Pregnant Box: What Happens When Opera Enacts an Embodied Analysis of Concealing Pregnancy

Abstract

This chapter discusses a project that originated as policy-commissioned research initiated by Health Service practitioners to address concerns about recurring presentations of ‘concealed pregnancy’ to health care settings in Ireland. Research was commissioned to marshal evidence towards reducing the incidence of this ‘problem’. I conducted the study, interviewing thirteen women about their experiences of concealing pregnancy. Engaging with the commissioned or applied policy process evoked for me Buroway’s (2004) conceptualization of policy research as applied or ‘instrumental knowledge’. A process in which knowledge making is premised on a positivist paradigm that accepts the possibility of direct access to a singular ‘reality’ while ignoring theorizations of connections between ‘knowledge’ and power and the implications of conceptions of subjectivity for knowing the social world (Buroway 2004; Lather 2010; Bacchi 2012; Shortall 2013). A paradigm with the effect of placing the inquiry in the realm of governmentality of women’s fertile bodies.