Thinking With Post-Birth Bodies: Articulating Sociological Care for Bodies That Function Differently After Birth

This paper articulates a sociological approach to bodies that function differently after birth. We suggest that post-birth bodies are distributed across a variety of areas of existing scholarship and that this can make it difficult to grapple with experiences that encompass gestation, altered functioning/injury, parenting and medical knowledge. We review and synthesise this rich literature to illustrate how it can be mobilised to sociologically theorise and explore physical recovery from birth, characterising this as the development of sociological care for such bodies. Our analysis draws on autoethnographic reflection on the post-birth body of a cis/queer/neurodivergent/white/middle-class mother alongside four pilot interviews concerning experiences with post-birth bodies in England. By placing these lived experiences into thematic dialogue with existing feminist/STS and sociological scholarship we illustrate why bodies altered through birth are good for sociologists to think with and outline potential avenues for future research in this field. We suggest that a focus on care for post-birth bodies enables critical exploration of assumptions about temporal relations between pregnancy, birth and mothering/parenting, as well as how these forms of labour are socially distributed and supported.