Speaker: Claudia Barcellos Rezende
The Centre for Maternal and Child Health at the School of Health Science, City, University of London welcomes Claudia Barcellos Rezende to discuss her findings on trust and affect in birth narratives in Brazilas part of the research seminar series.
About Claudia's Findings:
In this paper, I discuss how Brazilian women talked about health policies in their birth stories, analysing their expectations regarding their rights.
I argue that a personalised relationship with their obstetricians, with trust and affect, stand out as the relevant factor for a good birth experience.
These birth stories were collected among nine middle class white women in Rio de Janeiro, with ages between 35-45 years old, all of whom had private health plans.
They were analysed in terms of their structure as well as the categories and issues women emphasised, with a focus on their emotional dimensions.
The interviews were carried out in 2016, in a period, in which the main ideas of the humanisation birth movement were well disseminated in the media and internet websites.
The Brazilian health ministry instituted the Prenatal and Birth Humanization Program in 2000, aiming at ensuring respectful attention to women and babies and diminishing the use of unnecessary medical interventions.
The women studied knew of their rights but they did not elaborate on the program’s guidelines in their narratives.
Rather, finding obstetricians who performed normal births and respected women's wishes was more important, but it was not enough to guarantee that they would have the childbirth they planned.
Their birth stories suggested that the good development of birth stemmed mostly from a personalised trust relationship between doctor and patient, rather than from rights that should be observed.
About the Speaker:
Claudia Barcellos Rezende is a Professor of Anthropology at the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the London School of Economics in 1994.
She teaches both graduate and postgraduate courses and has previously researched friendship in London and in Rio de Janeiro, race relations and national identity in Brazil.
Since 2007, she has been studying pregnancy and birth in Rio de Janeiro, with a focus on subjectivity, emotion, embodiment and gender relations, and with the support of CNPq grants.
Among her publications are the books Os Significados da Amizade: Duas Visões de Pessoa e Sociedade (Ed. FGV, 2002), Retratos do Estrangeiro: Identidade Nacional, Subjetividade e Emoção (Ed. FGV, 2009) e Antropologia das Emoções, co-authored by Maria Claudia Coelho (Ed. FGV, 2010). Orcid number: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0297-1540.
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