Childbirth and Language/ A Study on Metaphor in The Language of 'Natural' Birth: A Review of Literature

Patricia Yaeger in her essay The Poetics of Birth (1995) identifies the invisibility of gestation and parturition in literary and cultural criticism and argues that although philosophers and political theorists have developed complex theoretical systems to help to articulate our relation to our bodies, only birth lacks a philosophy. Yaeger asks "Why has birth been ignored?" and suggests "reconstructing a narrative around such silences" to "supply ourselves with new meanings, structures, codes, and other modes of symbolic power" in order "to invent a story of birth with the power to supplement women's lost voices". She proposes that allowing into the apparatus of literary criticism a 'poetics of birth' would locate the spaces that unearth a "reproductive unconscious". Anthropologist Emily Martin asks how we attain a genuinely different vision of birth away from the medical model and asks, if allowed to arrange things to fit their proclivities and desires from the ground up, what imagery would (women) bring to the experience of birth…?" Martin asserts that there is "a compelling need for new key metaphors, core symbols of birth that capture what we do not want to lose about birth". The core of this review explores how representations of birth manifest themselves in the language and metaphors used by women and birth attendants in oral birth narratives. The review examines key metaphors used to express embodied ways of experiencing, thinking and knowing about birth; metaphors that capture a sense of acting and doing, but also symbols of birth that bring embodied agency and the birthing woman's consciousness back into the process of giving birth. The review explores the language, metaphors and analogies and in turn, the images contained within these narratives and discusses the conflicts and contradictions that arise in exploring these metaphors, particularly for feminist thought and practice. The review explores the use and importance of metaphorical models and analogies (Knowles and Moon) and metaphor in linguistic expression and conceptual systems (Lacoff and Johnson). Various aspects of the relationships between language, birth, subjectivity and embodiment are considered in the review including Helene Cixous' Eciture Feminine (who urgently appeals to women to 'find a language that can speak the body'), Peter Sloterdijk's Sphereology and Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology