Breaking the frame: Obstetric violence and epistemic rupture

abstract

The concept of ‘obstetric violence’ has emerged as an important legal and activist tool in the global quest for humane, equitable, and respectful maternal and intrapartum care. Over the last decade or so, the term has been elaborated as a legal concept in several countries of the Global South and has travelled across transnational boundaries, with scholars from diverse regions adopting the framework. In this paper, I argue that the term obstetric violence is not just a mode of description or a legal concept, but that it constitutes an epistemic intervention. By naming normalised modes of harm and violation as violence, this conceptual vocabulary challenges normative conceptions of pregnancy and birth. By rejecting the normalisation of reproductive oppression, the language of obstetric violence also constitutes a refusal of epistemic frames that silence, diminish, erase, and devalue alternative and embodied forms of reproductive knowledge and agency. I also argue that we need to consider and conceptualise obstetric violence not just as gender violence but as a specific form of violence against reproductive subjects. This means grappling with what makes this form of violence distinctive. It also means considering a broader entanglement of forces that work to coerce/constrain reproductive subjects beyond the scope of gender or the boundaries of ‘women’. Finally, I explore how Afro-feminist, decolonial, and queer challenges advance the focus on obstetric violence as violence against reproductive subjects, offering new directions that reiterate the epistemic rupturing potential of this conceptual apparatus.

keywords:

• obstetric violence
• reproductive oppression
• Afro-feminism
• reproductive subjectivity
• epistemic violence
• reproductive violence

Acknowledgements

The writing of this article was facilitated by generous research funding from the National Research Foundation (NRF) as well as from the University of Pretoria.

Notes

1 See Villarmea, Olza and Recio (2015) for important earlier work exploring the contested conceptual vocabularies of obstetric violence and childbirth.

2 Cisnormativity refers to the pervasive assumption that individuals’ gender matches their assigned biological sex and is closely entangled with heteronormative norms and binary conceptualisations of gender.

3 Gynocentrism refers to perspectives that are ‘women-centred’ in the sense of being grounded in notions of binary and stable gender and biological ‘womanhood’. Such perspectives often seek to revalue femininity and essential womanhood. There is also a rich tradition of feminist scholarship with such tendencies. See Young (1985) for a fuller engagement with gynocentric feminism.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rachelle Chadwick

RACHELLE CHADWICK is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Pretoria. She has written and published widely on the feminist politics of birth, obstetric violence, and feminist theory more broadly. Her book Bodies that Birth: Vitalizing Birth Politics was published by Routledge in 2018. She is currently Principal Investigator of the research project titled ‘The Birth Archive: Against Reproductive Silencing’ funded by the National Research Foundation. As part of this project, she also leads the ‘Gestational Justice Research Hub’.