Scholars turn to reproduction for its ability to illuminate the practices involved with negotiating personhood for the unborn, the newborn, and the already-existing family members, community members, and the nation. The scholarship in this volume draws attention to doula work as intimate and relational while highlighting the way boundaries are created, maintained, challenged, and transformed. Intimate labour as a theoretical construct provides a way to think about the kind of care doulas offer women across the reproductive spectrum. Doulas negotiate boundaries and often blur the divisions between communities and across public and private spheres in their practice of intimate labour. This book weaves together three main threads: doulas and mothers, doulas and their community, and finally, doulas and institutions. The lived experience of doulas illustrates the interlacing relationships among all three of these threads. The essays in this collection offer a unique perspective on doulas by bringing together voices that represent the full spectrum of doula work, including the viewpoints of birth, postpartum, abortion, community based, adoption, prison, and radical doulas. We privilege this broad representation of doula experiences to emphasize the importance of a multi-vocal framing of the doula experience. As doulas move between worlds and learn to live in liminal spaces, they occupy space that allows them to generate new cultural narratives about birthing bodies.

This book advances debates over the relationship between care and economy through the concept of intimate labor—care, domestic, and sex work—and thus charts relations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship in the context of global economic transformations.

This book contextualizes how having a doula, or labor-support woman, present during childbirth results in lower rates of medical interventions. American women are inundated with views that childbirth is inherently risky, their bodies deficient, and therefore encouraged to accept the medicalized nature of childbirth resulting in high rates of unwarranted interventions that can pose significant risk in a normal pregnancy. Why is birthing with a doula different? The narratives in this book support the belief that doulas often question the high rates of medical interventions in childbirth, fundamentally lodging a critique about the medicalization of childbirth to the women they serve. These stories share a very different philosophy about childbirth; one where the female body is capable, resilient, and not normally requiring external medical intervention. Doulas enter into a care-provider relationship that focuses on the experience of the birth as something transformative, to be honored and centered on the woman’s body in an active role in the process. Lastly, doulas model to their clients both love and advocacy because doulas believe that modeling these behaviors will translate as women become mothers through the process of childbirth.

There is no right way or best way to give birth, but if you’re pregnant, you’re likely already hearing advice and stories about what you should do, how you should feel, and what you should want from your birth experience. Your Birth Plan is an intervention: it’s a birth book that equally honors all paths and all pregnant people, guiding and empowering you to make informed decisions, without judgment or prescription, for your own positive birth experience. Long on information, short on opinions, Your Birth Plan is a how-to guide filled with practical descriptions, insights, stories and tips to make it easier for you to pick where, with whom, and in what way you would like to give birth. Your Birth Plan is comprehensive and free from judgment and prescriptions. It offers unbiased information about all birthing options, including birthing in a hospital, at home, or in a birthing center; having an epidural or an unmedicated birth; induction of labor; vaginal or Cesarean birth; and more. This is a new, inspiring, inclusive, and much-needed guide to help you plan for a birth where you are empowered to make your own choices and to have your needs met, whatever they are.

In this book, we make space to interrogate obstetric violence; from its historical and legal roots and contemporary realities, to responses of advocacy and resistance. Through the lens of obstetric violence, we are able to see overlap in structural vulnerability across continents as well as recognize the ways in which obstetric violence is symptomatic of larger global problems including systemic injustices related to reproductive health. Combining the perspectives of care providers, birthing people, advocates and researchers, our volume seeks to include both a systematic and structural understanding of obstetric violence. We bring together diverse voices, from practitioners, to activists, to academics, and provide a global perspective on obstetric violence with research from around the world, including indigenous communities from North America (Canada and Hawaii), examples from Latin American and Caribbean countries as well as country-specific cases from Argentina, Australia, Egypt, Mexico, Portugal, and the United States. The range of disciplinary perspectives and global experiences presented in this book demonstrates that obstetric violence is neither bound to one discipline, nor site specific. Together the chapters of this volume work to understand obstetric violence, moving beyond static definitions towards a spectrum of lived experiences that highlight three main areas: Legislation and Policy, Experiencing Obstetric Violence, and Advocacy, Resistance and Reframing. The time for a global recognition of obstetric violence &– of the larger structural forces embedded in systems that cross cultures and violate bodies in acutely vulnerable life moments &– is now. By naming it and saying it out loud we recognize obstetric violence exists and can together begin the process of systemic change necessary to prevent it.

The complete and essential guide to birth with a doula by the "undisputed experts in the field."--Los Angeles Times

This cross-disciplinary collection considers the intersection of affect and mothering, with the aim of expanding both the experiential and theoretical frameworks that guide our understanding of mothering and of theories of affect. It brings together creative, reflective, poetic, and theoretical pieces to question, challenge, and re-conceptualize mothering through the lens of affect, and affect through the lens of mothering. The collection also aims to explore less examined mothering experiences such as failure, disgust, and ambivalence in order to challenge normative paradigms and narratives surrounding mothers and mothering. The authors in this collection demonstrate the theoretical and practical possibilities opened up by a simultaneous consideration of affect and mothering, thereby broadening our understanding of the complexities and nuances of the always changing experiences of world-making.

Body Battlegrounds explores the rich and complex lives of society's body outlaws—individuals from myriad social locations who oppose hegemonic norms, customs, and conventions about the body. Original research chapters (based on textual analysis, qualitative interviews, and participant observation) along with personal narratives provide a window into the everyday lives of people rewriting the norms of embodiment in sites like schools, sporting events, and doctors' offices. Table of Contents Introduction | Chris Bobel and Samantha Kwan Part I: Going "Natural" • Body Hair Battlegrounds: The Consequences, Reverberations, and Promises of Women Growing Their Leg, Pubic, and Underarm Hair | Breanne Fahs • Radical Doulas, Childbirth Activism, and the Politics of Embodiment | Monica Basile • Caring for the Corpse: Embodied Transgression and Transformation in Home Funeral Advocacy | Anne Esacove Living Resistance: • Deconstructing Reconstructing: Challenging Medical Advice Following Mastectomy | Joanna Rankin • My Ten-Year Dreadlock Journey: Why I Love the "Kink" in My Hair . . . Today | Cheryl Thompson • Living My Full Life: My Rejecting Weight Loss as an Imperative for Recovery from Binge Eating Disorder | Christina Fisanick • Pretty Brown: Encounters with My Skin Color | Praveena Lakshmanan Part II: Representing Resistance • Blood as Resistance: Photography as Contemporary Menstrual Activism | Shayda Kafai • Am I Pretty Enough for You Yet?: Resistance through Parody in the Pretty or Ugly YouTube Trend | Katherine Phelps • The Infidel in the Mirror: Mormon Women's Oppositional Embodiment | Kelly Grove and Doug Schrock Living Resistance: • A Cystor's Story: Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome and the Disruption of Normative Femininity | Ledah McKellar • Old Bags Take a Stand: A Face Off with Ageism in America | Faith Baum and Lori Petchers • Making Up with My Body: Applying Cosmetics to Resist Disembodiment | Haley Gentile • I Am a Person Now: Autism, Indistinguishability, and (Non)optimal Outcome | Alyssa Hillary Part III: Creating Community, Disrupting Assumptions • Yelling and Pushing on the Bus: The Complexity of Black Girls' Resistance | Stephanie D. Sears and Maxine Leeds Craig • Big Gay Men's Performative Protest Against Body Shaming: The Case of Girth and Mirth | Jason Whitesel • "What's Love Got to Do with It?": The Embodied Activism of Domestic Violence Survivors on Welfare | Sheila M. Katz Living Resistance: • "Your Signing Is So Beautiful!": The Radical Invisibility of ASL Interpreters in Public | Rachel Kolb • Two Shakes | Rev. Adam Lawrence Dyer • "Showing Our Muslim": Embracing the Hijab in the Era of Paradox | Sara Rehman • "Doing Out": A Black Dandy Defies Gender Norms in the Bronx | Mark Broomfield • Everybody: Making Fat Radio for All of Us | Cat Pausé Part IV: Transforming Institutions and Ideologies • Embodying Nonexistence: Encountering Mono- and Cisnormativities in Everyday Life | J. E. Sumerau • Freeing the Nipple: Encoding the Heterosexual Male Gaze into Law | J. Shoshanna Ehrlich • Give Us a Twirl: Male Baton Twirlers' Embodied Resistance in a Feminized Terrain | Trenton M. Haltom • "That Gentle Somebody": Rethinking Black Female Same-Sex Practices and Heteronormativity in Contemporary South Africa | Taylor Riley Living Resistance:

This volume is about the relationship between bodily interventions, intimate labour and bioprecarity. It considers how access to and regulations around different kinds of medical intervention create vulnerabilities, especially for minorities, racialized groups, queers and trans people.