Start Date
12-6-2011 9:30 AM
End Date
12-6-2011 12:00 PM
Subject Areas
Africa, Middle East, modern, bodies, children, colonial/imperial, family, motherhood, reproduction
Abstract
French obstetrics in North Africa was not only a transfer of authority from women to doctors, it was a positivist unveiling of the Muslim female body. On the delivery table, the French colonial medical service in Morocco saw the final triumph of French positivism over “the Islamic mind” and its protector, the Muslim woman. If Orientalism seeks Islam’s truth beneath the woman’s veil as Meyda Yegenoglu has argued, then colonial obstetrics claimed to interrogate, dissect and conquer Muslim woman in her very flesh, reducing her to the visible, universal, biological meat of “woman’s parts.”
However, the medicalization of birth also dispelled French medical mythologies about the Moroccan female body. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock define medicalization as a reduction of social bodies to purely biological ones, and Cecilia Van Hollen sees medicalization as “biological disorders treated with biomedical interventions on individual bodies rather than with attempts to transform the social structure.” In Morocco, medicalization detached obstetrics from sociology and allowed doctors to use purely clinical data to study birth. Consequently, French obstetrics 1948-1956 began to identify actual problems in Muslim women’s health and lay the human and infrastructural groundwork for post-colonial obstetrics. The social history of Maternal and Infant Protection in Morocco illustrates the distance between the ideologies of colonial policy and postcolonial health.
In this paper, I use the example of Moroccan obstetrics to offer a post-colonial reconceptualization of Foucault’s biopolitics.
Keywords
birth, obstetrics, Morocco, midwife, Islam
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Download
The Muslim Womb: Midwives, Colonial Obstetrics and the Medicalization of Moroccan Birth
French obstetrics in North Africa was not only a transfer of authority from women to doctors, it was a positivist unveiling of the Muslim female body. On the delivery table, the French colonial medical service in Morocco saw the final triumph of French positivism over “the Islamic mind” and its protector, the Muslim woman. If Orientalism seeks Islam’s truth beneath the woman’s veil as Meyda Yegenoglu has argued, then colonial obstetrics claimed to interrogate, dissect and conquer Muslim woman in her very flesh, reducing her to the visible, universal, biological meat of “woman’s parts.”
However, the medicalization of birth also dispelled French medical mythologies about the Moroccan female body. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock define medicalization as a reduction of social bodies to purely biological ones, and Cecilia Van Hollen sees medicalization as “biological disorders treated with biomedical interventions on individual bodies rather than with attempts to transform the social structure.” In Morocco, medicalization detached obstetrics from sociology and allowed doctors to use purely clinical data to study birth. Consequently, French obstetrics 1948-1956 began to identify actual problems in Muslim women’s health and lay the human and infrastructural groundwork for post-colonial obstetrics. The social history of Maternal and Infant Protection in Morocco illustrates the distance between the ideologies of colonial policy and postcolonial health.
In this paper, I use the example of Moroccan obstetrics to offer a post-colonial reconceptualization of Foucault’s biopolitics.