ABSTRACT
The chapter explores the changing subjectivities of Swedish small-ward midwives in a time of healthcare restructuring and centralization of health units. It uses an intersectional feminist perspective on risk and place to investigate processes of peripheralization in the construction of worker subjectivities. Focus is on the closure of a small maternity ward in Sweden’s northern inland in 2017. In the study, one hospital manager and three midwives who used to work at the ward were interviewed, and the interview material was subjected to narrative analysis. The chapter concludes that work practices characterizing small maternity wards were constructed as risky in the political debate prior to the closure. Such constructions intersected with two peripheralization processes: one where small-ward maternity care practices were made peripheral, and one where certain patients were peripheralized. Midwives resisted this risk narrative – a resistance that alternately challenged and fuelled dominating neoliberal values and power structures.
