Taking care, bringing Life: A post-structuralist feminist analysis of maternal discourses of mothers and dais in India
Loading...
Links to Files
Permanent Link
Collections
Author/Creator
Author/Creator ORCID
Date
2017-02-03
Type of Work
Department
Program
Citation of Original Publication
Agarwal, V. (2018). Taking Care, Bringing Life: A Post-structuralist Feminist Analysis of Maternal Discourses of Mothers and Dai s in India. Health communication, 33(4), 423-432.
Rights
Abstract
My poststructuralist feminist reading of the antenatal and birthing practices of women (N=25)
living in a basti in India makes visible how the meanings of maternal experiences constituted as
our ways open discursive spaces for the mothers and dais as procreators to: challenge (i.e.,
question the authority of), co-opt (i.e., conditionally adopt), and judge (i.e., employ sanctioned
criteria to regulate) competing knowledge production forms. In critiquing maternal knowledge as
feminist discourse, the women’s strategies contribute theoretically to an integrative construction
of care by reclaiming displaced knowledge discourses and diversity in meaning production.
Pragmatically, consciousness-raising collectives comprising the mothers and dais can co-create
narratives of our ways of maternal experiences articulated in public discourse to sustain
equitability of knowledge traditions in migrant urban Third World contexts.