Giving Birth To A Subject

This book analyses how women navigate their personal worlds during a life stage of intense changes and ruptures, within a complex and rapidly changing sociocultural context of a post-socialist society. The transition to first-time motherhood is considered a unique phase in adult development, bringing about an abundance of profound psychosocial and bodily changes. This book-length study examines these changes from a first-person perspective, with particular attention to dimensions of personal experience and functioning that are usually neglected in psychological (and even sociocultural) scholarship – embodiment and techno-material mediatedness. To account for the complex and contextualised phenomenon, the author outlines a theoretical framework that connects sociocultural psychology with phenomenology and science and technology studies. This pluralistic and interdisciplinary approach promises to move forward the way we think not only about women’s experiences, pregnant and birthing bodies, and medical practices, but also the way we think about subjects, their embodied condition of existence, and their entanglements with socio-material aspects of culture.