617792

research-article2015
EJW0010.1177/1350506815617792European Journal of Women’s StudiesCohen Shabot

Article EJ WS
European Journal of Women’s Studies
1­–15
Constructing subjectivity © The Author(s) 2015
Reprints and permissions:
through labour pain: A sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1350506815617792
Beauvoirian analysis ejw.sagepub.com

Sara Cohen Shabot

University of Haifa, Israel

Abstract
Traditional western conceptions of pain have commonly associated pain with the
inability to communicate and with the absence of the self. Thus pain, it seems, must
be avoided, since it is to blame for alienating the body from subjectivity and the self
from others. Recent work on pain, however, has began to challenge these assumptions,
mainly by discerning between different kinds of pain and by pointing out how some
forms of pain might even constitute a crucial element in the production of subjectivity.
This article deals with the specific form of pain that is labour pain. Pain in labour has
been investigated in medicine and lately, copiously, within the social sciences. Analyses
from a more philosophical perspective are still very much missing, however, and in
developing such analyses, de Beauvoir’s ideas on subjectivity as inherently embodied,
as situated, and as profoundly ambiguous when authentically lived, appear to be of
significant use.

Keywords
Body, childbirth, eroticism, medicalization, phenomenology

Introduction: Pain on (de)constructing the subject

Western conceptions of pain traditionally associate pain with the inability to communi-
cate and the absence of the self. In her famous account, centring mainly on extreme
cases, such as pain inflicted in torture, Scarry (1985) sees pain as the carrier of perfect
certainty for the constituting subject (I have zero doubts regarding my own pain, there-
fore I have no doubt I exist, at least as a subject in pain). But she believes pain is, simul-
taneously, a corrosive force for a social subjectivity that communicates through language.

Corresponding author:
Sara Cohen Shabot, The Women’s and Gender Studies Programme, University of Haifa,
Haifa 3498838, Israel.
Email: scohensh@univ.haifa.ac.il

Downloaded from ejw.sagepub.com at University of Liverpool on December 5, 2015

2 European Journal of Women’s Studies 

Pain destroys language and communication: no one besides myself can really grasp my
pain.
Pain must be avoided, since it alienates the body from subjectivity, the self from
others.1 In the presence of pain, it seems, we stop being ‘functional subjects’: our bodies
become overwhelmingly present as we turn our attention and intentionality almost exclu-
sively to ‘ourselves as bodies’, making ourselves ‘immanent’, prisoners of our aching
flesh.
Summarizing Scarry, Vetlesen (2009) comments:

The body becomes absolutely present because it is being annihilated, because the annihilation
of it is so painful that the pain forces the person to abandon all other mental content, all other
objects of his attention and sensory ability. Torture demonstrates that physical pain possesses
the power to annihilate a person’s world, self and voice. (2009: 21, emphasis in the original)

Recent work, however, challenges these assumptions, distinguishing between kinds of

pain and pointing out how some pain might be crucial to the production of subjectivity
and of the subject as social.2
I deal here very specifically with labour pain. Pain in labour has been investigated in
medicine and lately, copiously, within the social sciences.3 Still missing, however, are
analyses from a more philosophical – mainly phenomenological and existentialist – per-
spective. De Beauvoir’s ideas on subjectivity as inherently erotically embodied, situated,
and profoundly ambiguous when authentically lived could be helpful here. I use de
Beauvoir to argue that through the experience of labour pain we might recognize our-
selves as immanent and transcendent, the epitome of de Beauvoir’s understanding of the
authentic and moral human condition: participating in the ‘given’ of the world but capa-
ble of transcendence. This is ambiguity. This is what de Beauvoir sees as the basis for the
phenomenological and existential constitution of subjectivity.
The lived body is above all ambiguous, for de Beauvoir, since it is part of the fleshed
world, of materiality, death and decomposition, while simultaneously constituting a site
of freedom from which subjectivity, as a future-oriented project, can be developed. The
body is the subject’s situation. In de Beauvoir’s words:

In the perspective I am adopting – that of Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty – if the body is
not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp upon the world and the outline of our projects. … It
is not the body-object described by the biologist that actually exists, but the living body of the
subject. (1989: 66, 69, emphasis in the original)4

This embodied, ambiguous subject is at the basis of de Beauvoir’s ethics. Clinging to

the illusion that we are pure subjectivities, pure freedoms unrooted in materiality and
objects, necessarily leads us to project our own abject immanent parts, from which we
cannot really escape, onto the other. This makes the other totally other, with no possibil-
ity of developing freedom; it also makes us appear to ourselves, deceptively, as pure
transcendent subjects. This, for de Beauvoir, is the main cause of oppression and obstacle
to our development as moral subjects (1948: 102).
I deal here with labour pain as a phenomenon with important meanings for the con-
struction and comprehension of subjectivity for those who experience it (and those who,

Downloaded from ejw.sagepub.com at University of Liverpool on December 5, 2015

Cohen Shabot 3

in labour, decide to avoid it). The phenomenon of labour pain challenges conceptions
that consider pain as solely destructive, an obstacle to the development of the subject.

How is this pain different from all other pain?

Women (mainly western, middle-class women) have recently reported serious dissatis-
faction with their disempowerment by the over-medicalization of childbirth, leaving
them feeling a loss of agency and of active subjectivity (Fisher et al., 1997; Garel et al.,
1987; Goodman et al., 2004; Lobel and DeLuca, 2007).5 Two canonical feminist theory
texts on the medicalization of childbirth and women’s feelings of disempowerment are
Martin (1987) and Rich (1986). These authors explore the disempowering effects of
medical interventions on the experience of childbirth for modern middle-class women,
writing about the alienation women feel from their bodies after experiencing highly med-
icalized labours. Martin records Caesarean section stories told by women who felt split,
totally deprived of subjectivity, almost annihilated, violated and robbed of their bodies
during the surgical procedure: ‘I felt as if I were being crucified’, she quotes; ‘I felt
assaulted, raped perhaps, by what had happened to my body with absolutely no control
on my part’ (Martin, 1987: 84). Highly medicalized labour abandons the experiential
body because, in this paradigm, that body is unimportant. What counts is the productive
body as medium for the valuable product, the healthy baby. Neither Martin nor Rich,
however, points out clearly enough what is really missing: exactly what kind of body is
being neglected, and the connection between the loss of agency and the loss of the expe-
riential lived body.6
The role of the numbing of pain in this experience of disempowerment in childbirth
also remains underexplored. I propose that the experience of labour pain often empowers
labouring subjects, providing them with an authentic subjectivity. Women can have
empowered births without pain, but when they do feel pain, it may play a significant role
in how subjectivity is experienced.7 The analysis of many descriptions by women labour-
ing in pain shows this to be a subjectivity that is neither purely immanent nor exclusively
transcendent but overtly ambiguous.8
To further address the role of pain – experienced or numbed – in empowerment during
childbirth, let us clarify how childbirth pain is different from the pain of serious illness
or the pain felt during activities meant to challenge the body, such as mountain climbing
or marathon running. Labour pain is lived as given or inescapable, thus resembling the
pain of disease and not the chosen pain of challenging sports. However, it is also lived as
something that allows agency and empowerment, thus more closely resembling the posi-
tive pain reported by certain athletes or ‘body artists’. Wendell (1999), reflecting on
chronic pain, provides a key to the categorization of labour pain. Using her categories,
labour pain is special because it is like both acute pain, which does not last but does
require action, and chronic pain, to which we must surrender, unafraid, since it cannot be
helped. Labour pain is also purposeful, and thus similar to the pain experienced by a
marathon runner (1999: 326–327). But the Beauvoirian perspective makes the dissimi-
larities between labour pain and the ‘positive pain’ of marathon running clear. You can
choose to run a marathon or not. You can stop in the middle if you want. Labour, however
(once a woman is pregnant with a wanted baby and the pregnancy has come to full term),

Downloaded from ejw.sagepub.com at University of Liverpool on December 5, 2015

4 European Journal of Women’s Studies 

can be neither chosen nor stopped at will. Thus it is much more immanent than the mara-
thon runner’s chosen pain.

On pain(s)
Theorists of pain, including Scarry (1985), Leder (1990) and Biro (2010), emphasize pain’s
destructive effects, dealing with how the self gets lost when subjected to extreme pain. Pain
abolishes the transcendent character of subjectivity, making us prisoners of our bare
embodiment. Our bodies are never so present and pressuring as in the presence of pain,
robbing us of other aspects of subjectivity. Merleau-Ponty shows that through pain the
body makes itself clearly present, while in ‘normal experience’ it is almost obliterated
(1962: 94; 1964: 66). But pain is not homogeneous. Recently, more attention has been paid
to how different kinds of pain (differing mainly in their intensity and causes) and different
cultural and personal attitudes towards pain provide insights into how we understand sub-
jectivity and the fact of its existence. Folkmarson Käll (2013b) argues that pain is not only
isolating – radically separating us from others by enclosing us in our ‘private flesh’ – but
can also be recognized as the experience that most vividly illuminates our ineluctable con-
nection with the world and others. If one aspect of pain that causes the most suffering is its
incommunicability, turning us into lonely subjects incarcerated in private bodies, that is
because this is not our normal experience: this is not how we experience our world and our
relationship with others. She sees pain as one of the best places for elucidating phenomeno-
logical theories of intersubjectivity and intercorporeality: ‘by emphasising and exaggerat-
ing the boundaries between self and other, pain not only highlights their separation but also
clearly makes present an original bond and sharing at the very core of this separation’
(Folkmarson Käll, 2013b: 38). Rather than denying pain’s isolating effects, she reaches
conclusions about our ‘original intercorporeality’ arising precisely out of those effects. But
is every pain isolating and confining? I return to this question when I deal with de Beauvoir’s
concept of the erotic and of pain in the erotic encounter.
In his philosophical study, Vetlesen (2009) analyses how different kinds of pain affect
our relationship to our embodied subjectivity. Strong, excruciating, long-lasting pain
may destroy our subjectivity by transforming us into pure immanence, reducing us to
plain physicality: ‘Pain becomes a tyrant … something that mercilessly dictates all sig-
nificance, all meaning. The life-world of the person shrinks to this single hub; one is
powerless and surrenders totally to the omnipotence of pain’ (2009: 56). Mild or less
long-lasting pain, though, paradoxically, may function as one of our best tools for under-
standing and experiencing the pervasive character of embodiment in subjectivity:
‘Generally speaking’, Vetlesen argues,

pain is what makes the body a particularly important concern for the individual. The fact that
the body, often quite suddenly and unprepared for by me, becomes a place for a concentration
of pain, forces me to have a new relationship with my own body. … Pain reminds me where I
belong and have to stay put: at home, at home with my body, in my body, as my body. (2009:
54–55, emphasis in the original)

Some pain, thus, may highlight two important conditions of our authentic subjectivity as
described in de Beauvoir’s existentialist phenomenology: being with others (intercorporeality)

Downloaded from ejw.sagepub.com at University of Liverpool on December 5, 2015

Cohen Shabot 5

and being embodied as lived bodies. In the presence of pain that makes us confront the true
nature of our subjectivity we are most authentically ourselves. De Beauvoir’s position on this
is clearly phenomenological: the body is neither a pure social construct nor provided by essen-
tial ontological features; the body constitutes the subject’s situation. Authors such as Bauer
(2001), Gatens (2003), Moi (1999) and Heinämaa (1997, 2003a, 2003b) note and emphasize
this phenomenological nature of de Beauvoir’s philosophy in which the subject’s already
sexed body is her situation and the subject cannot therefore, regardless of the features of her
particular body, be seen as totally constructed.
We are most authentically ourselves in the presence of pain that reminds us clearly
that we are overly embodied, that we cannot run away from this embodiment which is an
inevitable part of our real selves. This pain allows us, at the same time, to keep being
ourselves and to keep setting goals, creating, letting ourselves go out to meet the world,
communicating, being with others: in sum, reaching transcendence. Labour pain, in most
of its forms, constitutes this kind of ‘positive pain’.

Labour pain: Embodying ambiguity

Labour pain is universal, but experienced differently within diverse historical and cul-
tural contexts. It has been portrayed and reported as everything from excruciating and
agonizing to manageable and mild; even – in extreme cases – not felt at all. Labour has
even been reported as pleasurable. The experience of labour pain speaks to us about the
absence of bodily ‘essences’, how bodies are highly mouldable substances, interpreted
and lived depending on the specific position of the situated embodied subject.9
In her phenomenological paper on childbirth pain, Heyes (2013) reflects on her own
experience, wondering: ‘how could by far the most excruciating experience of my life
also be the most joyful, profound and spiritually transformative?’ (2013: 133). Having
given birth at home, unmedicated, Heyes recognizes that labour pain may be the price
worth paying, ‘for being allowed to bloody your own sheets in peace’ (2013: 135). This
is one way in which labour pain might be ‘productive’: in our present western cultural
situation – where childbirth is increasingly taken over by medical institutions, frequently
making parturient women passive, objectifying them, and placing them at the mercy of a
system that is ever more litigious and less human-oriented – pain may serve as a place of
resistance. It may be one of the most powerful tools available to women for defying
authority, for recovering agency over an experience that was originally loud but has been
silenced by the medical powers-that-be through painkillers and interventions.10 I do not
focus here on this aspect of the ‘productivity of pain’, as I deal with it in detail elsewhere.
I want to turn instead to labour pain’s more phenomenological aspects. Nevertheless, it
is very important to understand the function of this ‘pain as resistance’ in the process of
recovering subjectivity that many women seek after feeling they have lost their subjec-
tivity in the medicalization of birth, in the system that so often steals their agency by
turning them into functional vessels for foetuses and babies.
Heyes offers clues to how labour pain might be much closer to Vetlesen’s ‘mild pain’,
what I have called ‘positive pain’, than to all-pervasive pain, the kind that abolishes and
smashes subjectivity. ‘The pain of childbirth has a purpose’, Heyes points out, and is a
‘predictable part of the process of delivery. It also has a guaranteed end in a

Downloaded from ejw.sagepub.com at University of Liverpool on December 5, 2015

6 European Journal of Women’s Studies 

not-too-distant future’ (2013: 135). Labour pain is predictable and limited in duration. It
is also useful, resulting in something precious – when labour marks the end of a desired
and freely chosen process. Labour pain is not a sign of injury nor of a process of deterio-
ration. On the contrary: certain parturient women and midwives say that when the pain
becomes most intense, they know that the birth is approaching (Gleisner, 2013: 110).
Even at its worst, labour pain is frequently defined as manageable (and more so the more
supported and secure the woman feels).11
If we define labour pain in terms of ‘positive pain’, what are its constructive prop-
erties? Hyland (2013) analyses the ‘constructive aspects’ of ‘regular pains’. Rejecting
the view that health means a total absence of pain, Hyland reminds us that everyday
pains and aches are a common and important part of our non-pathological experi-
ence. They remind us of our limits and our possibilities, marking how we relate to
and engage with the world. Embodiment is never completely overcome, even in
states of ‘perfect health’. We are never ‘purely functional’ or ‘purely dysfunctional’
beings.
In her innovative interpretation of pregnant embodiment, Young (2005) points out
that many phenomenological analyses of the body are still permeated by the immanence/
transcendence binary. These analyses suggest that embodiment ‘reflects transcendence’
when it appears non-existent, ‘transparent’, to the subject, allowing the subject more or
less free participation in his or her various projects. The body becomes immanence,
though, when it is felt in all its weight and bulk, in pain, disease, or ageing: when it is felt
as a limitation. Young proposes the pregnant body as contesting this binary understand-
ing of embodiment. Pregnant bodies simultaneously are ‘felt’ and allow creativity and
freedom. In Young’s words:

… pregnancy is most paradigmatic of such experience of being thrown into awareness of one’s
body. Contrary to the mutually exclusive categorization between transcendence and immanence
that underlies some theories, the awareness of my body in its bulk and weight does not impede
the accomplishing of my aims. … Pregnant consciousness is animated by a double intentionality:
my subjectivity splits between awareness of myself as body and awareness of my aims and
projects. (2005: 51–52)

Drawing on several phenomenological analyses, mainly Young’s, Hyland reminds us

that subjectivity is never ‘pure immanence’ or ‘pure transcendence’: we are our bodies,
which are not passive corpses but dynamic fleshed bodies, always showing a tension
between their possibilities (I can) and their limits (I cannot). ‘For most of us the lived
body is neither pure object nor pure transcendence, but the site of an ambiguous interplay
of power and fragility. The materiality of the body at once serves to both facilitate and
restrict action’ (Hyland, 2013: 92). ‘Normal pain’, or ‘positive pain’, may be a priceless
tool for authentically constructing and knowing our own subjectivity and its relation with
the world and others.
Heyes indeed describes labour pain as resulting in a powerful introspective experi-
ence. ‘My labor was a colossal interoceptive experience – a host of body parts that had
lain mostly dormant to perception were suddenly present in blooming, buzzing confu-
sion’ (2013: 140). Regarding the last stage of labour, she writes:

Downloaded from ejw.sagepub.com at University of Liverpool on December 5, 2015

Cohen Shabot 7

Instantly, in a moment of epiphany, my entire consciousness changed. From the head-nodding

coma of an endorphin-soaked dream, I woke up, into the fullest and most alive state of alert
presence. My eyes felt bright and I was aware of every detail of the drama unfolding as my
body split in two. (2013: 141)

De Beauvoir on pain and the erotic

De Beauvoir wrote little about childbirth, let alone childbirth pain. In her few descrip-
tions of labour and labour pain she is reluctant – whether because she is biased by patri-
archal conceptions or is describing labour as lived by women under patriarchy – to
consider pain as positive or empowering. Disregarding human birth’s social and cultural
aspects, de Beauvoir ‘naturalizes’ labour: ‘Giving birth for cows and mares is far more
painful and dangerous than for female mice and rabbits. Woman, the most individualized
of females, is also the most fragile. … Childbirth itself is painful; it is dangerous’ (1989:
38, 41). Elsewhere, she adds: ‘all women fear the suffering of giving birth, and they are
happy that modern methods free them from it’ (1989: 411, emphasis mine).
De Beauvoir’s explicit comments on labour pain are not the place to find positive
understandings of that pain, incapable as de Beauvoir was of grasping any other way of
experiencing labour than that lived by oppressed women. We should look, instead, at her
descriptions of another kind of experience, one that she was indeed able to conceive of
and imagine as authentically lived: the experience of the erotic encounter. Bergoffen
lucidly explores de Beauvoir’s contribution to the understanding of embodied subjectiv-
ity as potentially profoundly erotic, ethically committed to others precisely through erot-
icism, generosity and the idea of the gift (Bergoffen, 1995, 1996, 1997, 2002).
For de Beauvoir, Bergoffen argues, ‘my body may become a threat to subjectivity
only if I experience immanence as objectification’ (Bergoffen, 1995: 191). Bergoffen
believes that for de Beauvoir the erotic is subversive and disruptive, letting embodied
subjects gendered by patriarchy disrupt the powers and codes that construct them as
immanent, docile, gendered and sexed. This may give rise to a new feminist ethic:

… de Beauvoir discovers that erotic experience disrupts (or at least has the power to disrupt)
the perversions of subjectivity perpetuated by patriarchy. In tracking de Beauvoir’s muted
voice we see her exploring the ways in which these erotic disruptions refigure our understanding
of the existential-phenomenological subject and direct us to an ethic of the erotic. (Bergoffen,
1996: 57)

For de Beauvoir, erotic relations are one of the principal frameworks within which, in an
act of generosity and openness, distinctions between subjects are blurred. Through the
erotic, we recognize both the otherness within us, namely our own flesh, and the irreduc-
ible freedom (and factual presence) of the other. The erotic fleshes out two kinds of
ambiguity – the vague distinctions between subjects and the world and the ambiguity
expressed through the intertwining of immanence and transcendence that characterizes
all subjects (de Beauvoir, 1989: 402, 499) – making it possibly the form par excellence
for recognizing ambiguity, making it present, and fleshing it out.
Both Merleau-Ponty and de Beauvoir assign eroticism a significant role in our making
ourselves subjects and differentiating ourselves from objects.12 Subjects are ambiguously

Downloaded from ejw.sagepub.com at University of Liverpool on December 5, 2015

8 European Journal of Women’s Studies 

immersed in the world through an erotic-cum-emotional bond. De Beauvoir’s insights

into the erotic encounter suggest its possible contribution to an understanding of freedom
and transcendence and its connection to notions of authenticity and embodiment. For de
Beauvoir, the erotic experience appears to be the most efficacious means for recognizing
our own and the other’s freedom and ambiguity.
De Beauvoir gives a moving description of such an authentic erotic encounter – one
that might take place when oppressive relations and conditions are overcome:

This blossoming [of feminine eroticism] supposes that – in love, tenderness and sensuality –
woman succeeds in overcoming her passivity and establishing a relationship of reciprocity with
her partner. … Thus, the lovers can experience shared pleasure in their own way; each partner
feels pleasure as being his own while at the same time having its source in the other. … In a
concrete and sexual form the reciprocal recognition of the self and the other is accomplished in
the keenest consciousness of the other and the self. … What is necessary for such harmony are
not technical refinements but rather, on the basis of an immediate erotic attraction, a reciprocal
generosity of the body and soul. … The erotic experience is one that most poignantly reveals to
human beings their ambiguous condition; they experience it as flesh and as spirit, as the other
and as subject. (1989: 377–378, emphasis mine)

De Beauvoir’s erotic is granted the power of transcendence in at least two important

ways. The first is as a pleasurable, rejoicing, embodied experience, which for de Beauvoir
has the characteristics of the ‘project’:

… in order for the idea of liberation to have a concrete meaning, the joy of existence must be
asserted in each one, at every instant; the movement toward freedom assumes its real, flesh and
blood figure in the world by thickening into pleasure, into happiness. If the satisfaction of an
old man drinking a glass of wine counts for nothing, then production and wealth are only
hollow myths; they have meaning only if they are capable of being retrieved in individual and
living joy. (1948: 135, emphasis mine)

The second way is related to the power of the erotic to make us recognize and experi-
ence our own and the other’s ambiguity. Because this is a precondition for authentically
and ethically being, it is clear why for de Beauvoir this is also deeply related to achieving
transcendence. Her illustrative description of pregnancy is a testimony to the connection
between experiencing ambiguity and reaching transcendence:

What is specific to the pregnant woman is that the body is experienced as immanent at the
moment when it transcends itself. … The transcendence of the artisan, of the man of action is
inhabited by one subjectivity, but in the becoming mother the opposition between subject and
object is abolished. She forms with this child from which she is swollen an equivocal couple
overwhelmed by life. (1989: 512)13

Here de Beauvoir offers a gendered description of transcendence, the specificity of preg-

nancy allowing women to transcend in a different sense than does ‘the man of action’,
namely through the ambiguity lived between a woman’s body and the other inside her.
De Beauvoir’s insights on the erotic encounter (and specifically on the meaning of
pain in that context) show what her ideas could contribute to the discussion of labour

Downloaded from ejw.sagepub.com at University of Liverpool on December 5, 2015

Cohen Shabot 9

pain and its value for our connection to our authentic, embodied subjectivities. Elsewhere,
she highlights pain’s possible role in the erotic encounter:

It must first be pointed out that attributing erotic value to pain does not in any way constitute
behavior of passive submission. Pain often serves to raise the tonus of the individual who
experiences it, to awaken a sensitivity numbed by the very violence of arousal and pleasure; it
is a sharp light bursting out in the carnal night. … Pain is normally part of erotic frenzy; bodies
that delight in being bodies for their reciprocal joy seek to find each other, unite with each other,
and confront each other in every possible way. There is a wrenching from oneself in eroticism,
a transport, an ecstasy: suffering also destroys the self, it is a going beyond and a paroxysm …
it is well known that the exquisite and the painful converge … torment gives pleasure. … [This]
expresses a desire to merge and not to destroy; and the subject that submits to it does not seek
to disavow and humiliate himself but to unite; besides, it is far from being specifically
masculine. In fact, pain has a masochistic meaning only when it is grasped and desired as the
manifestation of enslavement. (1989: 410–411)

I quote de Beauvoir at length because these words summarize her powerful insights into
what a highly erotic – and painful – experience could mean for the flourishing of an
authentic and intercorporeal subjectivity. Such ‘erotic pain’ does not isolate us or incar-
cerate us inside our armoured selves: it dissolves our boundaries. It takes us out to meet
the other.

Conclusion: Labouring with de Beauvoir

For most women, giving birth is painful, yet it often shares the empowering, creative
features de Beauvoir places at the core of the authentic erotic encounter. Labour is often
reported as being embedded in eroticism.14 The relation between experiencing labour
pain and experiencing labour as embedded in eroticism requires further investigation; it
is clear, though, that women who have lived childbirth as a highly sexual, sometimes
even orgasmic, experience have not numbed their labour pain. Yet, paradoxically, the
more labour is lived erotically, the less its pain, apparently, is felt as excruciating. But
pain still plays a crucial role. Here a woman describes her labour:

I didn’t have an orgasm, but I felt a little bit like it when I had my first baby. And that was only
at the transition shortly before pushing. For a moment I felt like being shortly before orgasm
– being high, having pain, and being afraid of what’s coming next. And I felt all this at the same
time. (quoted in Gaskin, 2003: 160, emphasis mine)

For de Beauvoir, recognizing our own and others’ true subjectivity means seeing our-
selves as a mixture of immanence and transcendence, flesh and freedom. Our path to
authentic subjectivity consists in identifying ourselves as freedom while fleshing out our
own irrevocable embodiment, our compulsory corporeality. Identifying ourselves as
ambiguous embodied subjects both rooted in materiality and immersed in transcendence
constitutes the first step towards an ethics that identifies the other, too, as ambiguity, both
freedom and immanence. The erotic encounter constitutes a priceless resource within
this process.

Downloaded from ejw.sagepub.com at University of Liverpool on December 5, 2015

10 European Journal of Women’s Studies 

De Beauvoir may not have been able to imagine a painfully erotic, empowering child-
birth, but her philosophy offers resources for developing this vein of thinking. We cannot
romanticize pain in labour. We must oppose reactionary, ‘backlash’ discourses on child-
birth.15 Women can be disempowered within the non-medicalized, midwifery model of
childbirth as well. Charles (2013) reflects on the deep feelings of incompetence, frustra-
tion and shame many women experience after ‘failing’ to give birth without medical
intervention: for some women, the ‘midwifery model’ is as disappointing as the medical-
ized one (see also Baker, 2010).
But feminist theory and politics (including de Beauvoir’s accounts of labour)
have already done much to deromanticize labour, demystifying the idea of labour as
the epitome of femininity, an experience that must be lived ‘naturally’ and painfully
for a woman to be ‘feminine’ or ‘moral’. Now feminist theory must attend to the
voices that find labour (and other typically ‘feminine’ embodied experiences such as
pregnancy and breastfeeding) empowering, of critical meaning to the construction of
authentic subjectivities. If feminist analyses avoid dealing with these experiences as
empowering, and not just oppressive, they allow them to be co-opted by essentialist,
romanticizing discourses that consider them ‘necessary’ to femininity rather than a
possibility that may be freely chosen in the process of becoming an authentic
subject.
Thus new feminist phenomenological accounts of pain in childbirth, while deroman-
ticizing labour, also need to examine its empowering possibilities. Such accounts can
profit from de Beauvoir’s conception of authentic embodied subjectivity as both imma-
nent and transcendent, as erotic and even capable of choosing and experiencing a ‘pain-
ful eroticism’. De Beauvoir could not think of labour as a non-oppressive, let alone a
rewarding and life-changing positive experience in spite (or even because) of its painful
nature, but she can help us understand it that way now.

Acknowledgements
I am deeply indebted to the two anonymous reviewers of this article, whose constructive advice
and comments helped me to transform my initial, narrow analysis of pain in childbirth into a much
broader (and hopefully more interesting) project.

Funding
This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (grant No. 1261/15).

Notes
  1. On modern western culture’s success in convincing us that pain is so negative it must be
avoided, see Honkasalo (1998).
  2. For an excellent account of how pain has been understood in the West and of recent changes,
see Folkmarson Käll (2013a: 1–2).
 3. Interesting socio-medical analyses of labour pain include Brownridge (1995), Gleisner
(2013), Hodnett (2002), Lowe (2002), Lundgren and Dahlberg (1998) and Mulinari (2013).
  4. For more on the body, in de Beauvoir, already in itself expressing life and transcendence
(rather than being a brute fact needing an abstract subjectivity to achieve transcendence), see
Bergoffen (1997: 154–160), Heinämaa (2003b) and Scarth (2004: 81–84).

Downloaded from ejw.sagepub.com at University of Liverpool on December 5, 2015

Cohen Shabot 11

  5. For a compelling analysis of feminist critiques and counter-critiques of the medicalization of

childbirth, see Jones (2012). This reaction against the medicalization of birth is grounded in
material and social conditions. Mostly white, western, middle-class women protest the alien-
ating aspects of childbirth’s medicalization. Poorer populations, still struggling to get proper
medical attention in general and for labour and childbirth in particular, often see this battle as
fought from a position of privilege, not theirs to fight. See Johnson (2013), explaining medi-
calization as mainly problematic for the privileged: ‘the preference expressed by many privi-
leged women in affluent countries … for midwifery care and home births, is curiously at odds
with public health data and ethical arguments. It is a rejection of privilege that simultaneously
confirms it. Therefore, the problem of medicalization seems to apply disproportionately to
privileged women. In fact, some of the most serious pronouncements of medical interference
in pregnancy and childbirth as a “natural, normal, woman-centered event” come from women
of considerable privilege and authority’ (2013: 200, emphasis mine).
  6. For a phenomenological account of the loss of the lived body in childbirth, see Cohen Shabot
(2012).
  7. In many cases, pain also constitutes an obstacle to empowerment in labour. The experience
of pain in labour is by no means necessarily, nor always, rewarding, erotic, or constructive.
Countless women find the experience torturous, paralysing and highly imprisoning and have
indeed found in practices that numb pain a way to restore subjectivity. It is crucial, from a
feminist point of view, to recognize such experiences and give them their true space and legit-
imacy, and feminist theory has done so quite successfully. De Beauvoir’s (1989), Firestone’s
(1970), and more recently Lyerly’s (2006) and Baker’s (2010) multiple descriptions of the
trap of painful labour – and how medicine and technology might liberate us from it – are some
of the best examples. Here, however, I am only discussing how pain in labour is experienced
as rewarding and empowering, rather than how it is (frequently) not.
  8. Countless labour stories (Gaskin, 2003, 2011; Powers, 2009) describe labour as an integrative
experience, compounding a strong sense of crude, uncontrollable embodiment with a clear
sense of agency, power and self-sufficiency. Lundgren’s phenomenologically informed study
of the ‘meaning of giving birth’ (2011) includes many reports reflecting this position, defined
by Lundgren as that of ‘women being subjects’ in the process of labour:

Well, it was so powerful. It was unlike anything else. As in very bad weather, such as a very
heavy thunderstorm, a snowstorm or something. You can’t control it. Something was happen-
ing regardless of what you do. I must say it’s very, very groovy.

And another:

You get concentrated when the pain comes and feel that the pain is developing something …
to follow and see the connection in relation to the opening. During my last delivery, it was
more like … no I don’t want this. But now I was no longer a victim. Instead, I was more in
control of myself, you may say. (quoted in Lundgren, 2011: 122–123)

These reports show how childbirth, when lived as highly intense, embodied and painful but
allowing agency, movement and choices, can be viewed as paradigmatically empowering –
not in essentialist, but in phenomenological-existentialist terms. In Beauvoirian language, it
perfectly conjoins the immanent with the transcendent to create a moment of clear, forceful,
authentic subjectivity. This Beauvoirian framework provides a way to describe the experience
lived by women for whom childbirth has been empowering as well as women who have felt
disempowered, even severely oppressed, within it.

Downloaded from ejw.sagepub.com at University of Liverpool on December 5, 2015

12 European Journal of Women’s Studies 

  9. Lowe (2002: 23) concludes her study on childbirth pain: ‘Although pain is a common com-
ponent of the experience of childbirth across cultures, ethnic groups, and the ages, it is highly
variable in both the sensory and affective dimensions. The degree of suffering that it causes is
also highly variable and can be mediated by physical attributes of the woman and her labour,
psychosocial characteristics of the woman, cultural beliefs and mores, the birth environment,
and care provided by the birth participants.’ For other revealing reports on the variety of
experiences of childbirth pain see Fox and Worts (1999: 336–338), Gaskin (2003: 150–166)
and Hodnett (2002).
The experience of childbirth pain, thus, is greatly constructed, highly influenced by cul-
tural conceptions of pain in general and of the ‘meaning’ of labour. It would be anachronistic
and simplistic to ignore the cultural, social and historical aspects through which this experi-
ence is constantly modified. My analysis here is restricted to the western experience lived
mainly by middle-class, privileged women, who often experience the medicalization of child-
birth as restricting their agency and threatening their otherwise free embodied subjectivities.
It would be interesting, though, to analyse other kinds of childbirth experience (and how pain
is lived within them) through an existentialist and phenomenological lens.
10. In feminist terms, the history of medicalized childbirth is interestingly complex. It was always
considered ‘natural’ and ‘moral’ for women to undergo the suffering and pain of childbirth.
Attempts to find medical relief for it were originally responding to desperate calls from
women, strengthened by feminist opposition to that attitude towards the pain. For women
who challenge women’s ‘natural destiny’, numbing labour pain can be empowering (Baker,
2010; Smeenk and ten Have, 2003; Wolf, 2012). Nevertheless, with childbirth’s increasing
medicalization, women started to feel disempowered again. Extreme numbing practices (like
the ‘twilight sleep’ used in America from the 1950s through the 1970s, during which women
almost completely lost consciousness) became common, diminishing women’s self-image
and their perception of control and agency during labour (Behruzi et al., 2013; Smeenk and
ten Have, 2003; Wolf, 2012).
11. On the importance of friendly presence and support in coping with labour pain, see Hodnett
(2002) and Lowe (2002).
12. Heinämaa (2003a: 63–64).
13. This is the translation as modified by Heinämaa, with whom I agree that the published English
translation fails to stress the gendered transcendence granted specifically to pregnant women:
‘Beauvoir argues that in pregnancy, the woman does not transcend herself, her habits, goals,
and projects, by voluntary bodily movements and deliberate actions only; rather, her self-
transcending involves another being growing inside her body and growing from her body’
(Heinamäa, 2014: 39).
14. Martin deals with reports that emphasize labour’s erotic character and the importance, for
an empowering labour experience, of recognizing that eroticism: ‘Birth is fundamentally a
creative act, as is the act of sexual union. The quality and intensity of the energy present and
the ultimate surrender during both events are closely related’ (Baldwin, quoted in Martin,
1987: 157–158). Martin notes that when labour is interpreted as sexual or erotic, it is usually
in order to portray it as inherently active and rewarding, in spite of being ‘hard work’ (1987:
159). This imagery has been used politically to justify ‘independent’ birth practices such as
unassisted childbirth: ‘When genital sex is chosen as the key metaphor for what birth is, a
number of consequences for action follow. Husband and wife will give birth alone, in private,
just as they would when engaged in other sexual behavior. To help the process along, just as
in other forms of sexuality, lovemaking, fantasizing, hugging, kissing, caressing are the most
relevant means’ (1987: 159). For more on ‘childbirth as erotic’ and on the concept of ‘orgas-
mic birth’, see Gaskin (2003: 150–166).

Downloaded from ejw.sagepub.com at University of Liverpool on December 5, 2015

Cohen Shabot 13

15. For interesting critical analyses of ‘backlash’ discourses and the romanticization of labour,
natural labour and labour pain, see Baker (2010), Charles (2013), Johnson (2013) and Jones
(2012).

References
Baker J (2010) Natural childbirth is for the birds. In: Lintott S (ed.) Motherhood-Philosophy for
Everyone: The Birth of Wisdom. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 154–166.
Bauer N (2001) Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Behruzi R, Hatem M, Goulet L et al. (2013) Understanding childbirth practices as an organiza-
tional cultural phenomenon: A conceptual framework. BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth 13:
205.
Bergoffen D (1995) Out from under: Beauvoir’s philosophy of the erotic. In: Simons MA (ed.)
Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State
University Press, pp. 179–192.
Bergoffen D (1996) From Husserl to de Beauvoir: Gendering the perceiving subject. Metaphilosophy
27(1–2): 53–63.
Bergoffen D (1997) The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologies, Erotic
Generosities. Albany: SUNY Press.
Bergoffen D (2002) Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre: Woman, man and the desire to be
God. Constellations 9(3): 409–418.
Biro D (2010) The Language of Pain: Finding Words, Compassion and Relief. New York and
London: W.W. Norton.
Brownridge P (1995) The nature and consequences of childbirth pain. European Journal of
Obstetrics and Gynecology and Reproductive Biology 59(suppl.): S9–S15.
Charles S (2013) Disempowered women? The midwifery model and medical intervention. In:
Adams SL and Lundquist CR (eds) Coming to Life: Philosophies of Pregnancy, Childbirth
and Mothering. New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 215–240.
Cohen Shabot S (2012) Laboring with Beauvoir: In search of the embodied subject in childbirth.
In: The 20th International Conference on Simone de Beauvoir, Oslo University.
De Beauvoir S (1948) The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. B Frechtman. New York: Philosophical
Library. (Originally published 1947 as Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté. Paris: Gallimard.)
De Beauvoir S (1989) The Second Sex, trans. and ed. HM Parshley. New York: Vintage Books.
(Originally published 1949 as Le Deuxième Sexe, 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard.)
Firestone S (1970) The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. New York: Bantam.
Fisher J, Astbury J and Smith A (1997) Adverse psychological impact of operative obstetric
interventions: A prospective longitudinal study. Australian and New Zealand Journal of
Psychiatry 31: 728–738.
Folkmarson Käll L (2013a) Introduction: Dimensions of pain. In: Folkmarson Käll L (ed.)
Dimensions of Pain: Humanities and Social Sciences Perspectives. New York: Routledge,
pp. 1–12.
Folkmarson Käll L (2013b) Intercorporeality and the shareability of pain. In: Folkmarson Käll
L (ed.) Dimensions of Pain: Humanities and Social Sciences Perspectives. New York:
Routledge, pp. 27–40.
Fox B and Worts D (1999) Revisiting the critique of medicalized childbirth: A contribution to the
sociology of birth. Gender and Society 13(3): 326–346.
Garel M, Lelong N and Kaminski M (1987) Psychological consequences of Caesarean childbirth
in primiparas. Journal of Psychosomatic Obstetrics and Gynaecology 6(3): 197–209.

Downloaded from ejw.sagepub.com at University of Liverpool on December 5, 2015

14 European Journal of Women’s Studies 

Gaskin IM (2003) Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth. New York: Bantam Dell.
Gaskin IM (2011) Birth Matters: A Midwife’s Manifesta. New York: Seven Stories Press.
Gatens M (2003) Beauvoir and biology: A second look. In: Card C (ed.) The Cambridge Companion
to Simone de Beauvoir. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 266–285.
Gleisner J (2013) The good and normal pain: Midwives’ perception of pain in childbirth. In:
Folkmarson Käll L (ed.) Dimensions of Pain: Humanities and Social Sciences Perspectives.
New York: Routledge, pp. 107–116.
Goodman P, Mackey MC and Tavakoli AS (2004) Factors related to childbirth satisfaction.
Journal of Advanced Nursing 46(2): 212–219.
Heinämaa S (1997) What is a woman? Butler and Beauvoir on the foundations of the sexual dif-
ference. Hypatia 12(1): 20–40.
Heinämaa S (2003a) Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty,
Beauvoir. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Heinämaa S (2003b) The body as instrument and as expression. In Card C (ed.) The Cambridge
Companion to Simone de Beauvoir. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 66–86.
Heinämaa S (2014) ‘An equivocal couple overwhelmed by life’: A phenomenological analysis of
pregnancy. PhiloSophia 4(1): 31–49.
Heyes CJ (2013) Child, birth: An aesthetic. In: Folkmarson Käll L (ed.) Dimensions of Pain:
Humanities and Social Sciences Perspectives. New York: Routledge, pp. 132–141.
Hodnett ED (2002) Pain and women’s satisfaction with the experience of childbirth: A systematic
review. American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 186: S160–172.
Honkasalo M-L (1998) Space and the embodied experience: Rethinking the body in pain. Body
and Society 4(2): 35–57.
Hyland S (2013) Between health and illness: Positive pain and world formation. In: Folkmarson
Käll L (ed.) Dimensions of Pain: Humanities and Social Sciences Perspectives. New York:
Routledge, pp. 84–93.
Johnson C (2013) The political ‘nature’ of pregnancy and childbirth. In: Adams SL and Lundquist
CR (eds) Coming to Life: Philosophies of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Mothering. New York:
Fordham University Press, pp. 193–214.
Jones JC (2012) Idealized and industrialized labor: Anatomy of feminist controversy. Hypatia
27(1): 99–119.
Leder D (1990) The Absent Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lobel M and DeLuca RS (2007) Psychosocial sequelae of Cesarean delivery: Review and analysis
of their causes and implications. Social Science and Medicine 64(11): 2272–2284.
Lowe NK (2002) The nature of labor pain. American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 186:
S16–24.
Lundgren I (2011) The meaning of giving birth from a long-term perspective for childbear-
ing women. In: Thomson G, Dykes F et al. (eds) Qualitative Research in Midwifery and
Childbirth: Phenomenological Approaches. Routledge: London and New York, pp. 115–132.
Lundgren I and Dahlberg K (1998) Women’s experience of pain during childbirth. Midwifery
14(2): 105–110.
Lyerly AD (2006) Shame, gender, birth. Hypatia 21(1): 101–118.
Martin E (1987) The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction. Boston: Beacon
Press.
Merleau-Ponty M (1962) Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C Smith. London: Routledge.
Merleau-Ponty M(1964) Signs, trans. RC McCleary. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Moi T (1999) What Is a Woman? Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Downloaded from ejw.sagepub.com at University of Liverpool on December 5, 2015

Cohen Shabot 15

Mulinari D (2013) Birth work: Suffering rituals in late modernity. A case study from a Swedish
birth clinic. In: Folkmarson Käll L (ed.) Dimensions of Pain: Humanities and Social Sciences
Perspectives. New York: Routledge, pp. 117–131.
Powers J (ed.) (2009) Labor Pains and Birth Stories: Essays on Pregnancy, Childbirth, and
Becoming a Parent. San Bruno, CA: Catalyst Book Press.
Rich A (1986) Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York and
London: Norton.
Scarry E (1985) The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Scarth F (2004) The Other Within: Ethics, Politics, and the Body in Simone de Beauvoir. Lanham,
MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Smeenk A and ten Have H (2003) Medicalization and obstetric care: An analysis of developments
in Dutch midwifery. Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 6: 153–165.
Vetlesen AJ (2009) A Philosophy of Pain, trans. J Irons. London: Reaktion Books.
Wendell S (1999) Feminism, disability and the transcendence of the body. In: Price J and Shildrick
M (eds) Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader. Routledge: London and New York, pp.
324–333.
Wolf JH (2012) Deliver Me from Pain: Anesthesia and Birth in America. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Young IM (2005) On Female Body Experience: ‘Throwing Like a Girl’ and Other Essays. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.

Downloaded from ejw.sagepub.com at University of Liverpool on December 5, 2015