This paper investigates how a first-time mother presents herself in a birth narrative as disempowered by clinical staff during the labour process. I explore instances of resistance in the narrative, understood as points in the interaction where the speaker attempts to regain some control over her experience. This is important, as previous research has shown that women who felt in control during the birthing process typically reported higher levels of emotional well-being after birth (e.g. Green et al 1990). The data for this analysis comes from a linguistic ethnographic study that follows first-time mothers through the transition from late pregnancy to early motherhood. The aim of this study is to further our understanding of how speakers use language to construct different identities over the course of life events.
I employ the concept of stance-taking to conduct an interactional analysis of the data set and to show how individual (and archetypal) social identities (such as ‘the mother’) are the product of stance accretion (Rauniomaa 2003, cited in Bucholtz and Hall 2005:596). I examine the specific affective and epistemic stances that the speaker takes over the course of the interaction, in order to position herself in relation to clinical staff, her baby and wider discourses about motherhood. In this way, I am able to illustrate how the speaker is able to present herself, over the course of her narrative, as a woman who believes in the importance of her bodily knowledge and how she is willing to challenge clinical staff in order to do what she understands to be best for herself and her baby and to regain some control over her birthing experience.
Bucholtz, Mary and Kira Hall. 2005. Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies 7(4-5): 585-614.
Green, Josephine M., Vanessa A. Coupland and Jenny V. Kitzinger. 1990. Expectations, experiences and psychological outcomes: A prospective study of 825 women. Birth 17(1): 15-24.
Rauniomaa, Mirka. 2003. ‘Stance accretion’, paper presented at the Language Interaction, and Social Organization Research Focus Group, University of California, Santa Barbara, February.
