Research Articles (Women & Gender Studies)

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/10566/8

Browse

Browsing by Author "Bozalek, Vivienne"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Obstetric violence within students� rite of passage: The reproduction of the obstetric subject and its racialised (m)other
    (UNISA Press, 2021) van der Waal, Rodante; Mitchell, Veronica; Bozalek, Vivienne
    Building on the work of Mbembe (2019) and Silva (2007), we theorise how the obstetric institution can still be considered fundamentally modern, that is, entangled with colonialism, slavery, bio- and necropolitics and patriarchal subjectivity. We argue that the modern obstetric subject (doctor or midwife) representing the obstetric institution engulfs the (m)other in a typically modern way as othered, racialised, affectable and outerdetermined, in order to constitute itself in terms of self-determination and universal reason. While Davis-Floyd (1987) described obstetric training as a rite of passage into a technocratic model of childbirth, we argue that students� rite of passage is not merely an initiation into a technological model of childbirth. The many instances of obstetric violence and racism in their training make a more fundamental problem visible, namely that students come of age within obstetrics through the violent appropriation of the (m)other. We amplify students� curricular encounters in two colonially related geopolitical spaces, South Africa and the Netherlands, and in two professions, obstetric medicine and midwifery, to highlight global systemic tendencies that push students to cross ethical, social and political boundaries towards the (m)other they are trained to care for. The embedment of obstetric violence in their rite of passage ensures the reproduction of the modern obstetric subject, the racialised (m)other, and institutionalised violence worldwide.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Touching matters: Affective entanglements in Corona time
    (SAGE Publications, 2021) Bozalek, Vivienne; Newfield, Denise; Romano, Nike
    This article troubles touch as requiring embodied proximity, through an affective account of virtual touch during coronatime. Interested in doing academia differently, we started an online Barad readingwriting group from different locations. The coronatime void was not a vacuum, but a plenitude of possibilities for intimacy, pedagogy, learning, creativity, and adventure. Although physically apart, we met daily through Zoom, and we touched and were touched by each other and the texts we read. A montage of writing fragments and a collective artwork, based on the Massive_Micro project, highlight virtual touching. Undone, redone, and reconfigured, we became a diffractive human/nonhuman multiplicity.