Den kapabla kvinnokroppen. Födande och feminism på Instagram

Abstract

This article examines the Swedish homebirth discourse and how it is articulated on social media at the beginning of the 2020’s. The purpose is to investigate how homebirths are positioned as a counter discourse to hospital births and are formulated as a feminist question. My empirical data consists of notes from online observations of public Instagram accounts advocating and informing about home births. These accounts position homebirths as a safer, freer, and more natural alternative to what they describe as an oppressive, patriarchal, and misogynistic hospital environment. They also situate homebirths as a feminist question. While the hospital is seen as oppressing women’s innate and intuitive capability to give birth, the home is described as a place of equality and security where the woman has the power to listen to and follow her body’s signals. The main purpose of the accounts is to strengthen the individual woman through giving her knowledge about her body and her rights, and to support her in making the right decision for herself and her body. In this article, I argue that the homebirth discourse uses and reproduces both a gynocentric and a postfeminist vocabulary, through which they simultaneously produce birth as an innate capability of the female body and a powerful force of transformation, and as a matter of individual empowerment, self-discipline, self-improvement, and choice.