“How to Get to the Right Side of the Border”

Abstract

In order to promote access to perinatal health education for foreign women in France, several health education programmes aimed at these women have been set up by practitioners. Based on an ethnographic survey carried out within eight educational initiatives in Paris, Seine-Saint-Denis and Bordeaux, this chapter analyses these programmes as border spaces. During group classes, health professionals employ educational discourses that (re)produce symbolic boundaries between those included (“Us”) and those excluded from the national community (“Them”). Foreign women, defined by their supposed archaic and oppressive culture of origin, are relegated to the wrong side of the border. In contrast, health professionals see themselves as being on the right side of the border, on the side of modernity. In order to cross over, foreign women are expected to acculturate and assimilate. Only then will they be included in the category of modern and emancipated women. Thus, the role of educator seems to consist of helping “Them” to reach the right side of the border. However, beneficiaries develop a critical discourse towards the binary and femonationalist discourses of educators. By speaking out about their experience of domination, both in their country of origin and in the French context, these women redraw the borders created by the educators. This chapter reveals how power relations of gender, race and class run through perinatal health education.