BAUHAUSWIFE

Lately, I have been undergoing what feels like one of the most significant intellectual awakenings I have experienced.  My days are a blur of laundry and dishes done to the tune of every pertinent podcast I can find; lego and conversations with the kids and tidying up while I scribble reams of notes on papers scattered everywhere, stealing chapters from the books I’m reading (Birth Wars, Sweetening the Pill, The Creation of Patriarchy, Feminism Unmodified) in the bathroom…My attentions are divided, somewhat.  I feel a little guilty, somewhat.  But also not really.  Where would I be without these kids?  The mess of ideas that I have banging around in my head on the politics of motherhood have developed thanks to my babies, and I feel an almost desperate sense that abandoning or even postponing the exploration of these thoughts would be to do my children a monumental disservice– a betrayal.  Where would they be without me?  I owe them my life, and my sincere attempt to parse it.

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In between lunch and reading to the kids, I’m frantically trying to keep abreast of an online conversation in which I’m trying to explain (to vociferous opposition) why motherhood is not an inherent expression of patriarchal power and female submission, but I do take a break when Horus asks me why we *always* have to listen to a Catharine MacKinnon lecture *every day*.

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But I’m so close—so close to being able to frame my thoughts on childbirth within the context of gender crime, gender violence, and the gendered political reality in which we all live, everyone on the planet.  And these thoughts are so precious to me, so dear to me, so important to me, and yes, so exhausting.  I’m exhausted, and *vibrating* all the time, with the thrill of this detective work.  It’s changing my mind, and it’s changing me; it’s cracking me open.   This, and being a mother, and everything else.  The fullness of it all is destroying me, and I feel like I’m moving steadily towards ferocious hagdom, away from a respect for gender, and into womanhood, and I love it.  I love it.

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I grew up semi-feminist and confused—obsessed with the beat-poets, and then post-structuralism while at UBC in the late 90s, all the while simultaneously being used and hated by the men I modified my life to follow, and whose attentions I vied for, because I wanted to exist, and I wanted to “succeed” in properly enacting  gender, but like most women I screwed that up because I just couldn’t shake murmur of dissenting voices in my head, telling me that I’m not nothing, or that I am no-thing, but rather I am human, and worthy of dignity.  I remember hearing the names Dworkin and MacKinnon bandied about as signifiers for anti-sex, anti-fun, prudery, conservatism and the opposite of cool.  The people I hung out with were moral relativists, reductionists, scientists. computer programmers, men.

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Becoming a mother has, among other things, meant that I have had to look at what it means to be a woman.  Clearly, not every woman chooses to be a mother.  But some women have motherhood forced upon them, and even women who sleep with other women may choose pregnancy, or may loathe or fear it if they experience sexual violence, as so many women do.  Every single woman has to contend with motherhood—the possibility of pregnancy, the ghosts of aborted babies, film reels in your head of your lost boys.  The presence or erasure of the children you have, or don’t have.

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But birth remains feminism’s blind spot.  Liberal feminists routinely claim that birth doesn’t matter—Like so many articles about the significance or insignificance of birth choices, the otherwise often-fantastic Glosswitch writes here, with the assumption that the outcome of birth is equal (and somewhat equally icky) in every instance “If you come out of [birth] relatively unscathed, you still have just as much of a say over what happens next” which I believe to be entirely untrue.  In observing the fallacy there, I’m *still* not making a value judgement on you, btw.  Glosswitch, like so many others, seems to be suggesting here that while all of our other choices can and should be analyzed in terms of lines of power and complicity and result, birth should somehow be exempt.

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Then there are the many radical feminists who believe that motherhood itself is straight collusion.  And still some other feminists assert that because birth is so messy and painful and dangerous, the most feminist of choices is to lie back and welcome all the interventions modern medicine has to offer, as though the medical-pharmaceutical industrial complex is an old reliable friend.

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There are, I think, many legitimate value judgements to be made about birth.  I absolutely believe, strongly, that it is *better* for babies to be born without drugs in their systems.  It is *better* for babies to receive the full blood volume available to them from their placentas.  It is *better* for babies not to be taken away from their mothers after birth.  All of these things are *better* for mothers also—significantly better.  Again, these are value judgements, but not moral ones, and take your time to ponder that distinction. This is not about which choices make us better feminists.  I don’t care about that. My point is that there are choices that are better *for women*—for our physical, mental and emotional health.  I am against institutionalized systems and processes that are *bad* for women—by which I mean leading to pain, suffering, depression, trauma, or disconnection. This should not  be a radical or confrontational statement.

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People are everywhere.  And everywhere I look, there are people tending to the wounds created by the systemic oppressions of our culture which begin, and are so poignantly articulated, underlined, and transmitted, at birth.  To claim that birth is uninteresting or insignificant is to negate the lived biological reality of women, and this claim similarly negates the fundamental significance of the body, of culture, of memory, of love.  The way we, as a society, *do* birth, upholds and reinforces the system of values in which we all live. To dismiss birth is to remove from one’s periphery even the possibility of fully reckoning with one’s humanity.

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I am interested in re-framing  birth and motherhood as central to womanhood (inasmuch as its spectre and reality does affect every woman’s life) and as an important part of an incisive critique of patriarchy.  I am interested in a super-valuing of birth and motherhood and female biology as central to a radical feminism. I know there are many women out there who will easily dismiss this view as false consciousness, or as a case of stockholm syndrome, or as a desperate rationalization of my self-inflicted oppression, and you’re welcome to that interpretation.  But my experience of pregnancy, birth and motherhood has been overwhelmingly ecstatic, expansive, powerful, interesting, intellectually stimulating, and joyful.

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The problem with motherhood is not motherhood (or women—just as the problem with birth is not women).  The problem with motherhood (and with my own experience of motherhood) is patriarchy, and the hatred of women, and the sex-based oppression of women.  The perception that the tasks and circumstances that arise from procreation are automatic drudgery, unworthy, uninteresting, and insignificant, stems from patriarchy.  I would also argue that in large part, the degree to which pregnancy and motherhood are enslaving and contributing  to our own oppression corresponds in large part to the degree to which our culture misunderstands the birth process, and in particular, the degree to which the birth process of individual women is sabotaged or destroyed.

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Anyone with an understanding of the hormonal science and physiology of birth should be able to see that the birth process is exquisitely designed to be fun, interesting, exciting, bonding and matriarchal.  An unhindered birth process sets down neural pathways in both mother and child that set them up for physical, emotional and psychological thriving during the first year of motherhood and beyond.

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The destruction of birth represents the most significant and wholesale damage to women by men, and is structural to all other forms of misogyny. The destruction of birth obliterates our support systems, not only between women (“mommy wars”), but between women and our children.  The epidemic of postpartum depression that absolutely sweeps the world (especially the western capitalist world, and communities that are “benefitting” from western maternal-child health initiatives, I don’t doubt) is a direct result of the systematic destruction of birth—the most effective form of female suppression—not birth itself.  Birth, in its optimal expression (spontaneous, unmedicated, un-interfered-with) creates the ideal conditions under which human beings can cooperate, solve problems, and live peacefully, in community.  An interpretation of pregnancy, birth and motherhood that sees the process of reproduction as intrinsically patriarchal, is, in my view, the saddest example of successful colonization and occupation.

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According to Catharine MacKinnon, “maleness is defined as the structures and actions of which are driven by an ideology predicated on an epistemic angle of vision, with values and behaviours to go along with it, based on the concrete status location of the male sex in society members of which, with variations, occupy a *superior* position in gender hierarchy. This produces the state-as-male—an institution centrally animated with sexual politics. “

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If one agrees with professor MacKinnon (which I do, how could one not, she is simply observing reality, albeit with unusual concision), what becomes especially interesting to me about the most commonly held feminist interpretations of birth (birth as insignificant, birth as a horror to be endured (thanks to drugs), or birth as an assistance to patriarchy that should be avoided at all costs) is that all of these readings of birth are male.

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In fact, everything about “normal” institutional birth in our western capitalist culture, is male.  (Except the vaginas.)

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Anyway.  I’ve gone on enough for now, but In the coming few weeks, I’m going to try to really unpack what I’m talking about.  In the meantime, I’d love to hear what you think.