This article reflects on the associative and dissociative movements that experiences pain and suffering can trigger, in terms of biosociality, but also of discursive captures and stigma. Our ethnographic terrain were female scenes and reports of birth from a survey of two groups of pregnant and postpartum women (Carneiro, 2011), sometimes hinged to a recent Brazilian documentary,Obstetric Violence – the voice of Brazil (2013). The purpose of this article is to reflect on contemporary concepts of pain and suffering, their relation to violence, and the production of narrative itself, combining research sources and environments, while considering gender hierarchies, policies of the female body, biopolitics and biomedicine. Foremostly, it is a mapping of displacements and routes, the use and disuse of conceptions of pain and suffering, from what has been narrated by women who have criticized the rates of cesarean sections and routine medical procedures in Brazil.
childbirth; grief; pain; violence
