ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the significance of language both in and as practices of reproduction. Whether written, spoken, or signed, language both provides humans with a means of communication and vehicles for expression, thus mediating our experiences, and also itself constitutes social action affecting and effecting consequences for the people involved and invoked in the exchange of text or talk. Through language, we enact, perform, embody, and reproduce relationships and persons, as this chapter discusses. What we say about reproduction and to whom, when, where, and how we say it inflect our expectations and experiences of bearing, birthing, and bringing up children. The focus of this chapter is on pregnancy. The discussion here is comprised mostly of reading between the lines in the literatures of the sociocultural anthropology of reproduction and of linguistic anthropology, which have engaged each other only glancingly. It draws from studies in literacy and in sociolinguistics, particularly from research on medical communication, that has been concentrated in societies where childbearing and childbirth have come to be regarded and treated, to varying degrees, in biomedicalized terms, including ethnographic work in the United States.
