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EJW0010.1177/1350506815617792European Journal of Women’s StudiesCohen Shabot
Article EJ WS
European Journal of Women’s Studies
1–15
Constructing subjectivity © The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1350506815617792
Beauvoirian analysis ejw.sagepub.com
Abstract
Traditional western conceptions of pain have commonly associated pain with the
inability to communicate and with the absence of the self. Thus pain, it seems, must
be avoided, since it is to blame for alienating the body from subjectivity and the self
from others. Recent work on pain, however, has began to challenge these assumptions,
mainly by discerning between different kinds of pain and by pointing out how some
forms of pain might even constitute a crucial element in the production of subjectivity.
This article deals with the specific form of pain that is labour pain. Pain in labour has
been investigated in medicine and lately, copiously, within the social sciences. Analyses
from a more philosophical perspective are still very much missing, however, and in
developing such analyses, de Beauvoir’s ideas on subjectivity as inherently embodied,
as situated, and as profoundly ambiguous when authentically lived, appear to be of
significant use.
Keywords
Body, childbirth, eroticism, medicalization, phenomenology
Corresponding author:
Sara Cohen Shabot, The Women’s and Gender Studies Programme, University of Haifa,
Haifa 3498838, Israel.
Email: scohensh@univ.haifa.ac.il
Pain destroys language and communication: no one besides myself can really grasp my
pain.
Pain must be avoided, since it alienates the body from subjectivity, the self from
others.1 In the presence of pain, it seems, we stop being ‘functional subjects’: our bodies
become overwhelmingly present as we turn our attention and intentionality almost exclu-
sively to ‘ourselves as bodies’, making ourselves ‘immanent’, prisoners of our aching
flesh.
Summarizing Scarry, Vetlesen (2009) comments:
The body becomes absolutely present because it is being annihilated, because the annihilation
of it is so painful that the pain forces the person to abandon all other mental content, all other
objects of his attention and sensory ability. Torture demonstrates that physical pain possesses
the power to annihilate a person’s world, self and voice. (2009: 21, emphasis in the original)
In the perspective I am adopting – that of Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty – if the body is
not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp upon the world and the outline of our projects. … It
is not the body-object described by the biologist that actually exists, but the living body of the
subject. (1989: 66, 69, emphasis in the original)4
in labour, decide to avoid it). The phenomenon of labour pain challenges conceptions
that consider pain as solely destructive, an obstacle to the development of the subject.
can be neither chosen nor stopped at will. Thus it is much more immanent than the mara-
thon runner’s chosen pain.
On pain(s)
Theorists of pain, including Scarry (1985), Leder (1990) and Biro (2010), emphasize pain’s
destructive effects, dealing with how the self gets lost when subjected to extreme pain. Pain
abolishes the transcendent character of subjectivity, making us prisoners of our bare
embodiment. Our bodies are never so present and pressuring as in the presence of pain,
robbing us of other aspects of subjectivity. Merleau-Ponty shows that through pain the
body makes itself clearly present, while in ‘normal experience’ it is almost obliterated
(1962: 94; 1964: 66). But pain is not homogeneous. Recently, more attention has been paid
to how different kinds of pain (differing mainly in their intensity and causes) and different
cultural and personal attitudes towards pain provide insights into how we understand sub-
jectivity and the fact of its existence. Folkmarson Käll (2013b) argues that pain is not only
isolating – radically separating us from others by enclosing us in our ‘private flesh’ – but
can also be recognized as the experience that most vividly illuminates our ineluctable con-
nection with the world and others. If one aspect of pain that causes the most suffering is its
incommunicability, turning us into lonely subjects incarcerated in private bodies, that is
because this is not our normal experience: this is not how we experience our world and our
relationship with others. She sees pain as one of the best places for elucidating phenomeno-
logical theories of intersubjectivity and intercorporeality: ‘by emphasising and exaggerat-
ing the boundaries between self and other, pain not only highlights their separation but also
clearly makes present an original bond and sharing at the very core of this separation’
(Folkmarson Käll, 2013b: 38). Rather than denying pain’s isolating effects, she reaches
conclusions about our ‘original intercorporeality’ arising precisely out of those effects. But
is every pain isolating and confining? I return to this question when I deal with de Beauvoir’s
concept of the erotic and of pain in the erotic encounter.
In his philosophical study, Vetlesen (2009) analyses how different kinds of pain affect
our relationship to our embodied subjectivity. Strong, excruciating, long-lasting pain
may destroy our subjectivity by transforming us into pure immanence, reducing us to
plain physicality: ‘Pain becomes a tyrant … something that mercilessly dictates all sig-
nificance, all meaning. The life-world of the person shrinks to this single hub; one is
powerless and surrenders totally to the omnipotence of pain’ (2009: 56). Mild or less
long-lasting pain, though, paradoxically, may function as one of our best tools for under-
standing and experiencing the pervasive character of embodiment in subjectivity:
‘Generally speaking’, Vetlesen argues,
pain is what makes the body a particularly important concern for the individual. The fact that
the body, often quite suddenly and unprepared for by me, becomes a place for a concentration
of pain, forces me to have a new relationship with my own body. … Pain reminds me where I
belong and have to stay put: at home, at home with my body, in my body, as my body. (2009:
54–55, emphasis in the original)
Some pain, thus, may highlight two important conditions of our authentic subjectivity as
described in de Beauvoir’s existentialist phenomenology: being with others (intercorporeality)
and being embodied as lived bodies. In the presence of pain that makes us confront the true
nature of our subjectivity we are most authentically ourselves. De Beauvoir’s position on this
is clearly phenomenological: the body is neither a pure social construct nor provided by essen-
tial ontological features; the body constitutes the subject’s situation. Authors such as Bauer
(2001), Gatens (2003), Moi (1999) and Heinämaa (1997, 2003a, 2003b) note and emphasize
this phenomenological nature of de Beauvoir’s philosophy in which the subject’s already
sexed body is her situation and the subject cannot therefore, regardless of the features of her
particular body, be seen as totally constructed.
We are most authentically ourselves in the presence of pain that reminds us clearly
that we are overly embodied, that we cannot run away from this embodiment which is an
inevitable part of our real selves. This pain allows us, at the same time, to keep being
ourselves and to keep setting goals, creating, letting ourselves go out to meet the world,
communicating, being with others: in sum, reaching transcendence. Labour pain, in most
of its forms, constitutes this kind of ‘positive pain’.
not-too-distant future’ (2013: 135). Labour pain is predictable and limited in duration. It
is also useful, resulting in something precious – when labour marks the end of a desired
and freely chosen process. Labour pain is not a sign of injury nor of a process of deterio-
ration. On the contrary: certain parturient women and midwives say that when the pain
becomes most intense, they know that the birth is approaching (Gleisner, 2013: 110).
Even at its worst, labour pain is frequently defined as manageable (and more so the more
supported and secure the woman feels).11
If we define labour pain in terms of ‘positive pain’, what are its constructive prop-
erties? Hyland (2013) analyses the ‘constructive aspects’ of ‘regular pains’. Rejecting
the view that health means a total absence of pain, Hyland reminds us that everyday
pains and aches are a common and important part of our non-pathological experi-
ence. They remind us of our limits and our possibilities, marking how we relate to
and engage with the world. Embodiment is never completely overcome, even in
states of ‘perfect health’. We are never ‘purely functional’ or ‘purely dysfunctional’
beings.
In her innovative interpretation of pregnant embodiment, Young (2005) points out
that many phenomenological analyses of the body are still permeated by the immanence/
transcendence binary. These analyses suggest that embodiment ‘reflects transcendence’
when it appears non-existent, ‘transparent’, to the subject, allowing the subject more or
less free participation in his or her various projects. The body becomes immanence,
though, when it is felt in all its weight and bulk, in pain, disease, or ageing: when it is felt
as a limitation. Young proposes the pregnant body as contesting this binary understand-
ing of embodiment. Pregnant bodies simultaneously are ‘felt’ and allow creativity and
freedom. In Young’s words:
… pregnancy is most paradigmatic of such experience of being thrown into awareness of one’s
body. Contrary to the mutually exclusive categorization between transcendence and immanence
that underlies some theories, the awareness of my body in its bulk and weight does not impede
the accomplishing of my aims. … Pregnant consciousness is animated by a double intentionality:
my subjectivity splits between awareness of myself as body and awareness of my aims and
projects. (2005: 51–52)
… de Beauvoir discovers that erotic experience disrupts (or at least has the power to disrupt)
the perversions of subjectivity perpetuated by patriarchy. In tracking de Beauvoir’s muted
voice we see her exploring the ways in which these erotic disruptions refigure our understanding
of the existential-phenomenological subject and direct us to an ethic of the erotic. (Bergoffen,
1996: 57)
For de Beauvoir, erotic relations are one of the principal frameworks within which, in an
act of generosity and openness, distinctions between subjects are blurred. Through the
erotic, we recognize both the otherness within us, namely our own flesh, and the irreduc-
ible freedom (and factual presence) of the other. The erotic fleshes out two kinds of
ambiguity – the vague distinctions between subjects and the world and the ambiguity
expressed through the intertwining of immanence and transcendence that characterizes
all subjects (de Beauvoir, 1989: 402, 499) – making it possibly the form par excellence
for recognizing ambiguity, making it present, and fleshing it out.
Both Merleau-Ponty and de Beauvoir assign eroticism a significant role in our making
ourselves subjects and differentiating ourselves from objects.12 Subjects are ambiguously
This blossoming [of feminine eroticism] supposes that – in love, tenderness and sensuality –
woman succeeds in overcoming her passivity and establishing a relationship of reciprocity with
her partner. … Thus, the lovers can experience shared pleasure in their own way; each partner
feels pleasure as being his own while at the same time having its source in the other. … In a
concrete and sexual form the reciprocal recognition of the self and the other is accomplished in
the keenest consciousness of the other and the self. … What is necessary for such harmony are
not technical refinements but rather, on the basis of an immediate erotic attraction, a reciprocal
generosity of the body and soul. … The erotic experience is one that most poignantly reveals to
human beings their ambiguous condition; they experience it as flesh and as spirit, as the other
and as subject. (1989: 377–378, emphasis mine)
… in order for the idea of liberation to have a concrete meaning, the joy of existence must be
asserted in each one, at every instant; the movement toward freedom assumes its real, flesh and
blood figure in the world by thickening into pleasure, into happiness. If the satisfaction of an
old man drinking a glass of wine counts for nothing, then production and wealth are only
hollow myths; they have meaning only if they are capable of being retrieved in individual and
living joy. (1948: 135, emphasis mine)
The second way is related to the power of the erotic to make us recognize and experi-
ence our own and the other’s ambiguity. Because this is a precondition for authentically
and ethically being, it is clear why for de Beauvoir this is also deeply related to achieving
transcendence. Her illustrative description of pregnancy is a testimony to the connection
between experiencing ambiguity and reaching transcendence:
What is specific to the pregnant woman is that the body is experienced as immanent at the
moment when it transcends itself. … The transcendence of the artisan, of the man of action is
inhabited by one subjectivity, but in the becoming mother the opposition between subject and
object is abolished. She forms with this child from which she is swollen an equivocal couple
overwhelmed by life. (1989: 512)13
pain and its value for our connection to our authentic, embodied subjectivities. Elsewhere,
she highlights pain’s possible role in the erotic encounter:
It must first be pointed out that attributing erotic value to pain does not in any way constitute
behavior of passive submission. Pain often serves to raise the tonus of the individual who
experiences it, to awaken a sensitivity numbed by the very violence of arousal and pleasure; it
is a sharp light bursting out in the carnal night. … Pain is normally part of erotic frenzy; bodies
that delight in being bodies for their reciprocal joy seek to find each other, unite with each other,
and confront each other in every possible way. There is a wrenching from oneself in eroticism,
a transport, an ecstasy: suffering also destroys the self, it is a going beyond and a paroxysm …
it is well known that the exquisite and the painful converge … torment gives pleasure. … [This]
expresses a desire to merge and not to destroy; and the subject that submits to it does not seek
to disavow and humiliate himself but to unite; besides, it is far from being specifically
masculine. In fact, pain has a masochistic meaning only when it is grasped and desired as the
manifestation of enslavement. (1989: 410–411)
I quote de Beauvoir at length because these words summarize her powerful insights into
what a highly erotic – and painful – experience could mean for the flourishing of an
authentic and intercorporeal subjectivity. Such ‘erotic pain’ does not isolate us or incar-
cerate us inside our armoured selves: it dissolves our boundaries. It takes us out to meet
the other.
I didn’t have an orgasm, but I felt a little bit like it when I had my first baby. And that was only
at the transition shortly before pushing. For a moment I felt like being shortly before orgasm
– being high, having pain, and being afraid of what’s coming next. And I felt all this at the same
time. (quoted in Gaskin, 2003: 160, emphasis mine)
For de Beauvoir, recognizing our own and others’ true subjectivity means seeing our-
selves as a mixture of immanence and transcendence, flesh and freedom. Our path to
authentic subjectivity consists in identifying ourselves as freedom while fleshing out our
own irrevocable embodiment, our compulsory corporeality. Identifying ourselves as
ambiguous embodied subjects both rooted in materiality and immersed in transcendence
constitutes the first step towards an ethics that identifies the other, too, as ambiguity, both
freedom and immanence. The erotic encounter constitutes a priceless resource within
this process.
De Beauvoir may not have been able to imagine a painfully erotic, empowering child-
birth, but her philosophy offers resources for developing this vein of thinking. We cannot
romanticize pain in labour. We must oppose reactionary, ‘backlash’ discourses on child-
birth.15 Women can be disempowered within the non-medicalized, midwifery model of
childbirth as well. Charles (2013) reflects on the deep feelings of incompetence, frustra-
tion and shame many women experience after ‘failing’ to give birth without medical
intervention: for some women, the ‘midwifery model’ is as disappointing as the medical-
ized one (see also Baker, 2010).
But feminist theory and politics (including de Beauvoir’s accounts of labour)
have already done much to deromanticize labour, demystifying the idea of labour as
the epitome of femininity, an experience that must be lived ‘naturally’ and painfully
for a woman to be ‘feminine’ or ‘moral’. Now feminist theory must attend to the
voices that find labour (and other typically ‘feminine’ embodied experiences such as
pregnancy and breastfeeding) empowering, of critical meaning to the construction of
authentic subjectivities. If feminist analyses avoid dealing with these experiences as
empowering, and not just oppressive, they allow them to be co-opted by essentialist,
romanticizing discourses that consider them ‘necessary’ to femininity rather than a
possibility that may be freely chosen in the process of becoming an authentic
subject.
Thus new feminist phenomenological accounts of pain in childbirth, while deroman-
ticizing labour, also need to examine its empowering possibilities. Such accounts can
profit from de Beauvoir’s conception of authentic embodied subjectivity as both imma-
nent and transcendent, as erotic and even capable of choosing and experiencing a ‘pain-
ful eroticism’. De Beauvoir could not think of labour as a non-oppressive, let alone a
rewarding and life-changing positive experience in spite (or even because) of its painful
nature, but she can help us understand it that way now.
Acknowledgements
I am deeply indebted to the two anonymous reviewers of this article, whose constructive advice
and comments helped me to transform my initial, narrow analysis of pain in childbirth into a much
broader (and hopefully more interesting) project.
Funding
This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (grant No. 1261/15).
Notes
1. On modern western culture’s success in convincing us that pain is so negative it must be
avoided, see Honkasalo (1998).
2. For an excellent account of how pain has been understood in the West and of recent changes,
see Folkmarson Käll (2013a: 1–2).
3. Interesting socio-medical analyses of labour pain include Brownridge (1995), Gleisner
(2013), Hodnett (2002), Lowe (2002), Lundgren and Dahlberg (1998) and Mulinari (2013).
4. For more on the body, in de Beauvoir, already in itself expressing life and transcendence
(rather than being a brute fact needing an abstract subjectivity to achieve transcendence), see
Bergoffen (1997: 154–160), Heinämaa (2003b) and Scarth (2004: 81–84).
Well, it was so powerful. It was unlike anything else. As in very bad weather, such as a very
heavy thunderstorm, a snowstorm or something. You can’t control it. Something was happen-
ing regardless of what you do. I must say it’s very, very groovy.
And another:
You get concentrated when the pain comes and feel that the pain is developing something …
to follow and see the connection in relation to the opening. During my last delivery, it was
more like … no I don’t want this. But now I was no longer a victim. Instead, I was more in
control of myself, you may say. (quoted in Lundgren, 2011: 122–123)
These reports show how childbirth, when lived as highly intense, embodied and painful but
allowing agency, movement and choices, can be viewed as paradigmatically empowering –
not in essentialist, but in phenomenological-existentialist terms. In Beauvoirian language, it
perfectly conjoins the immanent with the transcendent to create a moment of clear, forceful,
authentic subjectivity. This Beauvoirian framework provides a way to describe the experience
lived by women for whom childbirth has been empowering as well as women who have felt
disempowered, even severely oppressed, within it.
9. Lowe (2002: 23) concludes her study on childbirth pain: ‘Although pain is a common com-
ponent of the experience of childbirth across cultures, ethnic groups, and the ages, it is highly
variable in both the sensory and affective dimensions. The degree of suffering that it causes is
also highly variable and can be mediated by physical attributes of the woman and her labour,
psychosocial characteristics of the woman, cultural beliefs and mores, the birth environment,
and care provided by the birth participants.’ For other revealing reports on the variety of
experiences of childbirth pain see Fox and Worts (1999: 336–338), Gaskin (2003: 150–166)
and Hodnett (2002).
The experience of childbirth pain, thus, is greatly constructed, highly influenced by cul-
tural conceptions of pain in general and of the ‘meaning’ of labour. It would be anachronistic
and simplistic to ignore the cultural, social and historical aspects through which this experi-
ence is constantly modified. My analysis here is restricted to the western experience lived
mainly by middle-class, privileged women, who often experience the medicalization of child-
birth as restricting their agency and threatening their otherwise free embodied subjectivities.
It would be interesting, though, to analyse other kinds of childbirth experience (and how pain
is lived within them) through an existentialist and phenomenological lens.
10. In feminist terms, the history of medicalized childbirth is interestingly complex. It was always
considered ‘natural’ and ‘moral’ for women to undergo the suffering and pain of childbirth.
Attempts to find medical relief for it were originally responding to desperate calls from
women, strengthened by feminist opposition to that attitude towards the pain. For women
who challenge women’s ‘natural destiny’, numbing labour pain can be empowering (Baker,
2010; Smeenk and ten Have, 2003; Wolf, 2012). Nevertheless, with childbirth’s increasing
medicalization, women started to feel disempowered again. Extreme numbing practices (like
the ‘twilight sleep’ used in America from the 1950s through the 1970s, during which women
almost completely lost consciousness) became common, diminishing women’s self-image
and their perception of control and agency during labour (Behruzi et al., 2013; Smeenk and
ten Have, 2003; Wolf, 2012).
11. On the importance of friendly presence and support in coping with labour pain, see Hodnett
(2002) and Lowe (2002).
12. Heinämaa (2003a: 63–64).
13. This is the translation as modified by Heinämaa, with whom I agree that the published English
translation fails to stress the gendered transcendence granted specifically to pregnant women:
‘Beauvoir argues that in pregnancy, the woman does not transcend herself, her habits, goals,
and projects, by voluntary bodily movements and deliberate actions only; rather, her self-
transcending involves another being growing inside her body and growing from her body’
(Heinamäa, 2014: 39).
14. Martin deals with reports that emphasize labour’s erotic character and the importance, for
an empowering labour experience, of recognizing that eroticism: ‘Birth is fundamentally a
creative act, as is the act of sexual union. The quality and intensity of the energy present and
the ultimate surrender during both events are closely related’ (Baldwin, quoted in Martin,
1987: 157–158). Martin notes that when labour is interpreted as sexual or erotic, it is usually
in order to portray it as inherently active and rewarding, in spite of being ‘hard work’ (1987:
159). This imagery has been used politically to justify ‘independent’ birth practices such as
unassisted childbirth: ‘When genital sex is chosen as the key metaphor for what birth is, a
number of consequences for action follow. Husband and wife will give birth alone, in private,
just as they would when engaged in other sexual behavior. To help the process along, just as
in other forms of sexuality, lovemaking, fantasizing, hugging, kissing, caressing are the most
relevant means’ (1987: 159). For more on ‘childbirth as erotic’ and on the concept of ‘orgas-
mic birth’, see Gaskin (2003: 150–166).
15. For interesting critical analyses of ‘backlash’ discourses and the romanticization of labour,
natural labour and labour pain, see Baker (2010), Charles (2013), Johnson (2013) and Jones
(2012).
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