Religious women claim drug-free childbirth as gendered empowerment

Evidence

The distinction between looking for the symbolic meaning of pain (as an ideology) and for its agentive function may be illustrated further by reference to an ethnography of pain in childbirth among North American religious women published by the anthropologist Pamela Klassen. Klassen tells us that many of the women she studied regarded giving birth without drugs to be an empowering act because—as one of them put it—“it’s something that a man could never do.” Klassen is aware that this claim to power might be criticized for presenting an essentialized category of woman because not all women give birth. She thinks nevertheless that it can help to subvert the gendered image of male strength and female weakness. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 425

Categorization

• XREF: Complicates the vault thread on how religious/tradition-based action gets dismissed under liberal-secular categories — here the empowering claim is dismissed as ‘essentializing woman’ precisely by the modern analytic schema Asad critiques.