Giving Birth To A Subject Transition To Motherhood As An Embodied & Technologically Mediated Experience

This book analyses how women navigate their personal worlds during a life stage of intense changes and ruptures, within a complex and rapidly changing sociocultural context of a post-socialist society. The transition to first-time motherhood is considered a unique phase in adult development, bringing about an abundance of profound psychosocial and bodily changes. This book-length study examines these changes from a first-person perspective, with particular attention to dimensions of personal experience and functioning that are usually neglected in psychological (and even sociocultural) scholarship – embodiment and techno-material mediatedness. To account for the complex and contextualised phenomenon, the author outlines a theoretical framework that connects sociocultural psychology with phenomenology and science and technology studies. This pluralistic and interdisciplinary approach promises to move forward the way we think not only about women’s experiences, pregnant and birthing bodies, and medical practices, but also the way we think about subjects, their embodied condition of existence, and their entanglements with socio-material aspects of culture.

Chapter I: Introduction.- Chapter II: Situated subjects – cultural-historical contextualisation of transition into motherhood.- Chapter III: Embodied subjects – phenomenological reconstruction of the process of becoming a mother.- Chapter IV: Distributed subjects – losing and reclaiming maternal agency under the alienating conditions of local institutional practice.- Chapter V: Conclusion.

Biljana Stankovic, PhD, is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, Serbia. She teaches courses on qualitative methodology, cultural-historical psychology and critical psychology, at different academic levels. As a researcher, she employs a range of qualitative approaches to topics at the intersection of health psychology, social psychology, and psychology of women, while seeking to integrate theoretical perspectives from cultural-historical psychology, phenomenology, and science and technology studies. Her research interests include female embodiment and reproductive experiences, institutional aspects of medical care, experiences of people living with severe mental illness, and social trauma and historical narratives.