Representing African Women: A Case for Maternal Survival Narratives

• In Event: STS Africa: Biomedicine

Abstract

The high risk of maternal death in Africa has cast a shadow over experiences and representations of pregnancy and childbirth. In the 1980s, amidst new awareness of disparities in maternal mortality rates between high and low-income countries, tragic anecdotes of women dying during childbirth emerged as a tool to garner political and economic support for global health interventions aimed at women. While successfully raising public concern and billions of dollars in aid, given that these stories are some of the few stories of African women so widely circulated, it is important to ask what else does the genre of maternal death narrative do. What possibilities are foreclosed? How might discursive practices around childbirth structure the care offered to African women? And what power relations are revealed in this form of knowledge production and promotion? In this paper, I first examine how maternal death narratives function and structure potential solutions to the problem of maternal mortality. As these narratives tend to overlook the plethora of ways that women have survived, I use my fieldwork with pregnant and birthing women in southwest Nigeria to explore the ways that women piece together different sources of care in an effort to ensure successful deliveries amidst considerable uncertainty. I argue that we have at least as much to gain from maternal survival narratives as we do from the often-told maternal death narratives. In focusing on the pathways to death, women’s bodies are foregrounded as sites of knowledge production over their experiences.

Author

• Adeola Oni-Orisan, UC San Francisco/UC Berkeley