'I have a second heartbeat now': Using poetic inquiry to experience pregnancy as an embodied experiment/adventure
Date
2025
Authors
Roberts, L.
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Text (Australia), 2025; 29(2):1-17
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The tendency in the Western world is to over-medicalise the experience of pregnancy and to treat the experience like one might a temporary illness. The patriarchal systems that envelop the pregnant person are often criticised for the lack of agency they allow participants in their own experiences, as they habitually negate and diminish the capabilities of pregnant people to learn and advocate for themselves. Subscribing to a feminist phenomenological worldview and employing poetic inquiry (that is, poetry as-in-for research) throughout the period of gestation allowed me an experimental and forgiving vehicle for conceiving of my pregnancy as mine and not any institutional system’s. This essay examines pregnancy as an embodied, phenomenological experience, drawing on the work of phenomenological and posthuman scholars, and using pieces of the poetry I wrote during my first pregnancy as evidence. It should be treated as an argument for an embodied understanding of the pregnancy experience,and a plea to treat birthing people as navigators and leaders of their own physical and emotional destinies.
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Copyright 2025