ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the multiple kinds of 'risky bodies' enacted in women's birth narratives. It traces the emergence of different 'risk economies' according to sociomaterial positionings. Women who chose elective caesareans regarded birth as essentially risky. Choosing an elective caesarean section was constructed as a form of risk management. Biomedical risk economies were not only shaped by socioeconomics and the valorization of technoscience but were also enacted in narratives as a form of moral politics. While biomedical risk framed privileged women's talk about pregnancy and birth, there was another source of risk in their stories that centered on the fleshy vulnerability of the laboring/birthing body and attendant risks of exposure, objectification, bodily damage and mistreatment. Women planning elective caesareans enacted patriarchal representations of pregnancy and birth in their narratives, producing images of the laboring/birthing body as monstrous, threatening and uncontrollable. Patriarchal images of women's reproductive bodies materialized powerfully in privileged women's stories as an outsider perspective of birth.
