Doulas And Intimate Labour Boundaries Bodies And Birth

Doulas and Intimate Labour: Boundaries, Bodies and Birth

Scholars turn to reproduction for its ability to illuminate the practices involved with negotiating personhood for the unborn, the newborn, and the already-existing family members, community members, and the nation. The scholarship in this volume draws attention to doula work as intimate and relational while highlighting the way boundaries are created, maintained, challenged, and transformed. Intimate labour as a theoretical construct provides a way to think about the kind of care doulas offer women across the reproductive spectrum. Doulas negotiate boundaries and often blur the divisions between communities and across public and private spheres in their practice of intimate labour. This book weaves together three main threads: doulas and mothers, doulas and their community, and finally, doulas and institutions. The lived experience of doulas illustrates the interlacing relationships among all three of these threads. The essays in this collection offer a unique perspective on doulas by bringing together voices that represent the full spectrum of doula work, including the viewpoints of birth, postpartum, abortion, community based, adoption, prison, and radical doulas. We privilege this broad representation of doula experiences to emphasize the importance of a multi-vocal framing of the doula experience. As doulas move between worlds and learn to live in liminal spaces, they occupy space that allows them to generate new cultural narratives about birthing bodies.

Doulas and Intimate Labor

The Routledge Handbook of Anthropology and Reproduction

The Routledge Handbook of Anthropology and Reproduction is a comprehensive overview of the topics, approaches, and trajectories in the anthropological study of human reproduction. The book brings together work from across the discipline of anthropology, with contributions by established and emerging scholars in archaeological, biological, linguistic, and sociocultural anthropology. Across these areas of research, consideration is given to the contexts, conditions, and contingencies that mark and shape the experiences of reproduction as always gendered, classed, and racialized. Over 39 chapters, a diverse range of international scholars cover topics including: Reproductive governance, stratification, justice, and freedom. Fertility and infertility. Technologies and imaginations. Queering reproduction. Pregnancy, childbirth, and reproductive loss. Postpartum and infant care. Care, kinship, and alloparenting. This is a valuable reference for scholars and upper-level students in anthropology and related disciplines associated with reproduction, including sociology, gender studies, science and technology studies, human development and family studies, global health, public health, medicine, medical humanities, and midwifery and nursing.