"There is power that comes to women when they give birth. They don't ask for it, it simply invades them. Accumulates like clouds on the horizon and passes through carrying a baby with it..."/ Penny Armstrong and Sheryl Feldman / Wise Birth: Bringing Together the Best of Natural Medicine and Modern Medicine
Influenced by Patricia Yaeger's The Poetics of Birth and her proposal that that we "supply ourselves with new meanings, structures, codes, and other modes of symbolic power" in order "to invent a story of birth with the power to supplement women's lost voices, this paper considers the language and metaphors used to express embodied birth experiences as part of my practice-based research in drawing.
In contrast to the well-critiqued use of the metaphor of the body as a machine within the context of the 'technocratic model' of birth described by Davis-Floyd and Jordan and in an attempt to move away from 'spectacle' knowledge of birth where visualisations of knowledge about birth have been produced by observation, dissection, and the isolation of individual body parts, this paper considers the language and systems of embodied knowledge surrounding the holistic model of childbirth.
The presentation specifically explores 'natural', metaphors and narratives that women draw from to express embodied senses of a "power that comes to us" during birth. Focussing on the view of birth as a concentrated life force and as a feeling of being "swept up by a force greater than oneself", the paper considers the conflicts and contradictions that arise in these metaphors, particularly for feminist thought and practice. As part of the paradoxical and for many, problematic relationships between power, control and submission that is alive in this 'metaphorical concept' of nature as a 'visiting power' during birth, the presentation considers the concept of the sublime in relation to narratives of 'natural' birth.
As a way of exploring the visual potential of the metaphor of a 'force or 'supernatural power', I discuss the drawings and paintings of Mamma Andersson, Monika Gryzmala and Torsten Slama- all of whom make images of in-between spaces, that are both familiar and mysterious and contain in them invisible forces that touch on a sense of the sublime.
