1982). The focal point of men-midwives' interventions, of course, was not just any part of the body but women's pelves, the area of the body that was perceived as marking essential differences between men and women (Cody, 1999;Kapsalis, 1997). In the case of Mexico, obstetricians resignified women's bodies and reinvented their own surgical procedures due to their obsession with the pelvis.…”

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confidence: 99%

Mexican Women's Pelves and Obstetrical Procedures: Interventions with Forceps in Late 19th-Century Medicine

Cházaro¹,

Kersey²

2005

Feminist Review

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This essay is an inquiry into the socio-cultural history of the use of forceps in 19th-century Mexico. It argues that the knowledge and practices that the use of such instruments implied were related to complex and controversial issues of the time regarding gender, race and national identity. In my study of operations involving forceps, I found that the adoption of medical instruments depended not only upon their supposedly greater operative efficiency but also upon the political and medical meanings attributed to the pelves of Mexican women. Early 19th-century obstetrics conceived the womb as an example of ‘living nature’ whose qualities assured that births were ‘normally happy events’ making the use of forceps and other instruments unnecessary. However, by mid-century, in the aftermath of independence, Mexico was desperately attempting to forge its identity as a nation. Due to European theories of race, Mexican women came to be characterized as having pathologically deformed pelves that evidenced possible defects of racial formation. The analysis of operative practices involving forceps reveals just how strongly such medical instruments became charged with a complex political definition of the ‘mestizo race’, which was seen to hold political promise for the future. In this context, forceps ceased to symbolize the threat of death, with which they had been associated since colonial times, and became artefacts that helped to assure the safe delivery of newborn mestizos by overcoming the problems of Mexican women's pathological pelves; although by the same token, the status of women as biologically inferior beings in need of medical assistance was reconfirmed.

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Domesticating Birth in the Hospital: “Family‐Centered” Birth and the Emergence of “Homelike” Birthing Rooms

Fannin

2004

Life's Work

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Childbirth is both an embodied and symbolic process, and the home and the hospital have been the shifting and contested sites of childbirth in contemporary discourses of birth in the United States. I argue that the economic and cultural imperatives of deregulation and downsizing of US health-care produce new spaces of domesticity and birthing bodies. Through an examination of the relatively recent transformations of hospital space into "homelike" birthing rooms, I propose a more nuanced understanding of how discursive and material shifts in the practices and sites of birth create new spatialities and subjectivities. The emergence of the "homelike" hospital room situates the production of birth spaces at the nexus of debates around domesticity, the body, the politics of reproduction, and the economics of health care in the United States.

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The Politics of Reproduction: From Midwives' Alternative Public Sphere to the Public Spectacle of Man-Midwifery

Cited by 16 publications

References 41 publications

What is disability history the history of?

What is disability history the history of?

Mexican Women's Pelves and Obstetrical Procedures: Interventions with Forceps in Late 19th-Century Medicine

Domesticating Birth in the Hospital: “Family‐Centered” Birth and the Emergence of “Homelike” Birthing Rooms

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