Rachelle Chadwick
Biographic Data
| ID | 137416 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rachelle Chadwick |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rachelle |
| FAMILY NAME | Chadwick |
| SIGNATURE | CHADWICK R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Pretoria |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7526-8592 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 125 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Choosing Cesareans? New Imaginaries beyond Consent/Coercion
Should birthing people be able to choose to have cesarean sections for personal (nonmedical) reasons? In 2006, Katherine Beckett considered the right to choose cesareans in relation to three different waves of feminist activism. This article revisits Beckett’s questions and asks: Where are we now? While feminist birth politics has shifted, a revised feminist politics of elective cesarean sections is needed. This article offers two conceptual tool…
Cisgender men’s narratives about their desires to be pregnant: Re/constructing reproduction, gender, and their entanglement
Pregnancy capacity, and gestational desire are shared by people of different genders and sexes. Yet, gestational embodiment and subjectivity are feminized in the normative cisheteropatriarchal pregnancy imaginary where cisgender non-intersex women are constructed as essentialized pregnant subjects. An important part of this normative pregnancy imaginary is the preclusion of men’s desires to be pregnant, and the medico-socio-cultural construction …
The Many Faces of Birthing Freedom
What would birth be like in a feminist world? In this essay, I explore this question, asking what feminist freedom means in relation to birthing. Engaging in an imaginative inquiry that is rooted in respect for plurality, I explore the multifaceted dimensions of what we, as feminists, are fighting for in relation to birth. Building on a diverse array of feminist theories and philosophies of freedom (including the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Druci…
The question of feminist critique
This article engages the contested question of feminist critique, suggesting that reflecting on how we 'do' critique as feminist scholars is integral to the work of examining the broader politics of feminist worldmaking and knowledge production. Building on the work of Rosalyn Diprose and Audre Lorde, I suggest that the concept of 'epistemic generosity' opens space for the development of a lexicon in which the nuances of an open and receptive att…
Obstetric Violence: An Intersectional Refraction through Abolition Feminism
Obstetric violence , a term coined by activists in Latin America to describe violence during pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum, is a controversial feminist term in global health policymaking as well as in obstetric and midwifery practice and research. We reflect on the term both theoretically and autoethnographically to demonstrate its feminist value in addressing the problem of violence as embedded within the obstetric institution. We argue …
The Dangers of Minimizing Obstetric Violence
This commentary is a response to the article by Lappaman and Swartz, “How gentle must violence against women be in order not to be violent?” in which the term “obstetric violence” is critiqued. The authors argue that the term is harmful and does violence (to health care workers and even birthers themselves) and is not helpful to efforts to improve or reform maternity care. They suggest that we abandon the term and use less inflammatory descriptio…
Reproductive governance and the affective economy
The governance of reproductive practices, processes, decision-making, experiences, desires, subjectivities, and bodies has received and continues to receive significant attention in feminist efforts to name and resist reproductive oppression. And over the last 30 years, articles published in Feminism & Psychology have made significant contributions to the visibilisation and critique of this form of oppression. In this Virtual Special Issue on Rep…
Visceral Acts: Gestationality as Feminist Figuration
Reproductive labor has recently become the site of renewed theoretical interest. Despite this resurgence, visceral acts of procreative “life-making” continue to be undertheorized, particularly in social reproduction feminism. I argue that the vocabulary of “reproduction” is insufficient to capture the paradoxes, fugitivity, and gender-rupturing potentialities of procreative labor. In an effort to theorize the paradoxical contours of these labors,…
Breaking the frame: Obstetric violence and epistemic rupture
The concept of ‘obstetric violence’ has emerged as an important legal and activist tool in the global quest for humane, equitable, and respectful maternal and intrapartum care. Over the last decade or so, the term has been elaborated as a legal concept in several countries of the Global South and has travelled across transnational boundaries, with scholars from diverse regions adopting the framework. In this paper, I argue that the term obstetric…
Bodies that birth’ and the violence it bears: In conversation with Rachelle Chadwick
Rachelle Chadwick has been a crucial voice in theorising and exploring obstetric violence in the global south, especially in South Africa. Chadwick has published widely on reproductive politics, birth narratives, critical feminist methodologies and obstetric violence. She is currently leading the Gestational Justice Research Hub, a research group dedicated to gestational and reproductive justice at the University of Pretoria, funded by the Nation…
On reproductive violence: Framing notes
Who decides what is called out as violence? Who determines the forms of violence we are allowed, and permit ourselves, to see?”
On the politics of discomfort
This article engages the politics of discomfort as a critical but neglected dimension of feminist methodologies and research praxis. Discomfort is explored as a 'sweaty concept' that opens space for transformative praxis and the emergence of feminist forms of knowing, being and resisting. I theorise discomfort as an epistemic and interpretive resource and a lively actant in research encounters, fieldwork and analytic and theory-praxis spaces. Bui…
Theorizing voice: Toward Working Otherwise With Voices
This article provides an overview of the ways in which 'voice' has been engaged, defined and valorized in qualitative research and argues that alternative imaginings and conceptualizations of 'voice' are needed if we are to engage seriously with the material, embodied and contradictory dynamics of qualitative research encounters. In the paper, I argue that new materialist reconfigurings enable a productive reconceptualization of voice as a transi…
The online world of surrogacy Zsuzsa Berend
Bodies that Birth: Vitalizing Birth Politics
Bodies that Birth puts birthing bodies at the centre of questions about contemporary birth politics, power, and agency. Arguing that the fleshy and embodied aspects of birth have been largely silenced in social science scholarship, Rachelle Chadwick uses an array of birth stories, from diverse race-class demographics, to explore the narrative entanglements between flesh, power, and sociomateriality in relation to birth. Adopting a unique theoreti…
Doing homebirth like a man? Constructions of masculinity in South African men's narratives of homebirth
The intersections between homebirth and masculine identities have not been widely explored. In this paper, we focus on the construction/contestation of masculinity in South African men’s narratives of planning and experiencing homebirth. Drawing on 20 interviews conducted with a sample of 5 men and couples in 2013–2014, a narrative analysis found men constructed ideal masculinities and ways of being a man in relation to homebirth. The paper focus…
Thinking intersectionally with/through narrative methodologies
This article explores the potentially productive relations and tensions between narrative methodologies and intersectional research. The following questions are explored: How might narrative approaches be productive tools for intersectional research? How does intersectionality challenge and potentially extend current modes of narrative inquiry? What are the tensions of thinking intersectionality with/through narrative and vice versa? While a subs…
Ambiguous subjects: Obstetric violence, assemblage and South African birth narratives
Obstetric violence is gaining recognition as a worldwide problem manifesting in a range of geopolitical contexts. While global public health attention is turning to this issue, there has been a lack of theoretical engagement by feminist psychologists with the phenomenon of obstetric violence. This paper contributes to the literature on obstetric violence via a feminist social constructionist analysis of “marginalized” and low-income South African…
Embodied methodologies: Challenges, Reflections and Strategies
This paper focuses on the methodological challenges of 'embodying' qualitative research. While a substantial literature exists on theoretical aspects of the 'turn to bodies', there is little work which has grappled with its methodological implications. This article provides a brief overview and critique of approaches to embodied qualitative methodologies developed in the social sciences over the last decade. The paper also articulates theoretical…
Making the childfree choice: Perspectives of women living in South Africa
This article explores heterosexual childfree women’s decisions and the ways in which they negotiate their childfree identity in the context of pronatalist expectations. A convenience sample of seven women living in South Africa were interviewed about their rationale and experience of being childfree (black = 5; white = 2; age range 22 to 53). Findings following thematic analysis of interview transcripts indicated that the participants’ reasons fo…
Framing the rape victim: Gender and agency reconsidered Carine M Mardorossian
Negotiating risky bodies: Childbirth and constructions of risk
Policy makers, practitioners and researchers have identified risk as a key concept in relation to maternity care and childbirth. There is however a lack of research exploring women's discursive constructions of risk and childbirth in relation to sociological risk theories. In this article we explore pregnant women's everyday negotiations of risk in relation to the self-chosen plan to birth either at home or via an elective Caesarean section. We u…
Technologies of gender and childbirth choices: Home birth, elective caesarean and white femininities in South Africa
Since the 1970s, feminist research has provided a powerful critique of biomedical models of childbirth. While this critique has been extremely important, it has to some extent led to the neglect of other forms of power. For example, there has been little research which has explored childbirth as a way of ‘doing gender’ in which normative or resistant forms of gender and femininity are (re)performed. Drawing on the Foucauldian notion of ‘technolog…
Between bodies, cultural scripts and power: The reproduction of birthing subjectivities in home-birth narratives
Embodied methodologies: Challenges, Reflections and Strategies
This paper focuses on the methodological challenges of 'embodying' qualitative research. While a substantial literature exists on theoretical aspects of the 'turn to bodies', there is little work which has grappled with its methodological implications. This article provides a brief overview and critique of approaches to embodied qualitative methodologies developed in the social sciences over the last decade. The paper also articulates theoretical…
On the politics of discomfort
This article engages the politics of discomfort as a critical but neglected dimension of feminist methodologies and research praxis. Discomfort is explored as a 'sweaty concept' that opens space for transformative praxis and the emergence of feminist forms of knowing, being and resisting. I theorise discomfort as an epistemic and interpretive resource and a lively actant in research encounters, fieldwork and analytic and theory-praxis spaces. Bui…
Ambiguous subjects: Obstetric violence, assemblage and South African birth narratives
Obstetric violence is gaining recognition as a worldwide problem manifesting in a range of geopolitical contexts. While global public health attention is turning to this issue, there has been a lack of theoretical engagement by feminist psychologists with the phenomenon of obstetric violence. This paper contributes to the literature on obstetric violence via a feminist social constructionist analysis of “marginalized” and low-income South African…
Thinking intersectionally with/through narrative methodologies
This article explores the potentially productive relations and tensions between narrative methodologies and intersectional research. The following questions are explored: How might narrative approaches be productive tools for intersectional research? How does intersectionality challenge and potentially extend current modes of narrative inquiry? What are the tensions of thinking intersectionality with/through narrative and vice versa? While a subs…
Theorizing voice: Toward Working Otherwise With Voices
This article provides an overview of the ways in which 'voice' has been engaged, defined and valorized in qualitative research and argues that alternative imaginings and conceptualizations of 'voice' are needed if we are to engage seriously with the material, embodied and contradictory dynamics of qualitative research encounters. In the paper, I argue that new materialist reconfigurings enable a productive reconceptualization of voice as a transi…
Breaking the frame: Obstetric violence and epistemic rupture
The concept of ‘obstetric violence’ has emerged as an important legal and activist tool in the global quest for humane, equitable, and respectful maternal and intrapartum care. Over the last decade or so, the term has been elaborated as a legal concept in several countries of the Global South and has travelled across transnational boundaries, with scholars from diverse regions adopting the framework. In this paper, I argue that the term obstetric…
On reproductive violence: Framing notes
Who decides what is called out as violence? Who determines the forms of violence we are allowed, and permit ourselves, to see?”
Technologies of gender and childbirth choices: Home birth, elective caesarean and white femininities in South Africa
Since the 1970s, feminist research has provided a powerful critique of biomedical models of childbirth. While this critique has been extremely important, it has to some extent led to the neglect of other forms of power. For example, there has been little research which has explored childbirth as a way of ‘doing gender’ in which normative or resistant forms of gender and femininity are (re)performed. Drawing on the Foucauldian notion of ‘technolog…
Visceral Acts: Gestationality as Feminist Figuration
Reproductive labor has recently become the site of renewed theoretical interest. Despite this resurgence, visceral acts of procreative “life-making” continue to be undertheorized, particularly in social reproduction feminism. I argue that the vocabulary of “reproduction” is insufficient to capture the paradoxes, fugitivity, and gender-rupturing potentialities of procreative labor. In an effort to theorize the paradoxical contours of these labors,…
The question of feminist critique
This article engages the contested question of feminist critique, suggesting that reflecting on how we 'do' critique as feminist scholars is integral to the work of examining the broader politics of feminist worldmaking and knowledge production. Building on the work of Rosalyn Diprose and Audre Lorde, I suggest that the concept of 'epistemic generosity' opens space for the development of a lexicon in which the nuances of an open and receptive att…
Reproductive governance and the affective economy
The governance of reproductive practices, processes, decision-making, experiences, desires, subjectivities, and bodies has received and continues to receive significant attention in feminist efforts to name and resist reproductive oppression. And over the last 30 years, articles published in Feminism & Psychology have made significant contributions to the visibilisation and critique of this form of oppression. In this Virtual Special Issue on Rep…
Bodies that birth’ and the violence it bears: In conversation with Rachelle Chadwick
Rachelle Chadwick has been a crucial voice in theorising and exploring obstetric violence in the global south, especially in South Africa. Chadwick has published widely on reproductive politics, birth narratives, critical feminist methodologies and obstetric violence. She is currently leading the Gestational Justice Research Hub, a research group dedicated to gestational and reproductive justice at the University of Pretoria, funded by the Nation…
Between bodies, cultural scripts and power: The reproduction of birthing subjectivities in home-birth narratives
Technologies of gender and childbirth choices: Home birth, elective caesarean and white femininities in South Africa
Since the 1970s, feminist research has provided a powerful critique of biomedical models of childbirth. While this critique has been extremely important, it has to some extent led to the neglect of other forms of power. For example, there has been little research which has explored childbirth as a way of ‘doing gender’ in which normative or resistant forms of gender and femininity are (re)performed. Drawing on the Foucauldian notion of ‘technolog…
Negotiating risky bodies: Childbirth and constructions of risk
Policy makers, practitioners and researchers have identified risk as a key concept in relation to maternity care and childbirth. There is however a lack of research exploring women's discursive constructions of risk and childbirth in relation to sociological risk theories. In this article we explore pregnant women's everyday negotiations of risk in relation to the self-chosen plan to birth either at home or via an elective Caesarean section. We u…
Framing the rape victim: Gender and agency reconsidered Carine M Mardorossian
Making the childfree choice: Perspectives of women living in South Africa
This article explores heterosexual childfree women’s decisions and the ways in which they negotiate their childfree identity in the context of pronatalist expectations. A convenience sample of seven women living in South Africa were interviewed about their rationale and experience of being childfree (black = 5; white = 2; age range 22 to 53). Findings following thematic analysis of interview transcripts indicated that the participants’ reasons fo…
Thinking intersectionally with/through narrative methodologies
This article explores the potentially productive relations and tensions between narrative methodologies and intersectional research. The following questions are explored: How might narrative approaches be productive tools for intersectional research? How does intersectionality challenge and potentially extend current modes of narrative inquiry? What are the tensions of thinking intersectionality with/through narrative and vice versa? While a subs…
Ambiguous subjects: Obstetric violence, assemblage and South African birth narratives
Obstetric violence is gaining recognition as a worldwide problem manifesting in a range of geopolitical contexts. While global public health attention is turning to this issue, there has been a lack of theoretical engagement by feminist psychologists with the phenomenon of obstetric violence. This paper contributes to the literature on obstetric violence via a feminist social constructionist analysis of “marginalized” and low-income South African…
Embodied methodologies: Challenges, Reflections and Strategies
This paper focuses on the methodological challenges of 'embodying' qualitative research. While a substantial literature exists on theoretical aspects of the 'turn to bodies', there is little work which has grappled with its methodological implications. This article provides a brief overview and critique of approaches to embodied qualitative methodologies developed in the social sciences over the last decade. The paper also articulates theoretical…
Bodies that Birth: Vitalizing Birth Politics
Bodies that Birth puts birthing bodies at the centre of questions about contemporary birth politics, power, and agency. Arguing that the fleshy and embodied aspects of birth have been largely silenced in social science scholarship, Rachelle Chadwick uses an array of birth stories, from diverse race-class demographics, to explore the narrative entanglements between flesh, power, and sociomateriality in relation to birth. Adopting a unique theoreti…
Doing homebirth like a man? Constructions of masculinity in South African men's narratives of homebirth
The intersections between homebirth and masculine identities have not been widely explored. In this paper, we focus on the construction/contestation of masculinity in South African men’s narratives of planning and experiencing homebirth. Drawing on 20 interviews conducted with a sample of 5 men and couples in 2013–2014, a narrative analysis found men constructed ideal masculinities and ways of being a man in relation to homebirth. The paper focus…
The online world of surrogacy Zsuzsa Berend
Breaking the frame: Obstetric violence and epistemic rupture
The concept of ‘obstetric violence’ has emerged as an important legal and activist tool in the global quest for humane, equitable, and respectful maternal and intrapartum care. Over the last decade or so, the term has been elaborated as a legal concept in several countries of the Global South and has travelled across transnational boundaries, with scholars from diverse regions adopting the framework. In this paper, I argue that the term obstetric…
Bodies that birth’ and the violence it bears: In conversation with Rachelle Chadwick
Rachelle Chadwick has been a crucial voice in theorising and exploring obstetric violence in the global south, especially in South Africa. Chadwick has published widely on reproductive politics, birth narratives, critical feminist methodologies and obstetric violence. She is currently leading the Gestational Justice Research Hub, a research group dedicated to gestational and reproductive justice at the University of Pretoria, funded by the Nation…
On reproductive violence: Framing notes
Who decides what is called out as violence? Who determines the forms of violence we are allowed, and permit ourselves, to see?”
On the politics of discomfort
This article engages the politics of discomfort as a critical but neglected dimension of feminist methodologies and research praxis. Discomfort is explored as a 'sweaty concept' that opens space for transformative praxis and the emergence of feminist forms of knowing, being and resisting. I theorise discomfort as an epistemic and interpretive resource and a lively actant in research encounters, fieldwork and analytic and theory-praxis spaces. Bui…
Theorizing voice: Toward Working Otherwise With Voices
This article provides an overview of the ways in which 'voice' has been engaged, defined and valorized in qualitative research and argues that alternative imaginings and conceptualizations of 'voice' are needed if we are to engage seriously with the material, embodied and contradictory dynamics of qualitative research encounters. In the paper, I argue that new materialist reconfigurings enable a productive reconceptualization of voice as a transi…
Reproductive governance and the affective economy
The governance of reproductive practices, processes, decision-making, experiences, desires, subjectivities, and bodies has received and continues to receive significant attention in feminist efforts to name and resist reproductive oppression. And over the last 30 years, articles published in Feminism & Psychology have made significant contributions to the visibilisation and critique of this form of oppression. In this Virtual Special Issue on Rep…
Visceral Acts: Gestationality as Feminist Figuration
Reproductive labor has recently become the site of renewed theoretical interest. Despite this resurgence, visceral acts of procreative “life-making” continue to be undertheorized, particularly in social reproduction feminism. I argue that the vocabulary of “reproduction” is insufficient to capture the paradoxes, fugitivity, and gender-rupturing potentialities of procreative labor. In an effort to theorize the paradoxical contours of these labors,…
Obstetric Violence: An Intersectional Refraction through Abolition Feminism
Obstetric violence , a term coined by activists in Latin America to describe violence during pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum, is a controversial feminist term in global health policymaking as well as in obstetric and midwifery practice and research. We reflect on the term both theoretically and autoethnographically to demonstrate its feminist value in addressing the problem of violence as embedded within the obstetric institution. We argue …
The Dangers of Minimizing Obstetric Violence
This commentary is a response to the article by Lappaman and Swartz, “How gentle must violence against women be in order not to be violent?” in which the term “obstetric violence” is critiqued. The authors argue that the term is harmful and does violence (to health care workers and even birthers themselves) and is not helpful to efforts to improve or reform maternity care. They suggest that we abandon the term and use less inflammatory descriptio…
Cisgender men’s narratives about their desires to be pregnant: Re/constructing reproduction, gender, and their entanglement
Pregnancy capacity, and gestational desire are shared by people of different genders and sexes. Yet, gestational embodiment and subjectivity are feminized in the normative cisheteropatriarchal pregnancy imaginary where cisgender non-intersex women are constructed as essentialized pregnant subjects. An important part of this normative pregnancy imaginary is the preclusion of men’s desires to be pregnant, and the medico-socio-cultural construction …
The Many Faces of Birthing Freedom
What would birth be like in a feminist world? In this essay, I explore this question, asking what feminist freedom means in relation to birthing. Engaging in an imaginative inquiry that is rooted in respect for plurality, I explore the multifaceted dimensions of what we, as feminists, are fighting for in relation to birth. Building on a diverse array of feminist theories and philosophies of freedom (including the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Druci…
The question of feminist critique
This article engages the contested question of feminist critique, suggesting that reflecting on how we 'do' critique as feminist scholars is integral to the work of examining the broader politics of feminist worldmaking and knowledge production. Building on the work of Rosalyn Diprose and Audre Lorde, I suggest that the concept of 'epistemic generosity' opens space for the development of a lexicon in which the nuances of an open and receptive att…
Choosing Cesareans? New Imaginaries beyond Consent/Coercion
Should birthing people be able to choose to have cesarean sections for personal (nonmedical) reasons? In 2006, Katherine Beckett considered the right to choose cesareans in relation to three different waves of feminist activism. This article revisits Beckett’s questions and asks: Where are we now? While feminist birth politics has shifted, a revised feminist politics of elective cesarean sections is needed. This article offers two conceptual tool…
Sociology (22 works) · Gender Studies (16 works) · Political science (11 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Politics (9 works) · Social science (9 works) · Law (7 works) · Maternal and Perinatal Health Interventions (7 works)