ABSTRACT

This scene of unusual postpartum paternity is known as "couvade", and recurs in a variety of narrative accounts over time in surprisingly similar ways;the etymology of the term is the French "couver",. Perkinson's theorizing of hegemonic constructs as physically charged expressions that are produced, reproduced, and inscribed is particularly apt to the racialization of the New World accounts of exotic men's experience of childbirth that we observe here. The couvade scene in this story, though its reception throughout the early modern period is rather unknown, prepares quite perfectly this strange cultural phenomenon played out at the geographic and cultural outposts of barbarism. Anxiety pervades the scene of encounter and the stage is set for subsequent accounts of cultural inscrutability as told through the spectacle of exotic lyings-in. Anthropological studies of three societies by Munroe and Munroe and Monroe et alfound that Black Caribbean males reported greater number and frequency of symptoms of the syndrome compared to a Caucasian American sample.