Pre-text: Audience reaction to research as data

To talk about Hospital Labor as a late 20th century American play, is to emphasize both

• the way direct participants in any labor must deal with a world of objects and other people at the time of the labor,
• the way any one who participates in any conversation about labor is similarly confronted to a world of other people and, together, with them end up reconstructing the Cultural Labor, out of the particular labor.

First, audiences who see the video record do not immediately guess Lonnie's status as a medical doctor. More precisely, no one in any of these audiences has ever spoken aloud to say that Lonnie must be a doctor given X or Y. Individuals may or may not have guessed it, but they did not speak out their guess. Such audiences, mostly adult students in a leading school of education, often professional women (in education, heath and psychological services), and many of them mothers, take but a few seconds to accept that they are indeed watching a hospital labor and there are few "errors" identifying the major roles (attending physicians and nurses, husband, researcher). It is also common for casual observers to become quite sure that the laboring woman, is a white, probably affluent, suburbanite. But few are those who pick on the minor details that could be used to guess her professional status. Neither do they pick up on details possibly pointing at the husband's profession, or at the anesthesiologist's marital status. It is as if the total set up of the recorded image as constructed by the participants and the camera conspired to hide much that did not fit within the overall gestalt

Things become more complicated when the same kind of audience is told that Lonnie is a physician. Then, casual observers cannot be shaken from the certainty that everything they see is the result of this status, thus invalidating the research as in any way relevant to "normal" childbirth in an American hospital: "Being a doctor" must make a difference even if one cannot specify what difference it is, observationally making. That it might make no difference, or that it should lead at most to minor ripples in the progression of the labor, ripples that are immediately discounted interactionally, is a major scandal to a general audience. That the woman herself should appear to participate directly in the erasure of her status is even more scandalous: "in this day and age" a professional woman should not let herself be placed in the helpless position of the scared, ignorant, dependent woman when apparently everything is set for her to claim a leading role in the control of her own body.

The reaction is partially methodological: the case would not be "typical" or "representative" and the research would thus not be useful. To this concern we would answer that we do not claim the case is typical. We claim it is instructive in that its very uniqueness reveals constraints all women must experience in one way or another. The reaction to the discovery that Lonnie is a physician generally also has a strong moralistic undertone, and sometimes overtone, as it appears scandalous to many that a professional woman should be apparently just as much at the mercy of the medical establishment as any one else. It cannot be so, and we may have missed how Lonnie is in fact getting preferential treatment. But, above all, it should not be so.

This dual reaction is interesting at several levels:

1. It points at a distinction that is central to our argument: in social life, there are matters that are so fundamentally taken for granted that they are not easily talked about or negotiated to the extent that no one is given the space to talk about or negotiate these matters: that the audience was seeing a labor in a hospital and that it looked mostly as one might imagine such a labor to be was taken for granted. Other matters, like the impact that status should have on such an event as labor is something that is both taken for granted and eminently open for negotiation (it should(not) make a difference).
2. Many (all?) women are profoundly ambivalent about a most routine and taken for granted social event. There is some evidence in the reaction of the audiences that the more experienced women are with hospital labor (as mothers and/or medical personnel)
3. The preceding statements constitute a direct challenge any consensus theory of culture. Labor and delivery may be some of the most "cultural" events of human life, in that they are a moment of fundamental human concern requiring an heightened sense of the need to transform the natural into the human. But they certainly are in Euro-American cultures as they must be everywhere a site of uncertainty, contestation and ideological struggle both locally, between the immediately significant others of the pregnant woman, and more broadly when experiential dilemmas are transformed into ideological concerns and institutionalized in complex States.