Chinese Journal of Sociology

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The Image of Motherhood: Prenatal Examination, Body Experience, and Subjectivity of Urban Women  

Author: Lin Xiaoshan,Department of Social Work, School of Law and Politics, Zhejiang Normal University.   

  1. Author: Lin Xiaoshan,Department of Social Work, School of Law and Politics, Zhejiang Normal University.
  • Online:2011-09-20 Published:2011-09-20
  • Contact: Lin Xiaoshan,Department of Social Work, School of Law and Politics, Zhejiang Normal University E-mail:lxs2003100@126.com
  • About author:Author: Lin Xiaoshan,Department of Social Work, School of Law and Politics, Zhejiang Normal University

Abstract:

The changes of modern medical technology have greatly affected the motherhood experiences of urban women. In the context where health is important enough to be a major characteristic of modern society, pregnant women must practice the new ethics to go through prenatal examinations, which has reshaped their unique motherhood experiences. Through half a year’s ethnographic observation in the Maternal and Child Care Service Centre in a middlesized city and an indepth case analysis of an interviewee’s bodily experiences, this article reveals how urban women experience their motherhood during the course of prenatal examinations in a medicalized society that is dominated by health discourses. The paper points out that the intervention of medical technology has debased the body experience of pregnant women in that their body experience is now subject to medical discourses but not constructed through the women’s own narratives. Finally, the pregnant body is objectified as the target of medicine, making the subject of the pregnant body forgotten; thus, the experience of motherhood becomes an image under the influence of the health plans of modern medicine.

Key words: motherhood ,   antenatal examination ,   body experience ,   subjectivity ,   feminism