Childbirth as a political and sensitive dispute: maternal trajectories in the “Parir” documentary (Florencia Mujica, 2017)

Abstract

Between the law, the health system, the bodies and the aesthetic-visual economy that governs the media and culture, and in the liminal zone of the family, there is a “place” of collision, coupling, fitting and / or blurring between the public and the private: childbirth. What happens when an intimate -related to personal autonomy-, and at the same time intensely domestic and family decision, such as how one chooses to give birth, is affected, intervened by the State, by science, by the institutions and the market, under the dominance of patriarchy? How does vernacular cinema sensibly construct that tension? Articulating the contributions of gender and family studies, with cultural history and film studies. In these pages I reflect on the tensions between the public and the private based on the figurations of motherhood(s) and the experience of childbirth, taking as a case of analysis the “Parir” documentary, by Florencia Mujica, released in 2017. It traces the diverse and complex journeys of three cis heterosexual women in a stable relationship during the last months of their pregnancies: localized and intersected journeys that display beliefs and performances associated with gender, pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood. If putting into images is a way of putting into speech and making visible, making a certain cultural phenomenon thinkable and existent, if images are a place of dispute that imagines and constructs the social, I am interested in seeing the way in which this documentary is capable of thinking about gender and influencing, in a more or less critical way, the public sphere and the fight for rights of pregnant women — and people —.