The Poetics of Childbearing: Revelations of an Other World

With the ascent of obstetrics, gynecology, and psychoanalysis, the childbearing woman’s subjectivity has been increasingly eclipsed by that of her child-to-be. This article describes the sociohistorical understanding of childbearing and shows how it has become intertwined with four women’s lived experiences of pregnancy and birth based on diaries and interviews they completed for this study. The participants ’ childbearing experiences revealed an ambiguous, sensual symbiosis between themselves and others that threatens the Western notion of a free-floating, solipsistic subject exemplified in fetal photographs and ultrasound images. The gestation and fruition of life which can take place in the female body— has far more radical implications than we have yet to come to appreciate. —Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born. The Poetics of Childbearing Three images come to mind when I think about the origins of human life as depicted in popular culture, medicine, and psychoanalysis. The first is Lennart Nilsson’s prenatal photography where the fetus appears like an astronaut alone against a black sky. In such images, the pregnan