Amber Middleton

Dr. Moeller
English 497
3 March 2016
Branding of Motherly Bodies
I became interested in the concept of disastrous birth stories after my sisters first
childbirth didnt go as planned. After being pumped with different chemicals to try and induce
labor for over twelve hours, my sister underwent a C-section, received an infection from that Csection, and had to spend the first three days of her daughters life in a hospital bed unable to
move or care for her newborn. I was reintroduced to this topic when I watched the 2008
documentary The Business of Being Born, which advocates homebirth while criticizing the
current over-medicalized norms of hospital childbirth (Owens 294). In connection to Ahmed,
Wingard, and the learning objectives of our class, I hope to analyze how the modern United
States society has rhetorically conceptualized motherly bodies during childbirth, specifically
examining how dominant practices have created a separation between the mother and the
processes of birth, which in turn create these disastrous birth stories. I argue that by shifting our
understanding of the birth process from one of a doctors dominance toward one of the mothers,
we can respect the individual embodied experiences of childbirth without the medical-social
constructions that dominate the system today.
Many of the concepts examined by Ahmed and Wingard focus on a power imbalance
between someone who has power and privilege, and the other who is a subordinate to that power.
Wingard explains that othering is a neoliberal cultural phenomenon that allows those in power to
define themselves through a national identity, while also masking the economic and ideological
practices which drive neoliberalism at all scales (5). The branding of the others creates an
evacuated representation of one group of bodiesin order to create a coherentvision of
another community of bodies, while also working to use bodies as economic features within
capitalism (Wingard 14; 8). These concepts can be interestingly applied to the topic of birth
norms. The obstetric establishment works to keep the obstetricians in a place of power, therefore
putting mothers in a place without power as the other. Doctors do this by branding the women as
a subordinate, ignorant patient that needs to be diagnosed and treated, instead of a mother going
through the natural process known to her body (Wagner 5). As Wagner points out, hospitals act
as a hierarchy of status, authority, and control in which doctors are at the top and patients are at
the bottom (18). This small group of (mostly) male doctors control birth in such a way as to
preserve their own power and wealth while robbing women and families of control (Wagner
35).
By branding the experience of mothers as something that has to happen according to the
doctors convenience, the act of giving birth becomes a flat experience in which all births are
treated the same and there is no accounting for individual lived experiences (Wingard 20).
Women are separated from their birth physically and emotionally when they are subject to the
doctors procedures, which they often dont give consent to (Wagner 78). When doctors treat
every woman the same way, they limit opportunity for the unique experiences of giving a natural
or less medicalized birth, and instead leading to dangerous and often unnecessary induction
and/or C-section. Some of the procedures that limit this opportunity are done for the health of the
baby and mother, but these practices have been generalized to such an extent that high-risk
procedures are given to low-risk births. As Wagner suggests, the fundamental flaw in the

American birth culture is that we have highly trained surgeons regularly attending normal, or
low-risk, births (4).
When doctors are given the power over the mothers birth choice, a separation between
the mother and her birth experience is created. Doctors create this separation of mother and birth
in a few ways. Mainly, convenience is given more importance than medical need and the
mothers desires. Something that has been historically a natural process turns into a chemical and
surgical ordeal. Doctors separate the mother from choice in the birthing process, often suggesting
induction by presenting natural birth as very dangerous, even though the female body usually
knows when the baby is ready, and induction/C-section techniques can be very dangerous as well
(Wagner 95-96). Wagner also explains the more physical aspects of the doctors power, such as
the positioning of women on their backsthe worst position for giving birthsolely for the
doctors convenience and comfort, and the very popular use of Epidural that rob mothers the
opportunity of feeling the birth of their babies (21; 7).
The absence of feeling during birth brings up a very important aspect of the separation of
mother and birth that has been created in American culture and perpetuated by doctors. As of
2006 in the United States, doctors induce labor in more than 40% of all pregnancies (Wagner
96). These induction techniques erase a lot of the sensations that come with natural birth. Though
Ahmed doesnt clearly make this claim, one way of looking at pain from Ahmeds point of view
is a way to connect the bodies of those who feel pain and the source of that painin this context
pain would connect mother and child. Since bodies take the shape of the very contact they have
with objects and others, the explosion of birth pain can create an immense connection between
the objects that encounter the pain (Ahmed 1). Babies become saturated with the pain
experienced by their mother, while the pain of birth connects the mother to a history of pain felt
by mothers before her (Ahmed 20-21). The importance of pain is relevant to all types of pain, but
a physical pain that produces a child is an exceptional example of when Ahmed explains that it
is through pain that we come to understand ourselves as a bodily surface (24). From that, bodies
create a contingent attachment of pain itself (Ahmed 30). Through natural, painful, childbirth
the mother can experience pain to its fullest and important extent. The mother can become
attached to this pain, therefore attached to the product of this painthe child.
Society has conceptualized the birth process as a medical emergency that has to be diagnosed
and treated by obstetricians. This branding of mothers and the birth process has taken power and
choice away from mothers and given it to the doctors who now call the (sometimes very
dangerous) shots. By branding these bodies and this experience, the mother has been separated
from the birth emotionally and physically. If we changed our thinking about birth, shifting our
understanding of the process to give more power to the mothers, we can give all mothers an
opportunity to fully experience the empowering event that is birth, with less input from the
dominant power structures that currently have control.

Work Cited
Ahmed, Sarah. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.
Owens, Kim. Reviews and Reactions: A Rhetorical-Cultural Analysis of The Business of Being
Born. Rhetoric Review 30.3 (2011): 293-311. Web. 28 February 2016.
Wagner, Marsden. Born in the USA: How a Broken Maternity System Must Be Fixed to Put
Mothers and Infants First. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
2006. Print.
Wingard, Jennifer. Branded Bodies, Rhetoric, and the Neoliberal Nation-State. Plymouth:
Lexington Books, 2013. Print.