Reframing Motherhood Through the Culture-Centered Approach: Articulations of Agency Among Young Nepalese Women

Abstract

Based upon the culture-centered approach that foregrounds the relevance of interrogating the taken-for-granted assumptions that circulate in the dominant models of health communication on family planning, this article argues that traditional approaches to reproductive health campaigns are concerned with safe motherhood (e.g., fertility, birth spacing, hospital delivery) rather than with the processes through which women construct, negotiate, and maintain meanings of motherhood and health within their cultural contexts. In doing so, this traditional framework leaves out the broader sociocultural, political, and economic contexts of social structures that constrain and enable the possibilities for health in the realm of motherhood. The culture-centered approach notes the erasure of these voices of women from dominant epistemic structures, and seeks to interrupt knowledge production by co-constructing meanings of reproductive health through dialogues with women at the margins. Therefore, in-depth interviews were conducted to centralize experiences of the cultural participants, allowing alternative health meanings to emerge within their local contexts. In particular, highlighting narratives of young Nepalese women living under poverty, we are able to understand how women actively (re)construct meanings of motherhood within their localized cultural spaces.

Notes

¹“Third World” refers to those spaces of the world that have typically been constituted in the discursive spaces of knowledge production of development and health as underdeveloped and therefore in need of interventions. Although contemporary discourses of political correctness question the use of the term “Third World” (and rightly so), our use of the term here is strategic, to demonstrate the demarcations of the First and Third that constitute the symbolic and material politics of contemporary health discourse in globalization politics.

²In the contexts within which we conducted the interviews, a large proportion of Nepali families continue to live as extended families. Women therefore come to live in the family of the husband after marriage, and live amid an extended network of in-laws. The husband's family becomes her own family, where she enacts her choices, roles, and obligations. Therefore, acceptance into the family of her husband becomes a critical point for newly married women. Our references to family here are used to refer to what would be understood as the family of the in-laws in Western discourse.

³The reference to her husband's family as her family is something that continually emerges through the discourses articulated here, reflecting the Nepalese culture within which the concept of family for women after marriage is tied to what would be considered the family of her husband. The honor and dignity of her husband's family and the happiness of her in-laws are two threads that continually emerged in references to family. Given the centrality of this reference to her husband's family as her family, through our write-up, our references to family typically refer to the family of the husband. Furthermore, in their discourses, when women referred to their families of birth, they typically did so by explicitly stating that they were referring to their family of birth.