Midwifery as Feminist Praxis in Aotearoa/New Zealand

This book highlights ways the practices of midwives in Aotearoa/New Zealand are caught within an array of competing discourses. For midwives these discourses and practices are produced within the contested terrain of what is constructed as 'normal birth'. While midwifery's theoretical and emancipatory political projects are articulated as a counter discourse to medical hegemony, some midwifery practices inadvertently re-inscribe pregnant/birthing bodies within medico-legal frameworks. This is an outcome, not of the sovereign power of obstetrics over women/midwives, but of attempts by midwives themselves to negotiate heterogeneous forms of risk and keep birthing women, and their own practices, safe. Within these relationships and practices of freedom, the midwife constructs herself as what I call an 'auditable subject'. These processes produce the disciplinary normalisation of midwives/midwifery. The technologies of the midwife/self occur within the relations of ruling that render the pregnant/birthing bodies of women, and the labouring bodies of midwives, increasingly amenable to subtle forms of liberal governance.