Narrative Affordances for Birthing-Selves

In birth literature, there is a consensus that birth narratives incorporating a strong sense of agency contribute to the person's well-being postpartum and beyond. In this article, I aimed to develop an ecological perspective on the emergence of birthing-self narratives and analyse the restrictions experienced in forming empowering birth narratives from the affordance perspective. The concept of affordance has equipped philosophers with a useful tool to study organism-environment relations and to look beyond dualities such as internal and external, biological and environmental, physical and social etc. I argue that this conceptual framework can be fruitful in understanding the emergence of agency and selfhood during birth. Authentic birthing-self narratives are necessarily rooted in the encompassing birth assemblages and reconceptualizing birth assemblage as a system producing narrative affordances for the birthing-self may contribute (1) to supporting a contextual account of self-experience and agency in birth and (2) to illustrate through birth the complexity of the affordance space in which human organisms develop self-experiences. In this study, I dwell on my research and analyse three birthing-self narratives to illustrate how feelings of a birthing body intra-act with physical, social, institutional, and discursive space to shape affordances for narrating the birthing-self.