Writing birthing bodies: exploring the entanglements between flesh and materiality in childbirth

ABSTRACT

This article enquires into the lived experiences of childbirth as a site of ‘fleshy becomings’ that disrupts the dominantly cleaned-up approaches to organising. Theoretically, we approach childbirth as a primitively humane experience in which birthing bodies become entangled with the materiality by which they are surrounded. The empirical material of the article consists of 12 in-depth interviews with first-time mothers in Finland as well as of photographs and autoethnographic research notes taken by the two authors of this article. By empirically highlighting the interplay between flesh and materiality in the ‘making’ of birthing bodies, this article offers novel viewpoints on the discussion of embodied experiences as well as on the entangled relations between flesh and materiality in the field of organisation studies. It also makes an empirical contribution using a unique contextual example of ‘birthing’ to illustrate how vulnerable topics can be researched, offering critical viewpoints on this subject.

KEYWORDS:

• Birthing body
• childbirth
• flesh
• materiality
• organising
• embodied experience

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Suvi Satama http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8465-3524

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Liikesivistysrahasto: [Grant Number 14-7764].