The Reluctant Social Worker: Intimate Labor for the State

• In Event: 3129 - Section on Medical Sociology Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 5. Emotional Labor in Healthcare Delivery

Abstract

In the United States, Black women are more than three times more likely to die from pregnancy and childbirth complications than white women (Bridges 2011; Martin and Montagne 2017). In New York City (NYC) the rate is even higher (Angley et al. 2016). This disparity is the result of structural racism within hospitals (Hardeman, Medina, and Kozhimannil 2016), which directly impacts the quality of care patients receive (Martin and Montagne 2017; Hardeman, Medina, and Kozhimannil 2016) and provides space for explicit practitioner bias (Bridges 2011). Lean on Me is a federally funded doula initiative that provides free doula access to low-income NYC women, who are also primarily women-of-color. In general, doulas provide emotional and physical support to women during pregnancy, labor, and the post-partum period, and are associated with decreases in pregnancy and labor complications (Kozhimannil et al 2016). The doulas of Lean on Me perform intimate labor (Boris and Parreñas 2010) as employees of the state. However, they also use emotional labor (Hochschild 1983) in a direct effort to alter each woman’s birthing environment. This work goes largely unrecognized by the city and allows the doulas to stage a quiet resistance from within the state. In this instance, emotional labor becomes a source of “micropower” (Gallicchio 2015), granting the doulas influence within an otherwise hostile hospital environment. This article explores how the Lean on Me doulas, as intimate laborers for the state, enlist emotional labor to harness this “micropower” as a tool of quiet resistance against the hospital-birth status quo.

Author

• Carolyn Ann Fraker, University of Minnesota