Birthing from Within
Nature, Technology, and Self-Making in Silicon Valley Childbearing
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2435679 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Andrea Ford (0000-0003-0462-9669, University of Edinburgh, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 35 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 602-630 |
| Publication date | 2020-11-05 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Cultural Anthropology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0886-7356 • E-ISSN: 1548-1360 |
| Publisher | American Anthropological Association (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.14506/ca35.4.05 |
| PMID | 37113568 |
| OpenAlex | W3114779775 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 11 |
| References cited | 21 |
Through examining childbearing in California's Silicon Valley, this article describes how seeking "self-actualization" has become a rite of passage for contemporary childbearing people. This approach undermines distinctions between "technological" and "natural" approaches to birth, as people are coached to leverage both logistical and animalistic capacities to produce "self-knowledge" and enact new feminist ways of doing embodiment. Based on fieldwork conducted as a doula, this article describes new rituals, anxieties, and aspirations that draw from both the idea that self-authenticity stems from an unadulterated, primordial nature and that self-realization is enabled by a very modern, reflexive strategy of self-design. In this community, the way reproduction comes to matter has less to do with realizing gendered expectations and kinship relations than with creative self-optimization. This approach facilitates women's self-determination, while simultaneously introducing new forms of pressure and advancing a dominant cultural discourse that minimizes thinking about structural conditions and mutual accountability
Aesthetics · Identity (music · Kinship · Leverage (statistics · Political science · Reflexivity · Reproduction · Rite of passage · Silicon valley · Social science · Sociology · Anthropology · Child Welfare and Adoption · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Law · Reproductive Health and Technologies · Ecology
Hormonal Health
Bio-imaginaries
Hormonal stories
Carceral Pharmacology
A multi-actor perspective of humanised midwifery care excellence
The Rise in Cesarean Births and the Technocratic Medicalization of Childbirth in Late-Reform China
The "natural" in the artificial
Bridging Reproductive and Productive Work
Blenders, Hammers, and Knives
No justice in birth
Caring for a Responsible Self
Nature, culture, and gender
Birth as an American Rite of Passage
Childbirth and Authoritative Knowledge
Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?
The woman in the body
Pragmatic women and body politics
Pictures of a Gone City
Reproducing Gender
Staying with the Trouble
Data for life
Is It Me or My Brain? Depression and Neuroscientific Facts
Shame, Gender, Birth
The Pregnancy Manifesto
Haunting Images
Biological Relatives - IVF, Stem Cells and the Future of Kinship
Where Are the Ethnographies of US Hospital Birth
Deep in the Brain
The Race of Hysteria
The Vanishing Mother
Gender Expectations
Gender, Body, Biomedicine
| Unique citing works | 11 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2,2 |
| Citation span | 2021 - 2025 (5) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 10 |