READING THE BODY, WRITING THE BODY: WOMEN’S EXPERIENCES OF GIVING BIRTH SHARED ON THE INTERNET

In my dissertation, I apply a reproductive justice framework to a discourse analysis of twenty-three birth narratives from four websites. I argue that women share their narratives of giving birth on the internet in order to find a virtual close-knit community that they may find lacking in their physical lives; however, these communities are complicated by the natural birth ideology that informs modern Western conceptions of birth. Thus, I conclude that discourse communities of birth on the internet may provide some form of connection for new mothers but are not as straightforwardly supportive as they may at first appear