“’I Felt Like I Was Cut in Two’: Postcesarean Bodies and Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Switzerland

Extrait de l'interview :

My article is based on an ethnography of parents’ experiences of cesarean births in Switzerland, where one in three deliveries is a cesarean, one of the highest rates in Europe. I examine how women who have undergone cesareans often turn to complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) therapies to address persistent pain and discomfort from the surgery. This trend is largely due to the lack of biomedical guidelines specifically addressing these post-surgical issues. [lire l'interview complet]

Résumé de l'article :

In neoliberal cultural contexts, where the ideal prevails that female bodies should be unchanged by reproductive processes, women often feel uncomfortable with their postpartum bodies. Cesareaned women suffer from additional discomfort during the postpartum period, and cesarean births are associated with less satisfying childbirth experiences, fostering feelings of failure among women who had planned a vaginal delivery. In Switzerland, one in three deliveries is a cesarean. Despite the frequency of this surgery, women complain that their biomedical follow-up provides minimal postpartum support. Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) therapists address these issues by providing somatic and emotional postcesarean care. CAM is heavily gendered in that practitioners and users are overwhelmingly women and in that most CAM approaches rely on the essentialization of bodies. Based on interviews with cesareaned women and with CAM therapists specialized in postcesarean recovery, I explore women’s postpartum experiences and how they reclaim their postcesarean bodies. [lire l'article]