Abstract Panel


Authors Information
SequenceTypeName TitleFirst NameLast NameDepartmentInstitute / Affiliation
1 Author Ms. HIBA HAROON K C CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF SOCIAL SYSTEMS PHD STUDENT
Abstract Information
TrackID
:
IUAES23_ABS_Q7048
Abstract Theme
:
PT146 - Violence and Women's Experiences
Abstract Title
:
WOMEN IN LABOUR: PAIN AS A SILENCED EXPERIENCE UNDER PATRIARCHAL GAZE
Short Abstract
:
Childbearing pain is simultaneously physical, emotional, and social, varying with cultural contexts. In heteronormative Indian societies, motherhood is believed to be the highest achievement of women's lives. Therefore women's birthing experience is extensively supervised by the institutions of family, marriage, caste, religion, and biomedicine; their expressions and experiences of pain in childbirth are socially silenced and fashioned through definite gender mechanisms. Consequently, Women restrict their expressions of pain by internalizing the male gaze that directs them to be submissive, kind, and tolerable in any socio-biological encounters.
Long Abstract
:

Childbirth and labor pain have remained the subject of 'sociological unimagination' for a long time. Childbirth emerged as an anthropological and sociological inquiry in the mid of 1970s by challenging the split between public and private where female reproductive labor was veiled under the 'malestream' academic gaze. This research primarily intends to understand how women and society perceive and give meaning to labor experiences by analyzing childbirth discourse and women's birthing stories. Dominant cultural beliefs validate vaginal delivery over C-section on the basis of prolonged pain endurance without epidural/anesthesia as ideal birth, disregarding women's subjective experiences and birthing choices. Language is a powerful mechanism of knowledge production, glorifying vaginal birth as normal and c-section as abnormal. Though society accepts delivery through the vagina as the legitimate way of birthing, there is a deliberate social muting on women's experiences of pain in childbirth. This study attempts to give voice to laboring women who lived as 'muted groups' (Ardener, 1975) and are portrayed as 'inarticulate,' where the knowledge production is solely articulated from a male worldview; therefore intends to carry out qualitative research by employing narrative inquiry among 20 birthed women from selected hospitals in Kozhikode district, Kerala. Existing Narratives on labor pain reveal that women's understanding of pain is formulated by internalizing dominant discourses and stories of other women; they mold themselves to endure pain without fail and submit to medical surveillance. This study explores how birthing women are supervised and discouraged from expressing pain and self-restricting their embodiments to be labeled as ideal women. This paper analyzes how the internalization of definite gender norms patterns laboring behavior and expects women to be tolerable and kind at any socio-biological encounter. Each woman from a different social location uniquely makes sense of their pain, which entirely differs from the experts' narratives.  

Abstract Keywords
:
Childbirth, pain, social muting, subjective experience