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«Страшилки» для рожениц: конструирование и преодоление страха в родах
The focus of my research is on individual midwives and “professional” doulas, two “neighboring” groups of specialists independent of the maternity hospital who accompany women during pregnancy, childbirth and the postpartum period on a personal and paid basis.
The purpose of this review is to describe and analyze texts containing a representation and interpretation of fears, worries, fears, panic, anxieties, phobias, frustrations during pregnancy and childbirth, as well as a description of ways to overcome such emotions in the studied communities.
For this, the contexts of the existence of stories about professional perinatal support, about personal experience of pregnancy and childbirth were studied; their functions; variability, stereotyped; circulation mechanisms, the impact of stories on communication participants; correspondence of texts with medical and other explanatory models.
An analysis of the texts recorded and narrated by the mothers and representatives of the communities in different contexts suggests that the main recipients of family, friendly, media, medical “horror stories” “control” their impact through careful planning and organization of childbirth, as well as through the purchase of information, training, techniques, counseling, partner and professional support of childbirth. Fears are normalized, rationalized and “defeated” by independent perinatal specialists, including through an active professional position and the sale of training programs for childbirth, self-help technologies, practices, rituals and professional support.
The circulation of such texts in the studied communities, including those depicting and interpreting perinatal fears in childbirth, provides for the construction and translation of various experiences of awareness, living and verbalization of emotions in childbirth (emotional knowledge); the (re)production, transmission and competition of popular and/or alternative explanatory models, optimistic practices, emotionally colored rituals and interactions that rationalize, normalize, and conquer the theme of the terrible childbirth.