ABSTRACT
This chapter proceeds by exploring the entanglements between performing and constructing birth narratives, and biomedical vocabularies and ontological frames. Birth narratives are not seen as pure reflections of experience or 'what really happened' but as diffracted in/though broader sociomaterial and biomedical frames. Clockwork birth, the normative medical textbook version of 'normal' birth, functioned as an ontological framing device or internalized technology of power that materialized particular kinds of birthing bodies and shaped birth narratives in powerful ways. A key characteristic of clockwork birth was the telling of a formulaic birth story in which the embodied experience of labor/birth often disappeared. When enacting a clockwork script, low-income women told labor/birth as a series of clocktime happenings over which they had little to no control. Access to the clockwork medical script was thus not easily or automatically obtained by low-income women birthing in the public sector.
