Narrative Affordances for Birthing-Selves

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Sociology
• Philosophy of Science

Background:

• Birth narratives significantly impact postpartum well-being.
• A strong sense of agency in birth stories is linked to positive outcomes.
• Existing literature highlights the importance of empowering birth narratives.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop an ecological perspective on birthing-self narrative emergence.
• To analyze restrictions in forming empowering birth narratives using affordance theory.
• To understand agency and selfhood during birth through an organism-environment relations lens.

Main Methods:

• Utilizing the concept of affordance to study organism-environment interactions.
• Analyzing three birthing-self narratives from the author's research.
• Examining the intra-action of the birthing body with physical, social, institutional, and discursive spaces.

Main Results:

• Affordance theory provides a framework for understanding agency and selfhood in birth.
• Birth assemblages act as systems producing narrative affordances.
• The interplay of the birthing body and its environment shapes the capacity for self-narration.

Conclusions:

• Reconceptualizing birth assemblages can support contextual accounts of self-experience and agency.
• The study illustrates the complexity of the affordance space influencing self-experience during birth.
• An affordance perspective enriches the understanding of authentic birthing-self narratives.