Painful childbirth is agentive despite being unwilled and particularized

Evidence

But I want to think of the pain of childbirth not as a meaningful experience, and not as an image subversive of male arrogance (on that score, alas, it has not been historically very effective). Pain may be thought of directly as a constitutive element of giving birth. My point is not that birthing should be accepted as a moral basis of the female claim to empowerment. Still less that her ability to face pain courageously is a virtue. It is that particular women in particular places and particular times actually give birth in pain—and this creates a new situation for the mother herself and for others. For those who can exercise it, the power to bring another life and therefore other relations into the world in pain is no less agentive for being particularized as well as unwilled (I refer, of course, not to the decision to have a child but to the process of conception, pregnancy, and birth). — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 428

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• DEEPTHINKING: The whole move — refusing both the symbolic-meaning reading and the feminist-empowerment reading to return agency to the concrete, unwilled physical act itself — resists one-sentence summary.
• XREF: Connects to the book’s running theme of agency and intentionality in Asad’s critique of liberal secular subjectivity, and to the pain-as-negative biomedicine thread.

Related

• Pain in childbirth can be agentive without being chosen, willed, or empowering (similarity 0.95)
• Unwilled bodily events like childbirth need not count as passive or agency-free. (similarity 0.88)
• Feminist theory has refused to treat unwilled childbirth as agentive (similarity 0.86)
• Women experience childbirth as either creative act or passive ordeal (similarity 0.83)
• Childbirth feels depersonalizing, leaving the mother without pride in creation (similarity 0.82)
• Pain can be agentive rather than merely a passive state (similarity 0.79)
• Religious women claim drug-free childbirth as gendered empowerment (similarity 0.79)