Suzy Roan - SGSAH Research

The Featured Researcher for December 2023 was Suzy Roan, with a PhD Project titled The Shape of Birth: Languages of Birthing Embodiment in the Storying of Contemporary Home Birth in the UK

HEI: The Glasgow School of Art

Supervisors: Sue Brind, School of Fine Art, The Glasgow School of Art; Prof Soo Downe, Midwifery Studies, University of Central Lancashire; Dr Helen Charman, English, Cambridge University

The Shape of Birth: Languages of Birthing Embodiment in the Storying of Contemporary Home Birth in the UK

Suzy Roan is a part-time PhD researcher in the School of Fine Art at The Glasgow School of Art with co-supervisors in Midwifery Studies and English.

Summary

Drawing together the disciplines of Fine Art, Midwifery and Phenomenology, my practice-led research (predominantly expanded drawing and print practices) uses collaborative oral history methods and a feminist voice-centered method of narrative enquiry to explore languages of embodiment within contemporary home birth narratives.

4/ Lizi’s birth / Separation /Digital photograph

Medical lexicons and master narratives continue to dominate cultural storytelling of childbirth in the UK (Chadwick 2018). Consequently, medical master narratives of ‘safety, risk and technocratic progress’ with an emphasis on complications, ‘trouble’, pain and difficulty continue to influence the ways in which women and people who birth make choices around birth (Chadwick & Foster, 2013), experience childbirth and tell birthing stories (Chadwick 2014). Within this framework, the dynamic processes of spontaneous physiological birth and subjective and embodied expressions of birth-giving are often missing, hidden or lost.

Anthropologist Emily Martin in her persuasive work ‘The Creation of New Birth Imagery’ (1987) argued that “there is a compelling need for new key metaphors, core symbols of birth that capture what we do not want to lose about birth” (Martin 1987, 1992, 2001). Martin explored how pervasive medical explanations are in our society and suggested that metaphors offer a potent mechanism for translating belief into behaviour. Martin asked:

“If the fragmentation in ordinary language we use to talk about birthing is in part a result of scientific medicine’s definition and treatment of birth, what happens to that language when women arrange to birth in a different setting, according to different principles? What imagery would (women) bring to the experience of birth…?” (Martin 1987, 1992, 2001)

27 years later, sociologist Rachelle Chadwick argued that there still remains a “compelling need for us to develop new birthing lexicons, metaphors and counter-narratives in which the embodied and subjective experience of the birth-giver is foregrounded” (Chadwick 2014).

Influenced by the work of Martin and Chadwick, the project engages in first-hand narrative interviews with women, people who birth, midwives and birth-workers about their experiences of home birth. The research explores the language and imagery that those who have experiences of home birth turn to, as a way of giving expression to experiences of birth-giving, potentially beyond rational consciousness. By paying attention to what is, perhaps ‘beyond coherence’ in oral testimonies of home birth through socially engaged art practices and visual methods of narrative analysis, this research aims to excavate and re-evaluate this rich body of embodied knowledge around labour and birth beyond the barriers of conventional language.

What happens to a lexicon of birth when it engages with the dynamic processes of spontaneous physiological birth through the visual and the imaginary?

With the first-hand narratives as both material and instruction for the artworks, the research looks to collage techniques of feminist avant-garde artists, feminist phenomenological theories of the body, in particular carnal sociology in relation to embodiment and language and an emphasis on the importance of generating knowledge through deep observant participation.