Título
(Eu) somos lived experience of pregnancy and medicalization
Autor
Luca, Francesca de
Resumo
en
In the past fifty years, pregnancy has gained a lot of interest in social sciences in
correspondence with the surge of the body as systematic category of analysis.
The pregnant body seems to become a hyper-body on which simultaneously operate
biopolitics, economic forces and social imaginaries, all engaged in the creation of a new,
dynamic ethic of reproduction.
This thesis is an in-depth exploration of the unfolding of my lived experience of pregnancy on
the background of the biomedical landscape. Moreover, it analyses the sharing of this
experience with three pregnant women that, like me, immigrated in Portugal.
It is developed within a phenomenological and critical frame, and takes the form of a
dialogue, a dialectical alternation between the autoethnography of my pregnancy and the
reflections it triggered in terms of embodiment, medicalization and socialization.
The pregnant embodiment that emerges is a liminal one: challenging postulates of subjectivity
and individuality, it reflects the complexity of being at once an “I”, (eu) and an “us” (somos).