Danielle Bessett
Dissertation Title: "Defining the 'Normal' Pregnancy: Knowledge, Emotion, and Embodied Experience of Women in Stratified Reproduction"
Dissertation Committee: Troy Duster (Chair), Lynne Haney, Rayna Rapp
Dissertation Summary:
"Normality" is the unexamined but ever-present yardstick by which most decisions in and about contemporary reproduction are made. My dissertation investigates how, in the presence of a powerful normalizing discourse of obstetric medicine and highly gendered ideals of maternal sacrifice, the “normal” pregnancy comes to have multiple and sometimes contradictory meanings for women over time. While I utilize a multi-method approach in this project (including textual analysis of obstetric journals and popular self-help guides, ethnographic observations, and informant interviews with doctors, midwives, nurses and receptionists), my research focuses primarily on in-depth longitudinal interviews with a diverse group of sixty-four pregnant women in Manhattan, the Bronx, and suburban Connecticut.
All of the women in my study attempted to balance their desire to see their pregnancy as unique against the competing desire for reassurance of formulaic progress. I document how differences in social class and race/ethnicity help to construct the determinations women make of “normal” versus “abnormal,” or “exceptional,” fetuses. Such differences show themselves most clearly in the differing role medical experts played in this process: more economically-privileged, white women from the Manhattan and Connecticut sites relied more heavily on medical experts to elaborate their condition and confirm the well-being of their fetus, while less economically-privileged white women and women of color (primarily) from the Bronx site employed expert knowledge in combination with the practical knowledge of female relatives and friends and religious faith to make their determinations. However, women’s interpretations of their embodied symptoms, which are typically constructed as synonymous with fetal subjectivity, needs, and well-being, were more homogeneous across social classes. Expecting mothers were expected to adopt techniques of self-surveillance in order to learn to read their symptoms and to produce a discourse of embodied experience for experts, while at the same time “normalizing” non-life threatening pregnancy symptoms in ways consistent with a broader societal discourse of maternal sacrifice. Only a small number of women rejected this discourse of maternal sacrifice, finding it too limited to make sense of, or relieve, their symptoms or the conflicts between women’s family and paid employment roles. Women who challenged the discourse of maternal sacrifice did so by adopting the language of pathology to medicalize their pregnancy further and to bring about intervention by health care professionals.
I document how these women experience and define their pregnancies and how their invocations of normality express understandings of individual well-being as well as the kind of family life they envision. Taken together, these methods allow me to examine critically the “dividing practices” that have taken place within obstetric medicine and the culture more broadly and, most importantly, the ways that women experience them amidst their own life conditions. The empirical findings provided in these chapters advance our understanding of how expert classifications and expert knowledge are negotiated within the context of everyday life, as people use the repertoire of cultural resources at their disposal to engage in this negotiation.
Curriculum Vitae |
