| In the United States, childbirth is the number one cause for hospitalization, and the authoritative status of biomedical knowledge obscures other ways of birthing. Childbirth is contested terrain, however, and the independent midwifery movement offers a safe alternative to the culturally dominant rational-technological approach. Because birth uniquely bridges the biological and the social, contention over ways of birthing is likely to have significance at the level of emotions. This is especially so given the routine use of electronic fetal monitors, epidural drugs, lithotomy tables, and episiotomies in hospital birth and the oppositional midwifery view that birth is a healthy state of personal and family transition.;In this study, I use the midwifery movement as a case to examine how social movements create and legitimize new emotion knowledge and normative frameworks. Through a running exchange between existing theory and empirical research, I integrate cultural approaches to social movements (Eyerman and Jamison 1991; Melucci 1989, 1997) with relevant ideas from the sociology of emotions (Hochschild 1975, 1979, 1998; McCarthy 1989; Perinbanayagam 1989) to generate a new model that joins recent work (Goodwin, Jasper and Polletta 2001; Aminzade and McAdam 2002) that treats emotions as central to political protest.;Data from intensive interviews, secondary sources, and movement documents reveal that the midwifery movement's contention with established political authorities is best understood as an attempt to legitimize alternative knowledge about childbirth. I find that central to the movement's alternative knowledge are feeling rules and interactional resonances that replace fear with trust, pain with pleasure, and the supposed neutrality of impersonal material reductionism with love. Through constructing and disseminating alternative feeling rules and interactional resonances, the midwifery movement transforms specific emotion interests into new emotion knowledge. Analysis of the distinctive goals of the midwifery movement therefore offers support for a new and expanded conceptualization of social movements as emotive praxis. |
