Becoming Mothers Alongside a Roomful of Things

Abstract

This chapter takes the example of the bed to explore the ways in which the relationships between humans and objects within the birth space position both as actors that produce (un)certain outcomes. The bed is caught up in a set of productive relationships, sharing a role in the birth space with the decision-making, thinking woman. Sitting in the centre of most birth wards, the bed calls a woman to lie down upon it, and this call may be welcomed or it may be resisted, the bed may support a woman or it may become an obstruction, even a prison. Thinking with Heidegger’s ruminations on the ‘thingness of things’ I argue that the ‘bedness of the bed’ shows us both the way an object is its own entity (made by us, given purpose by its use, with its own presence) while moving us in particular ways—this inanimate thing in the room produces human action. To be attentive to the agency of the bed itself and the way it is caught up in complex relationships (with tangible effects on the experience of birth), highlights the way that the conscious self must encounter an excess of decisions with consequences that are not always obvious.