Abstract: Review Essay: Bearing Meaning of Birth Bearing Meaning: The Language of Birth by Robbie Pfeufer Kahn, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995, 441 pp. clothbound. The meaning begins with coauthorship of this review by an academic (Davis-Floyd)-one who, by profession, lives in abstract world of ideas, and by a midwife (Luce) who lives in embodied world of birth-a world of flesh and blood and fluids and rich smells and animal sounds and primal energy, a world as ordinary and universal as world of academia can be rarefied and particular. What unites us to each other is our lived critique, in words and in practice, of medicalization of birth and women's bodies-a critique that led us both, consciously and reflectively, to eschew technological management of birth process and give birth to our children at home, away from technomedical gaze. Through this choice we also find ourselves connected to Robbie Pfeufer Kahn's brilliant and insightful work, Bearing Meaning: The Language of Birth, for this is a book that speaks both of our languages-the language of body and of mind. Its author shares our embodied experiences of pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding and our deep desire to find a language through which we can both describe and honor those experiences. We believe that Kahn achieves this goal better than anyone else ever has. A sociologist and a mother, she unites her academic training with her motherhood to give voice and coherence to women's reproductive embodiment and to situate birth and maternal in their proper place in society and in domains of knowledge. As she writes so eloquently, what unites women is our common purpose to enable knowledge to arise from bodily processes and from touch that is mediated by consciousness (p. 5). This work is fruit of a lifetime of lived experience, deep reflection, and political activism; it represents an integration of knowledge across a range of disciplines refracted through lens of bodily experience of giving birth, of breastfeeding, and mutually recognized bond between mother and child-a shared subjectivity grounded in body, which Kahn codes as the maialogical bond. In Introduction, Kahn employs language that is tightly woven and pregnant with original insights and juicy metaphors to set out her intentions: to write about her experience of giving birth to her son Levin and what she learned from it, to enter this story into recorded history, and to honor maternal body and all it encompasses as worthy of scholarly research and inclusion in academic discourse. The intensely personal narrative of Levin's birth and growth runs like a continuous thread through text from Chapter 1 to Epilogue, grounding her theories in body of this motherson relationship. A microcosm of larger tapestry, Introduction contains all strands that Kahn artfully weaves through body of book: an analysis of attitudes toward birth found in texts from Western tradition, from Homer forward; a description of influence of these texts and ideologies they contain on birth practices and our sense of maternal body; and counter stories, personal and textual, to dominant ones that inform medicalized birth in our culture. Kahn utilizes embodied experience as a tool for challenging and deconstructing worlds of meaning contained in traditional Western texts and institutionalized in medical practice and social policy. She stakes out her own ground in relationship to feminist theory and feminist movement, finding in perspective of women of color a place for nature, culture, and spirituality, areas central to her own theorizing because so present in her experience of birth. She also offers a thought-provoking defense of her use of personal narrative. In laying claim to her own voice, Kahn affirms validity and legitimacy of personal and experiential in arena of academic research, and invites others to see their own experiences as worthy of deep reflection and inclusion in discourse about creating and finding meaning. …
Publication Year: 1996
Publication Date: 1996-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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