ABSTRACT

Birth is politically and morally contested and subject to competing idealizations, valorizations and ontological contestations. This chapter explores how birthing bodies—the ways they were framed, enacted and treated—emerged as central to women's feelings about their birth experiences. The collective weave of voices show that birthing bodies are central to what matters to women in relation to birth. What emerges as important to women is not necessarily type of birth but the kinds of affective energies, flows and relations circulating with/in particular birth assemblages. In women's telling, it was the sociomaterial arrangements between bodies, meanings and machines, vitalized by ontological politics, which enabled or disabled affirming connections with others. Women who felt 'bad' or distressed about their births used words such as 'not nice', 'traumatic', 'horrible', upsetting, scary and disappointing to describe their experiences. The relational, material-discursive and affective matrix of labor/birth thus shapes women's feelings about birth and their corporeal selves.