At the Intersection of Experience, Activism and Nominalism: Disputes on Obstetric Violence
New Formations - Print ISSN 0950-2378 - Online ISSN 1741-0789
Volume 2025 Number 117
Preprint Article
At the Intersection of Experience, Activism and Nominalism: Disputes on Obstetric Violence
Keiju Vihreäsalo
Abstract
This article tracks the intersections of experience, activism and nominalism in relation to an obstetric violence campaign. At the core of this article lies the experiences of obstetric violence in thirty narratives collected by Finnish Me Too in Childbirth campaigners. The experiences analysed here are situated within the context of activism and within the contested aim of labelling experiences as obstetric violence. In addition to a narrative analysis and a focus on the objectifying practices described in the narratives, I discuss activism and the relation between these experiences and the naming of such experiences as violence. The Me Too in Childbirth campaign reframes problematic routine practices as instances of violence. Activists detach their experiences from the hegemonic narratives of heroic resilience in labour to reframe femininity, motherhood and women as subjects with rights. They aim to politicise shameful private events and render them agents of change. In this way, what happens within hospital walls is not an insignificant element of private life, but the location for a possible push towards change, activism and politics. Through new definitions of violence, new kinds of grievances become problematic and visible. Once again, the personal is political. Obstetric violence activism reveals entanglements with the active aim of naming the phenomena and phenomena evolving through naming. Theoretically, I combine phenomenological studies of shame with Foucauldian notions of power and discuss the experiencing bodies as a point of resistance.
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To cite this article
Keiju Vihreäsalo (2025) At the Intersection of Experience, Activism and Nominalism: Disputes on Obstetric Violence, New Formations, 2025(117)