"Obstetricians Are Always Taking a Position Against Us": The Politics of Contemporary Midwifery and Childbirth in Palestine
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2024-05
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Abstract
Although until the late 1960s women's reproductive health care had been largely the domain of Palestinian women healers, midwives, and nurse-midwives, the contemporary reproductive healthcare system in Palestine is medicalized, masculinized, and commodified in an indigenous society already suffering from the brutality of Israeli occupation. Based on interviews with eight experienced Palestinian midwives, scholarly and field research, and field knowledge, this article examines ideological and practice differences among midwives, and between some nurse-midwives and traditional midwives (dayat), largely in contemporary Jerusalem and the West Bank. It highlights sharp gendered class contradictions in midwives' relations to obstetrician-gynecologists and the Palestinian Authority Ministry of Health; points to the rise and impact of a biomedical interventionist risk sensibility on the physician-led hospital shop floor; and considers the psychic and sexual dimensions of working with women seeking reproductive healthcare, including the impact of trauma and limited reproductive agency.
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Scholars@Duke
Frances S. Hasso
I am a Professor in the Program in Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University with secondary appointments in the Department of History and Department of Sociology. I taught in and directed the International Comparative Studies Program at Duke from 2010-2015 and was a member of the Oberlin College faculty from 2000-2010. I am Editor Emerita (2015-2018) of the Journal of Middle East Women's Studies. I have been a National Humanities Center fellow, an ACOR fellow, a Rockefeller fellow, and an SSRC/ACLS fellow. My research has additionally been supported by the National Science Foundation, American Sociological Association, Woodrow Wilson National National Fellowship Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Palestinian American Research Center, the Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (Leiden), The Josiah Charles Trent Memorial Foundation Endowment, and Duke Arts & Sciences Faculty Committee Research Grants. My latest book, Buried in the Red Dirt: Race, Reproduction and Death in Modern Palestine, is released from Cambridge University Press as a Creative Commons Open Access monograph. Many of my publications are accessible open access through my personal website https://franceshasso.net/publications/. I can be reached at fsh5@duke.edu.
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