Narratives of the Pregnant Body: The Stories of Women in the Latter Stages of Pregnancy

Abstract

Becoming a mother is conceptualised as an important life transition in the social sciences. In this chapter I present narratives of six women in the latter stages of pregnancy. The study from which these narratives are drawn aimed to investigate the meaning of changes in weight, body image and eating behaviour in the context of the transition to motherhood and the women’s lives more generally. Previous research suggests that pregnancy and the postpartum period is a time of significant changes in weight, body satisfaction and eating behaviours for many women, and that these might have implications for their health and well being. However, most of this research does not explore how experience is constructed. The qualitative study from which these accounts are drawn took a narrative psychological approach within a material-discursive framework. It aimed to address the following questions: How do women construct reality to make sense of their lived and embodied experience of pregnancy? What possibilities or limitations do their stories create for them? Negative narratives of pregnancy as transgressing idealised femininity ie. the slender ideal, were evident in the women’s stories. However, these dominant cultural narratives of what women should look like were also resisted and pregnancy narratives allowed for being larger and a relaxation of dietary restraint for most, but not all, of the women. Anticipation of the postpartum period further highlighted dominant narratives of femininity, as the importance of regaining control over the transgressive body was emphasised. It is concluded that until more positive and empowering alternative narratives of the pregnant body are available, the transition to motherhood with regard to the meaning of changes in weight, body image and eating behaviour is likely to cause problems for both individual women and society

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This paper was published in University of Huddersfield Repository.

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