Birth Scene Research Articles

Investigation of birth scenes of movies and tv series published on youtube in terms of traumatic birth perception

Investigation of birth scenes of movies and tv series published on youtube in terms of traumatic birth perception

Reinvention of Padishah-i Islam in the Visual Representations of Ghazan Khan

This article discusses how the visualization of Mahmud Ghazan, the sixth Ilkhanid ruler, was employed to construct and propagate his image as the Padishah-i Islam (King of Islam), thus justifying him both as king of Iranshahr (land of Iran) and the legitimate successor of the Prophet Muhammad. In a quest for visual translations of the Ilkhanid concept of Padishah-i Islam—an inseparable combination of the Persian notion of ideal kingship and prophethood—several illustrations from the Diez albums representing Ghazan or events of his reign have been identified, two of which have become subject to detailed iconographic analyses. Two approaches to the visualization of Ghazan as Padishah-i Islam can be considered here. The first is Ghazan’s birth scene where the visual narrative is covered in various formal and semantic layers; transformed into a symbolic narrative of a holy birth associated with those of the prophets. The second appears in the scene of Ghazan’s enthronement, probably once illustrated as an unknown manuscript’s frontispiece, the images’ composition and components appear as a visual panegyric poem which applies an elaborate visual language that elevates Ghazan to the level of a divine king.

Reinvention of Padishah-i Islam in the Visual Representations of Ghazan Khan

This article discusses how the visualization of Mahmud Ghazan, the sixth Ilkhanid ruler, was employed to construct and propagate his image as the Padishah-i Islam (King of Islam), thus justifying him both as king of Iranshahr (land of Iran) and the legitimate successor of the Prophet Muhammad. In a quest for visual translations of the Ilkhanid concept of Padishah-i Islam—an inseparable combination of the Persian notion of ideal kingship and prophethood—several illustrations from the Diez albums representing Ghazan or events of his reign have been identified, two of which have become subject to detailed iconographic analyses. Two approaches to the visualization of Ghazan as Padishah-i Islam can be considered here. The first is Ghazan’s birth scene where the visual narrative is covered in various formal and semantic layers; transformed into a symbolic narrative of a holy birth associated with those of the prophets. The second appears in the scene of Ghazan’s enthronement, probably once illustrated as an unknown manuscript’s frontispiece, the images’ composition and components appear as a visual panegyric poem which applies an elaborate visual language that elevates Ghazan to the level of a divine king.

Kanatlı Olarak Betimlenen Vaftizci Yahya Figürü

This article contains the theological substructures and the iconographic analysis of the Winged Saint John the Baptist figure. The answer to the question of why John the Baptist was thought as a winged, has been sought out by using the references of Holy Books, examining not only his mission and identity but also his life story It has been established that despite having roots in the 4th century, the first example of Saint John the Baptist as winged was founded at the South transept wall of Saint Achilles Church in Serbia from 13th century. Moreover this special depiction had been included in the iconographic program during the Post-Byzantine period. The icon examples of Winged Saint John are classified into 4 sections as follows: the front, the profile, the part of the composition with other saints and as a secondary figure in his own birth scene. This classification is composed according to the formal differences of those icons.

How to Give Birth - According to Hollywood

This article examines birth scenes in five mainstream films in order to explore the way norms about birthing are reproduced or challenged. The films are: Juno (Reitman, 2007), Knocked Up (Apatow, 2007), Baby Mama (McCullers, 2008), The Back-up Plan (Poul, 2010) and What to Expect When You’re Expecting (Jones, 2012). What do the birthing scenes look like, are they realistic with non-on-set births and does the directors’ and writers’ gender, age, skin colour and class have any parallels with what is portrayed? The analysis shows that certain norms are upheld in all films; vaginal delivery in hospital, birthing positions of half sitting or laying down and present partners or friends during delivery. Scenes not representing this were depicted as the Other and thus made deviant. Homogeneity in the group behind the camera was found which correlates with certain homogeneity on screen as well. Of all the eight scenes, the women give birth half sitting or laying down in seven, implying a dominance of certain positions. These positions were found to be very common off-screen too, despite the wide range of birthing positions available and recommendations to try different ones during labour. This implies that the practicality for personnel goes beforehand. By using feminist theories on the body and medical studies on births, these findings reveal power structures devaluating female-coded bodies. The results also enhance the importance of analysing patterns of representation in general, but birthing depictions in particular, since these representations can affect people’s understanding of how a birth should be in real life.

Natality or Birth? Arendt and Cavarero on the Human Condition of Being Born

This essay offers a critical analysis of Hannah Arendt's notion of natality through the lens of Adriana Cavarero's feminist philosophy of birth. First, I argue that the strength of Arendtian natality is its rootedness in an ontology of uniqueness, and a commitment to human plurality and relationality. Next, I trace with Cavarero three critical concerns regarding Arendtian natality, namely that it is curiously abstract; problematically disembodied and sexually neutral; and dependent on a model of vulnerability that assumes equality rather than asymmetry. This last issue is further developed in the final section of the essay, where I examine the idea that birth, for Cavarero, becomes the very concept by which we can distinguish and normatively differentiate acts of care and love from acts of wounding and violence. Upholding the normative distinction here depends on a conceptual distinction between vulnerability and helplessness. To maintain the ethical potential of the scene of birth, I argue that we have to insist on the very characteristics Cavarero attributes to it—ones, as this essay aims to show, that are ultimately missing in the Arendtian account thereof.

A Study of Bodhisatta's Birth Scene Found at the KusināruÑ Pagoda in Mawlamyine

A Study of Bodhisatta's Birth Scene Found at the KusināruÑ Pagoda in Mawlamyine

Anatomy’s a drag: Queer fashion and camp performance in Leigh Bowery’s Birth Scenes

Abstract Leigh Bowery is often remembered for his outlandish fashion design, controversial performance art and alternative rock band, Minty. Bowery’s performances in his self-fashioned ‘looks’ were genre- and gender-bending. His costumes were often transformative prosthetics and imagined anatomies that acted as fantastical yet temporary body modification. While Bowery’s incessantly shifting body is addressed, this article focuses on Bowery’s notorious Birth Scenes (1992−94). Manifesting in a variety of iterations, Bowery literally wore another person, who happened to be his wife, as drag for simulated birth onstage. And importantly, the performances occurred at queer venues and events during the ongoing AIDS crisis of the early 1990s. Through visual cultural analysis, this article argues that Bowery manipulated camp tactics of artifice, incongruity, appropriation and humour, to challenge normativity and capitalism, and furthermore; to test cultural assumptions about drag performance, which was then having a distinct cultural moment in the early 1990s. This article explores Bowery’s Birth Scenes to understand how queer fashion and performance combine to explode notions of the body and embedded sociocultural norms of sexuality, gender and consumerism.

Sexy birth: Breaking Hollywood’s last taboo

I look at several depictions of birth in popular culture that seem to be breaking ‘Hollywood’s last taboo’ against showing graphic representations of the birthing body. I offer four illustrations of this relatively recent departure from conventional birth imagery and discuss (1) the 2006 sculpture of Britney Spears birthing on a bearskin rug, (2) the crowning scene in the 2007 movie Knocked Up, (3) a 2012 birth scene depicted in the HBO show Game of Thrones, and (4) a birth montage from an episode of the Netflix show Sense8, to suggest that representations of birth no longer solely depict asexual bodies. I consider the consequences that these sexualized representations of the birthing body might have for women’s embodied experience of birth and evaluate this sexy birth imagery in light of a cultural shift towards an increasingly (hetero)sexualized femininity. In particular, I am interested to explore how normative (hetero)sexualized femininity may align with the growing medical management of childbirth and the uptick in surgical delivery. I investigate whether graphic depictions of birth leave us with increased sexual objectification or the possibility for a new sexual subjecthood. I close by offering a queer reading of the birth depictions in the Netflix drama Sense8 and consider how its non-normative depictions of women’s laboring bodies may unsettle the powerful norms that constitute (hetero)sexualized femininity and refigure women’s experiences of childbirth.

Scenes of Birth and Founding Myths: Dada 1916/17

A striking number of performances by the early Dada group—in 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire and in 1917 at the Galerie Dada in Zurich—stage various scenes of birth: The first act of Hugo Ball's and Emmy Hennings's play-reading of Leonid Andreyev's The Life of Man contains a brutal and painful birth scene. Ball's Nativity Play relates the story of Jesus Christ from his birth to his crucifixion. Similarly, Marcel Janco's adaptation of Oskar Kokoschka's grotesque Sphinx and Straw Man features a Mr. Fetus, who symbolizes the impotence of the unproductive male protagonist, and the most spectacular chapter of Ball's Dadaist novel, Tenderenda, titled “Grand Hotel Metaphysics,” tells of the birth of another monstrous misfit: “Dada.” All these unsettling and mournful birth fantasies—particularly when read together—challenge and contradict the established narrative that the early twentieth-century Dada movement was born of chance, when Ball and Richard Huelsenbeck found the word in a French dictionary. Moreover, they resist subsequent historiographical efforts to subsume Dada under a specific genealogy: On the one hand, the birth of “Dada” designates the end of art (history) or of the possibility to conceive of art in genealogical terms. On the other hand, Dada marks the beginnings of something radically new, which is receptive to genealogical gestures: Signatures, manifestos, (re)definitions, and (re)interpretations as well as the tireless attempts to date an incommensurable event characterize the Dada movement.

“Dread name of love”: The Perverse Aesthetics of Enjoyment as Disgust in Barnes and Beckett

“Dread name of love”The Perverse Aesthetics of Enjoyment as Disgust in Barnes and Beckett Michelle Rada Jouissance is simply overrated. It is not so wonderful that everyone really wants it, the pervert supposedly being the only one who refuses to give it up and who is able to go out and get it. The psychotic suffers due to an uncontrollable invasion of jouissance in his or her body, and neurosis is a strategy with respect to jouissance—above all, its avoidance. Perversion too is a strategy with respect to jouissance: it involves the attempt to set limits thereto. Bruce Fink, “Perversion” setting some limits A copy of Djuna Barnes’s 1916 poem, “Birth,” appears with the word “awful” handwritten by Barnes herself. In the poem, the anatomically graphic moment of a child being born is suspended by a somewhat melodramatic contemplation of death as the aim of all life, the child’s cries prophesizing its own end. Read as a self-critical inscription, Barnes’s “awful” marks her poem as bad, as a piece of writing retrospectively evaluated and rejected. In this scene of birth, an incisive ambivalence sets the scene, the fifth line declaring how “Both love and hate creep” through a certain blade. Barnes’s “awful” poem binds this awful visual and awful experience to a kind of “love,” a kind of enjoyment of its gross object, aesthetic or otherwise. The inscription of “awful” can be read not just as the writer’s critical backwards glance at her own work, but rather as part of the text itself, through which birth is figured as an awful moment, ambivalently announcing a specific form of enjoyment of the awful, the bad, and the disgusting as such. Describing the structure of perversion as a triumphant transgression of “the factor of disgust” by the libido, Freud writes that the “sexual instinct in its strength enjoys overriding this disgust” (Three Essays 17–18). As such, perverse enjoyment is experienced precisely during the subject’s act of reconstituting the limits of disgust, and thus also of jouissance. Cited above, Fink’s account of perversion presents the underside of Freud’s, emphasizing the “attempt to set limits” to jouissance as that which constitutes perversion. Enjoyment takes place at the site of an ambivalent [End Page 171] act, in which a boundary or law is transgressed and simultaneously replaced with a new one. In Disgust: Theory and History of a Strong Sensation, Winfried Menninghaus discusses perversion in Freud as concomitant with “the violation of postinfantile barriers of disgust,” perversion thus being “the absence of disgust in a context where reactions of disgust and repression are normally expected” (194). Adding Menninghaus’s and Fink’s accounts to Freud’s, perversion entails setting new limits to the possibility of enjoyment and erecting new barriers of disgust, not simply doing away with the existing law but reconstructing it as well. The perverse subject, then, at once refuses the law and refashions it, and it is within this transgressive yet self-restrictive act that enjoyment is ambivalently discovered. In Barnes’s novel Nightwood (1937), the coincidence of a love object with an object that produces disgust or repulsion conditions the possibility for enjoyment in and of the text. Specific sites of enjoyment necessarily coincide with the disarmingly strange and the uncomfortably close. While not the most obvious texts to read alongside Nightwood, Samuel Beckett’s novella First Love (1968) and short story “Enough” (1973) depict and produce close encounters of this kind, through which the law is objected to and abjected. These texts reconstitute the limits of the gendered body and posit an aesthetic that is read here as perverse. Often psychoanalytically inflected, Barnes and Beckett criticism returns over and again to the psychical and affective registers of shame, trauma, and melancholia to read these texts and the ways through which they complicate enjoyment as a form or effect of different experiences of loss and repression. A model for cathexis and attachment distinct from the self-reflexive splitting of shame, the uncanny returns of trauma, and the ambivalent hauntings of melancholia, perversion makes room for these strange texts and the aesthetic responses they generate to be read otherwise. There...

At the egg's edge: Lygia Clark's indiscretions

This essay examines the way the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark (1920–1988) revisits and reconstructs the scene of birth in works that invoke, directly or indirectly, the figure of the egg. It compares Clark's reconstructions in relation to Jacques Lacan's account of birth, the development of the individuated subject and the normative, patriarchal social relations that subject upholds. It argues that while Lacan's account entails the bracketing of the indistinct and sensuous materiality he refers to as the Real, Clark's works reclaim the Real, creating a very different experience of bearing and being born, and of doing it together in and as a sharing of fluids, membranes, openings/passageways, in and as haptic contact. Constituted by this kind of interpenetration and entanglement, the Real becomes a field of discovery within which the contact of indiscrete flesh, of inorganic and organic matter, is the starting point for re-experiencing and remaking sociality and new modes of life.

Recritude: Reflections on Postural Ontology

Recritude: Reflections on Postural Ontology

Recritude: Reflections on Postural Ontology

Recritude: Reflections on Postural Ontology

Frieze Frame

This marble relief carving of a birth scene was created by an unknown sculptor some time between 400 and 300 BCE (Roman times). The plaque measures approximately 30 cm × 15 cm and was excavated in Ostia, Italy. It depicts a woman in an almost relaxed reclining pose, on a drape- covered plinth. She is attended by three contented women. Given the delivery practices of the time, it is likely that the woman has delivered the infant on a birthing chair and has been moved to a softer couch for aftercare. One of the birth attendants appears to be holding either the placenta or wadding cloths. Midwives of the time were female; male physicians typically would not attend a birth, except in cases of difficult labour in high status women. The carving was likely created to ease the concerns of expectant mothers by depicting a positive image of childbirth, or it could have been a funerary plaque to commemorate the work of a particular midwife. Whatever its purpose, this frieze is a beautiful and—for the time—realistic view of a magical theme.

Musical Borrowing as Incarnation: A Theological Reading of Hildegard's O quam preciosa in John Adams's El Niño

As well as being a major dimension of music, the concept of time can be used to distinguish God's ontology from the temporality of God's creation in Christian theology. In Theology, Music and Time (2000), Begbie uses the dimension of time as a mediatory framework linking the disciplines of music and theology. While some recent interdisciplinary dialogues have discussed music's ability to express theological concepts using this framework, this paper seeks to demonstrate how the process of Incarnation—a transcendent and immanent God revealed in time—might be interpreted through a musical narrative. This particular narrative involves the ‘musical borrowing’ of Hildegard's responsory, O quam preciosa, in the ‘The Christmas Star’ movement (the birth scene) of John Adams' ‘Nativity-oratorio’El Niño (2000).

Childbirth Education, the Internet, and Reality Television: Challenges Ahead

Childbirth Education, the Internet, and Reality Television: Challenges Ahead

The Taboo Aesthetics of the Birth Scene

The Taboo Aesthetics of the Birth Scene

Prenatal origins of temperamental reactivity in early infancy

Background Temperament theory has long considered individual differences in reactivity and regulation to be present at birth. Recent evidence suggests that such differences may be present prenatally and moderated by maternal emotionality. Aims To determine whether induced maternal emotional activation generates a fetal response and whether observed fetal responsivity is associated with early infant temperament. Study design Women viewed an emotionally evocative labor and delivery documentary at 32 weeks gestation while physiological indices were evaluated and their infant's temperament was assessed at 6 weeks postnatal age. Subjects Participants were 137 pregnant women and their infants. Outcome measures Maternal physiological (heart rate and skin conductance) and fetal neurobehavioral (heart rate and motor activity) data were collected during gestation in response to the stimulus. Infant temperament (irritability and consolability) data were based on observational methods after birth. Results Fetuses reacted to maternal viewing of the video with decreased heart rate variability, fewer motor bouts, and decreased motor activity. There was correspondence between the nature of individual maternal physiological responses to the full video, as well as phasic responses to a graphic birth scene, and fetal responsivity. Fetuses that reacted more intensively to maternal stimulation were significantly more likely to become infants that demonstrated greater irritability during a developmental examination at 6 weeks of age. Discussion These results support the presumption that early postnatal temperamental characteristics emerge during the prenatal period.

S11-3 A Scene of Birth and Care for Disease in Medieval Japan(ISPOG2007)

S11-3 A Scene of Birth and Care for Disease in Medieval Japan(ISPOG2007)