"I Felt Like I Was Cut in Two": Postcesarean Bodies and Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Switzerland.

Cesarean Cesareaned bodies Complementary and alternative medicine Postpartum Switzerland

Journal

Culture, medicine and psychiatry

ISSN: 1573-076X

Titre abrégé: Cult Med Psychiatry

Pays: Netherlands

ID NLM: 7707467

Informations de publication

Date de publication:
06 May 2024

Historique:

accepted: 18 03 2024

medline: 6 5 2024

pubmed: 6 5 2024

entrez: 6 5 2024

Statut: aheadofprint

Résumé

In neoliberal cultural contexts, where the ideal prevails that female bodies should be unchanged by reproductive processes, women often feel uncomfortable with their postpartum bodies. Cesareaned women suffer from additional discomfort during the postpartum period, and cesarean births are associated with less satisfying childbirth experiences, fostering feelings of failure among women who had planned a vaginal delivery. In Switzerland, one in three deliveries is a cesarean. Despite the frequency of this surgery, women complain that their biomedical follow-up provides minimal postpartum support. Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) therapists address these issues by providing somatic and emotional postcesarean care. CAM is heavily gendered in that practitioners and users are overwhelmingly women and in that most CAM approaches rely on the essentialization of bodies. Based on interviews with cesareaned women and with CAM therapists specialized in postcesarean recovery, I explore women's postpartum experiences and how they reclaim their postcesarean bodies.

Identifiants

DOI: 10.1007/s11013-024-09856-6 PMID: 38709356

pubmed: 38709356

doi: 10.1007/s11013-024-09856-6

pii: 10.1007/s11013-024-09856-6

doi:

Types de publication

Journal Article

Langues

eng

Sous-ensembles de citation

Subventions

Organisme : Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung

ID : 197393

Informations de copyright

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