Mediated subjectivities of the maternal: A critique of childbirth videos on YouTube

Abstract

This paper presents an illustrative analysis of amateur You Tube videos portraying a specific style of natural births called hypnobirths, which make use of relaxation and hypnosis techniques during labour and birthing, and offer an alternative to birthing in interventionist, obstetrics-led settings. Moving forward from the visible advantages of relaxation and hypnosis related birthing support, within the context of the natural birthing movement, to restore women’s agency in birthing, resisting and rejecting hyper medicalized technocratic cultures of births, this paper suggests that these home-made, amateur hypnobirthing videos need to be viewed against the feminist critique of the intensive motherhood discourse, which sees the videos producing the birthing mother as an individualized, self-regulating and highly invested, subject, transcending pain in a mythic journey of blissful birthing. The labours of these maternal subjects evident in the carefully curated visuals of the ultimate joyful, painless birth, complete with its own distinct vocabulary that scripts a specific narrative of birth, contribute to mediated frameworks of reference which establish hierarchies of good and bad births, which might ultimately be going against the core feminist critique of technocratic birthing cultures, the very framework they seek to resist.

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