Precarious beginnings: Gendered risk discourses in psychiatric research literature about postpartum depression

Abstract

The transition to motherhood in western society is particularly informed by risk-based scientific and medical discourses and, as a result, women are especially subject to rationalities and practices that are employed in the name of risk. The aim of this article is to examine the gendered risk discourses that are embedded in one aspect of medicalized mothering - the postpartum period. This article interrogates three key elements of the discursive construction of postpartum depression (PPD) in contemporary psychiatric research literature (approximately 1980-2007). Specifically, I examine how risk-based reasoning is incorporated into the concepts of the postpartum triad and the high-risk mother, and how arguments about why PPD is a 'significant social problem' create a tension between the rights of the mother and those of the child. By placing women in a position to manage certain types of risks related to the postpartum period, these discourses serve to responsibilize women and structure their subjectivities in gendered ways.This analysis contributes to a growing literature that investigates how assumptions about gender, race, class and sexuality are produced and re-produced through the notion of risk.

Problematizing the neurochemical subject of anti-depressant treatment: The limits of biomedical responses to women’s emotional distress

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When the Ghosts Live in the Nursery: Postpartum Depression and the Grandmother‐Mother‐Baby Triad in Luzhou, China

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Policing the Maternal Mind: Maternal Health, Psychological Government, and Swiss Pregnancy Politics

“…As the examples cited in the introduction demonstrate, today the idea that a woman's psyche can cause serious problems for a pregnancy is considered mainstream gynecological knowledge. In recent decades, the psychoanalytical jargon of this discourse has shifted into more general calls for greater awareness about stress and early signs of what might develop into postpartum depression (Godderis 2010). In francophone psychiatry, the concept of "perinatality," which usually designates the period between the twenty-eighth week of amenorrhea and the seventh day of the child's life, has become a domain in its own right (Dayan, Andro, and Dugnat 1999;Missonnier 2005).…”