Laboring with Beauvoir: In Search of the Embodied Subject in Childbirth

Using Beauvoir's existentialist and phenomenological ideas, this piece reflects on the embodied experience of childbirth, offering an alternative to the essentialist/postmodern dilemma concerning the feminist analysis of labor. When lived as an intense, embodied, painful experience, childbirth can be viewed as an empowering experience not in essentialist, but in phenomenological-existentialist terms: an experience that (in Beauvoirian language) perfectly conjoins the immanent with the transcendent to create a “project of subjectivity.”