Abstract
This doctoral thesis explores how women hospitalised for medically defined high-risk pregnancies navigate, resist, and reimagine maternal identities within institutional maternity care. Drawing on post structural feminist theory and Foucauldian discourse analysis, the study examines how biomedical, legal, and cultural narratives, amplified by surveillance technologies, construct maternal subjectivity and position the fetus as a distinct patient.Twelve women admitted to a metropolitan Australian antenatal ward participated in a creative intervention, Music–Drawing–Narrative (MDN). This method combined music, visual art, and narrative expression to elicit experiences often silenced in clinical discourse. Analysis of their works revealed two dominant discursive formations: the medicalisation of pregnancy, which privileges surveillance over relational care, and the binary regulation of maternal identities through “tentative/sure” and “good/bad” mother framings. These narratives produced temporal and emotional double binds that unsettled women’s sense of self.
The study introduces the concept of threefold displacement, spatial, temporal, and ontological, to describe how hospitalisation reconfigures maternal subjectivity. Notably, women’s creative works frequently excluded fetal imagery, operating instead as forms of epistemic resistance that re-centred relational meaning-making and reclaimed maternal presence.
By positioning creative expression as a legitimate epistemological practice, the research establishes arts-based inquiry as a rigorous mode of knowledge production in perinatal research. It challenges the assumption that hospitalisation is inherently protective, arguing instead for midwifery-led, community-based care models grounded in relational ethics, emotional safety, and maternal dignity.
| Date of Award | 2026 |
|---|---|
| Original language | English |
| Supervisor | Deborah DAVIS (Supervisor) & Jenny BROWNE (Supervisor) |
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