Private Birth, Public Spectatorship: Reimagining Digital Activism Through Embodied Practices of Birth Vlogging in Korea

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Abstract

This study investigates how natural birth vlogging produces embodied knowledge and affective circulation, and in doing so, becomes a politicized act within digital environments. Rather than focusing on overt protest or organized mobilization, the project examines how the sensory display of childbirth transforms private bodily experience into shared affective and epistemic resources. It asks: How do private, embodied experiences become politicized acts when they are publicized on social media, as revealed through natural birth vlogs in South Korea? By making childbirth publicly visible and audibly present, natural birth vloggers do not simply narrate their experiences, but they transmit them. In this way, vlogging operates as a site of embodied knowledge-making, where emotions circulate between bodies and generate collective understanding that unsettles dominant medicalized interpretations of birth. Drawing on theories of affective knowledge production and mediated witnessing, the study conceptualizes natural birth vlogs as sites where embodied experience becomes politically meaningful. Through mediated co-presence, audiences encounter childbirth not as a distant spectacle but as experiential testimony that challenges taken-for-granted assumptions about medical authority and reproductive governance. Methodologically, the research employs thematic discourse analysis and visual/sonic analysis of 60 Korean YouTube natural birth vlogs and their comment sections. The findings are threefold. First, vloggers politicize reproduction by claiming reproductive autonomy across medical decision-making, fathers’ participation, and post-birth care practices, thereby challenging institutional authority and gendered divisions of labor. Second, deliberate visual and sonic techniques render embodied experience sensorially transmissible, producing affective knowledge. Third, publicization invites mediated witnessing that expands perceived reproductive options and prompts viewers to reconsider the institutional control embedded in dominant childbirth practices. Overall, the study argues that natural birth vlogging constitutes an emergent mode of embodied digital activism, demonstrating that the politicization of private life can unfold through the circulation of lived, affective knowledge rather than overt protest discourse.

Author

• Jiyoung Bae, Yale University