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Thoughts On The Postpartum Situation, Jennifer Scuro Phd

Faculty Works: PHI (2010-2021)

The event of childbirth carries with it a dominant narrative: that a pregnant woman happily gives birth to a baby. This appears to be quite a simple formulation—as if a natural fact, as if plain and common sense. Yet, the complexities masked by the mythological and whitewashed quality of this narrative, as I have already argued recently in The Pregnancy 6= Childbearing Project: A Phenomenology of Miscarriage (Feb 2017), harms and even kills women. In this paper, I expand on the problem of what I term “dismemberment after birth” as it operates invisibly in the “postpartum situation.” The dominant narrative, …