Practices of the pregnant self: Compliance with and resistance to prenatalnorms

A major challenge of medical anthropology is to assess how biomedicine, as a vaguely-defined set of diverse texts, technologies, and practitioners, sh apes the experience of self and body. Through narrative analyses of in-dept h, semi-structured interviews with 158 pregnant women in southern Californi a, this paper explores how the culture of biomedicine, encountered formally at prenatal care check-ups and informally through diverse media, influence s pregnant women's perceptions of appropriate prenatal behavior. In the spi rit of recent social scientific work that draws on and challenges Foucauldi an insights to explore social relations in medicine, we posit a spectrum of compliance and resistance to biomedical norms upon which individual prenat al practices are assessed. We suggest that pregnancy is, above all, charact erized by a split subjectivity in which women straddle the authoritative an d the subjugated, the objective and the subjective, and the haptic as well as the optic, in telling and often strategic ways. In so doing, we identify the intersection between the disciplinary practices of biomedicine and the practices of pregnant women as a means of furnishing more fruitful insight s into the oft-used term "power'' and its roles in constituting social rela tions in medicine.