| I utilize participant observation, autoethnography and in-depth interviews with women who have given birth at home and homebirth midwives in Oklahoma to understand perceptions and responses to society's hegemonic birth system, its power, ideology, and practices. Employing Foucauldian, Foucauldian feminist, and Social Constructivist frameworks, I illuminate issues of reality construction, knowledge, and power related to the homebirth experience. Participants expressed distinctions between biomedical and midwifery models. They described complex processes whereby women's bodies are transformed into docile bodies through disciplinary technologies, including control of ideology and panopticonic domination of time, space, and movements of the body. This process involved technocratic constructions of women's bodies and birth as pathological and women's bodies as defective machines that require application of technology and expert action to birth. Homebirth mothers and midwives articulated narratives of empowerment, knowledge, and control in the philosophy and practice of the midwifery model and homebirth, and subscribed to a holistic paradigm that involved constructing women's bodies and birth as healthy and normal, understanding women as social beings, and valuing nature over technology. Homebirth was directly and indirectly presented as resistance to normalizing medical hegemony whereby respondents claimed ownership of their bodies, births, and babies, pursuing this aim through active creation of agency, empowerment, and practice of alternative birth models. |
