Voice of a rock. Testimony’s importance as a discursive genre in the recognition of obstetric violence

Abstract

The article studies an experience of obstetric violence. I analyze the discursive construction from Das's heuristic proposal on testimony, in dialogue with Bakhtin's work about discursive genres. I propose that the testimony is an intimate discursive genre that has political potential, since the person who enunciates it, publicly exposes her vulnerability; In this act, subjectivity, anchored in moral precepts, plays an important role in dismantling the official model of the world, according to Bakhtin. In the testimony, a vision of the world that confronts the dominant norms is exposed. Inés, my interlocutor, shows in her narrative a dispute between the relevance of "medical action" versus the "embodied experience of childbirth." The message gains discursive power through dialogical relations (change of discursive subjects) together with a tendency to "fusion between the speaker and the addressee", characteristic of Bakhtin's intimate styles. Based on this analysis, I propose that in order to understand obstetric violence and its significance process, it is necessary to: situate the experience in the life trajectory of those who have incarnated experienced the exercise of obstetric power in the framework of the Mexican national State in which violence against women is a widespread phenomenon.