The Promise of Repair: VBACs and Contemporary Feminist Political Desire

Abstract:This article critically explores feminist activism around a particular birthing practice that is often described as a radical form of recovery from C-section: vaginal births after cesarean (VBACs). I treat VBACs as a dense site of feminist desire that has been produced by what I call the feminist birthing industry. I argue that undergirding contemporary feminist investment in VBACs is not simply the contention that birthers should have access to births that they desire. Instead, VBAC advocacy is often underpinned by a sense that birth is a psychically transformative process only if it is embodied and experienced in a certain way, and that it is the vagina that is the site of maternal transformation. The investment in the vagina as a space of radical possibility that is fundamentally linked to projects of self-making and self-transformation unfolds in a moment where feminism— thanks also to the critical work of queer theory, trans studies, and Black studies—has largely disavowed a politics that tethers the feminine to genitalia, and that invests in the vagina as a site of authentic femininity. My interest, then, is in exploring how and why birth remains a space where feminist advocacy remains distinctively and peculiarly vaginally-oriented, linking the vagina to self-fulfillment.