Performing childbirth: construction and challenge of a performative marketplace

• Ano de defesa: 2019
• Autor(a) principal: Abdalla, Carla Caires
• Orientador(a): Brito, Eliane Pereira Zamith
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Palavras-chave em Português: Performatividade; Parto; Mercado performativo; Empoderamento do consumidor; Jornada do herói
• Palavras-chave em Inglês: Performativity; Childbirth; Performative market; Consumer empowerment; Hero’s Journey
• Link de acesso: https://hdl.handle.net/10438/27297

Using the performative theory, the present research explores the childbirth market in Brazil. In this context, more than half of the childbirth are C-sections and the humanized childbirth movement, organized by mothers and pregnant women, challenges this situation. The performative theory explores how a social concept is conventionalized by actors who create tools and techniques to commodify this concept. The first article uses historic method to explore how C-section became the norm in Brazil as means to understand how a consumption marketplace becomes normalized in a perfomative marketplace. The second article uses netnography and life story interviews to understand the challenge of the consumer mothers to gain protagonism in the childbirth, explaining how the actors’ competition, by introducing new tools and techniques, challenge a norm. The third article uses life story interviews and netnography in a closed Facebook’s group to understand the relation between the narrative of activist mother’s trying to change the market and the Hero’s Journey, reporting the similarities and differences when the hero’s myth is inserted in a post-modern marketplace. In the conclusion, I reflect on how markets that become performative, hence disempowering consumers, can create activists’ reactions to challenge it, and how these reactions can create new forms of oppression. The consumers, despite their hero’s narrative against a market, do not have the decision power in a technical marketplace and need the support of new actors to legitimize the changes.