Abstract

Using Beauvoir's existentialist and phenomenological ideas, this piece reflects on the embodied experience of childbirth, offering an alternative to the essentialist/postmodern dilemma concerning the feminist analysis of labor. When lived as an intense, embodied, painful experience, childbirth can be viewed as an empowering experience not in essentialist, but in phenomenological‐existentialist terms: an experience that (in Beauvoirian language) perfectly conjoins the immanent with the transcendent to create a “project of subjectivity.”