CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020
| Author | Denisova, Mariia |
|---|---|
| Title | Childbirth with Doulas: Mediated Agency, Embodiment, and Female Bonding in Moscow Maternity Hospitals |
| Summary | In contemporary Russia, childbirth is highly medicalized and over-bureaucratized which leads to the lack of proper care and emotional support of mothers-to-be sometimes accompanied by the cases of medical abuse. Studies emphasize women’s institutional distrust and anxiety towards state maternity hospitals. In the discussions of women’s resistance to the systematic medical mistreatment, the notion of women’s agency is usually reduced to intentionality and individual decision-making, while the less is said about the relational dimension of agency and responsibilities for decisions made. In the present research, I fill this gap by addressing the case of childbirth with doulas in Moscow hospitals. Unlike midwives, doulas do not perform any medical manipulations, but provide women with informational, emotional, and physical support before, during, and after delivery. Drawing on 16 semi-structured interviews with women who experienced childbirth with doulas in Moscow maternity hospitals and at home, I examine how women’s agency and embodiment are mediated by doulas’ professional support. I introduce the notion of the guided labour to illustrate the role of a doula in childbirth, in which she functions as a guide, a translator, and an advocate. The doulas’ support and expertise help women gain a stronger “voice” in the Russian maternity care system. By deploying the phenomenological approach of the lived body, this research goes beyond the study of various discourses of “a good birth” and “a good mother” and explores how they are reinterpreted by women themselves and enacted by women’s bodies. I argue that despite the rise of neoliberal parenting culture and commercialization of care in post-Soviet Russia, mothers-to-be are experienced double-burden of responsibility: one comes from the intensive motherhood ideology and the other – from the Russian pronatalist politics. |
| Supervisor | Geva, Dorit; Naumescu, Vlad |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2020/denisova_mariia.pdf |
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