ABSTRACT
When people tell stories they do not simply involved in reflecting the true facts of their experiences. Instead, storytelling is a dialogical process involving a dialectical interplay between cultural master narratives, normative values and the lived, bodily-emotional experiences of the storyteller. This chapter explores some homebirth counter-stories that disrupt cultural horror stories and medical master narratives, and which reinscribe the birthing woman as the center of the birth process. Cultural birthing horror stories have been identified as enjoying increasing currency within Western contexts and are linked to increasing numbers of women electing to have a caesarean section. Comic counter-stories can also disrupt the tendency to marginalize women and construct medical technology or experts as the active agents of childbirth in medical master narratives. The chapter explains South African women's homebirth narratives focuses on moments of storytelling excess emerging in the form of humor and metaphor. Women often relied on metaphorical storylines when trying to narrate the embodied-emotional experience of birthgiving.
