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Domesticating Birth in the Hospital: “Family‐Centered” Birth and the Emergence of “Homelike” Birthing Rooms
Author(s) -
Fannin Maria
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
antipode
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.177
H-Index - 98
eISSN - 1467-8330
pISSN - 0066-4812
DOI - 10.1111/1467-8330.00337
Subject(s) - childbirth , nexus (standard) , embodied cognition , politics , sociology , space (punctuation) , professionalization , reproduction , health care , gender studies , pregnancy , political science , social science , law , ecology , linguistics , philosophy , genetics , artificial intelligence , computer science , biology , embedded system
Childbirth is both an embodied and symbolic process, and the home and the hospital have been the shifting and contested sites of childbirth in contemporary discourses of birth in the United States. I argue that the economic and cultural imperatives of deregulation and downsizing of US health‐care produce new spaces of domesticity and birthing bodies. Through an examination of the relatively recent transformations of hospital space into “homelike” birthing rooms, I propose a more nuanced understanding of how discursive and material shifts in the practices and sites of birth create new spatialities and subjectivities. The emergence of the “homelike” hospital room situates the production of birth spaces at the nexus of debates around domesticity, the body, the politics of reproduction, and the economics of health care in the United States.