Constructing subjectivity through labour pain: A Beauvoirian analysis

Introduction: Pain on (de)constructing the subject

Western conceptions of pain traditionally associate pain with the inability to communicate 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, therefore I have no doubt I exist, at least as a subject in pain). But she believes pain is, simultaneously, a corrosive force for a social subjectivity that communicates through language. 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 exclusively 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 – perspective. 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 ourselves 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 capable 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 possibility 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 construction and comprehension of subjectivity for those who experience it (and those who, 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 dissatisfaction 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 medicalized 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 experiential 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 labouring 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 positive 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 dissimilarities 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), can be neither chosen nor stopped at will. Thus it is much more immanent than the marathon 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 subjectivity 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 connection 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 phenomenological theories of intersubjectivity and intercorporeality: ‘by emphasising and exaggerating 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 significance, 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 understanding 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) 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 essential 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 cultural 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 subjectivity 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 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 deterioration. 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 properties? 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 experience. 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 understanding 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 experience. ‘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 confusion’ (2013: 140). Regarding the last stage of labour, she writes:

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 descriptions of labour and labour pain she is reluctant – whether because she is biased by patriarchal 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 subjectivity as potentially profoundly erotic, ethically committed to others precisely through eroticism, 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 irreducible 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 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 experience 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 pregnancy 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 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 incarcerate 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 ourselves 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.

De Beauvoir may not have been able to imagine a painfully erotic, empowering childbirth, but her philosophy offers resources for developing this vein of thinking. We cannot romanticize pain in labour. We must oppose reactionary, ‘backlash’ discourses on childbirth. ¹⁵ Women can be disempowered within the non-medicalized, midwifery model of childbirth as well. Charles (2013) reflects on the deep feelings of incompetence, frustration and shame many women experience after ‘failing’ to give birth without medical intervention: for some women, the ‘midwifery model’ is as disappointing as the medicalized 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 deromanticizing labour, also need to examine its empowering possibilities. Such accounts can profit from de Beauvoir’s conception of authentic embodied subjectivity as both immanent and transcendent, as erotic and even capable of choosing and experiencing a ‘painful 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.