Autor/es
Descripción
ver mas
Colaborador
Felitti, Leyla
Obradovich, Gabriel
Idioma
spa
Extent
228 p.
Derechos
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 4.0 Internacional (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Formato
application/pdf
Identificador
Cobertura
1020035
Santa Fé (inhabited place)
2015-2021
Abstract
This thesis describes and analyses the processes of spiritualization of pregnancy and childbirth that are constructed within holistic networks oriented towards maternity, and characterized by promoting the ideology of humanizing childbirth. It is based on an ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the city of Santa Fe (Argentina) between the years 2017 and 2021, following mothers, midwives, and doulas who participated in these networks.
The networks oriented towards maternity are part of local groups that promote holistic spiritualities. Said networks merge the spiritual dimension of health with an agenda for gender, sexuality, and reproductive rights, establishing connections with feminist discourses that criticize gender and power relations within the biomedical system. They also conceive the body as a privileged pathway and access to internal spiritual and emotional life, aiming to "empower" women through their connection with nature, imbuing sacredness to their bodily and sexual processes.
Within the analysed networks, a spiritual discourse is present which relates pregnancy, labour, and childbirth to natural cycles and a sacred order that is expressed through the notion of energy.
The thesis falls within the intersection of two fields of study: socio-anthropological studies on reproduction and childbirth, and studies on contemporary spiritualities that, from a gender perspective, address women's reproductive experiences.
For descriptive and analytical purposes, the processes of spiritualization of pregnancy and childbirth are approached through four specific objectives. Firstly, the aim is to describe the spiritual worldviews and functioning of these networks, as well as the women who are part of them. Secondly, the celebration rituals of maternity carried out within these networks are described and analysed. Thirdly, the ways in which holistic understandings and practices regarding pregnancy and childbirth acquire political dimensions are explored. Lastly, home birth stories are analysed in order to understand the significant subjective transformations that this experience implies for women.
The analytical key that structures this research argues that the analysed networks oriented towards maternity, characterized by resonances and affinities with New Age spirituality and a distinctive mode of organization found in feminine spiritualities, serve as institutional channels and mediations where three constitutive processes of my interlocutors' experiences of pregnancy and childbirth take place. These processes include the ritualization of maternity and the enshrinement of the maternal body, a form of politicization of maternity based on a spiritual grammar that articulates the sacred meaning of childbirth with struggles against obstetric violence and the politicization of "desired" motherhoods, and, finally, the construction of a collective narrative structure that starts from the experience of home birth as a significant biographical event of transcendental nature.
These processes are understood and brought into dialogue in the context of an intersection of various elements: the emergence of obstetric violence as a framework that provides intelligibility to the childbirth experiences of cisgender women, the popularization of discourses and practices of holistic and feminine spiritualities, and the growing feminist rhetoric that values and politicizes "desired" motherhoods in recent Argentina. In this sense, the original contribution of this thesis consists of addressing the intersection of three phenomena that have not been analysed together in the national academic context: maternity, spirituality, and feminism.
The networks oriented towards maternity are part of local groups that promote holistic spiritualities. Said networks merge the spiritual dimension of health with an agenda for gender, sexuality, and reproductive rights, establishing connections with feminist discourses that criticize gender and power relations within the biomedical system. They also conceive the body as a privileged pathway and access to internal spiritual and emotional life, aiming to "empower" women through their connection with nature, imbuing sacredness to their bodily and sexual processes.
Within the analysed networks, a spiritual discourse is present which relates pregnancy, labour, and childbirth to natural cycles and a sacred order that is expressed through the notion of energy.
The thesis falls within the intersection of two fields of study: socio-anthropological studies on reproduction and childbirth, and studies on contemporary spiritualities that, from a gender perspective, address women's reproductive experiences.
For descriptive and analytical purposes, the processes of spiritualization of pregnancy and childbirth are approached through four specific objectives. Firstly, the aim is to describe the spiritual worldviews and functioning of these networks, as well as the women who are part of them. Secondly, the celebration rituals of maternity carried out within these networks are described and analysed. Thirdly, the ways in which holistic understandings and practices regarding pregnancy and childbirth acquire political dimensions are explored. Lastly, home birth stories are analysed in order to understand the significant subjective transformations that this experience implies for women.
The analytical key that structures this research argues that the analysed networks oriented towards maternity, characterized by resonances and affinities with New Age spirituality and a distinctive mode of organization found in feminine spiritualities, serve as institutional channels and mediations where three constitutive processes of my interlocutors' experiences of pregnancy and childbirth take place. These processes include the ritualization of maternity and the enshrinement of the maternal body, a form of politicization of maternity based on a spiritual grammar that articulates the sacred meaning of childbirth with struggles against obstetric violence and the politicization of "desired" motherhoods, and, finally, the construction of a collective narrative structure that starts from the experience of home birth as a significant biographical event of transcendental nature.
These processes are understood and brought into dialogue in the context of an intersection of various elements: the emergence of obstetric violence as a framework that provides intelligibility to the childbirth experiences of cisgender women, the popularization of discourses and practices of holistic and feminine spiritualities, and the growing feminist rhetoric that values and politicizes "desired" motherhoods in recent Argentina. In this sense, the original contribution of this thesis consists of addressing the intersection of three phenomena that have not been analysed together in the national academic context: maternity, spirituality, and feminism.
Título obtenido
Doctora de la Universidad de Buenos Aires en Ciencias Sociales
Institución otorgante
Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Sociales