Pregnancy as an Embodied Experience: Cultural Construction, Body Politics, and a Cross-Cultural Autoethnography of China and Canada

Abstract

Pregnancy is commonly understood as a biological and medical process, yet women’s lived experiences of pregnancy are profoundly shaped by institutional arrangements, social relations, and cultural discourses. This article adopts a cross-cultural and reflexive autoethnographic approach to examine how pregnancy is socially and communicatively constructed in China and Canada. Focusing on medical systems, family practices, and discourses of motherhood, the study analyzes how different governance logics shape pregnant women’s embodied experiences and gendered subjectivities.

The analysis shows that pregnancy in China is embedded in a highly medicalized and family-centered framework that emphasizes risk prevention and collective responsibility. Pregnant bodies are simultaneously positioned as objects of protection and regulation through intensive prenatal surveillance and everyday familial interventions. In contrast, pregnancy in Canada is shaped by a model of limited medical intervention and individualized responsibility, which foregrounds bodily autonomy and emotional well-being while governing through self-management and uncertainty. From the perspective of body politics and gendered health communication, this study argues that pregnancy is not a purely physiological condition but a culturally mediated and politically situated embodied experience. By foregrounding pregnancy as a site of everyday body politics, the article contributes to feminist health communication and medical humanities scholarship on gender, care, and subjectivity.