The midwife's present

This thesis develops an approach to midwifery that is more open to the (un)known, to the (un)thought, to the (im)possible. It argues for practitioners who have an ethical responsibility to embrace difference and to welcome the other. In this thesis I write of ways midwives and others ‘word the world’ and act in it, in order to understand how midwives can and do embrace opening themselves to possibilities and difference, in order that childbearing women will not have their possibilities for personhood closed. As a midwife and a midwife-academic, I ask how current discursive practices in midwifery and childbearing function as they do. Using the techniques of ‘writing as inquiry’ and genealogy I bring to the foreground ways in which midwives think and act with and against the grain in the maternity health care system. Interrogating overlapping and competing discourses in midwifery, I work to understand how discourses produce at the same time numerous identities and accompanying ambivalence. In seeking understandings of the work that women do to constitute themselves as midwives, I write of midwives’ political and ethical moves towards and away from difference and towards and away from sameness, rules and order. While midwifery does not generally recognise itself in poststructuralism, midwifery is (sometimes often) a poststructural practice. As I spotlight moments in which midwives already move in poststructural ways, I argue that a serious reflexive turn for midwives towards poststructural theory and practice is easily imaginable, and desirable. The thesis argues that theories and practices which help midwifery move closer to the (un)known, the (un)thought, the (im)possible are ethically and politically responsible. In embracing difference and welcoming the other, childbearing women and midwives together may create their best chances yet for viable mothering and midwifery lives. This is the ‘possibilities work’ midwives and midwife-academics can do