Bursting volcano, rushing river and heartbeat monitors: inscribing subjective experiences of childbirth in contemporary fiction.

Placing contemporary representations of subjective experiences of childbirth at the centre of the analysis, the article examines birth scenes in Inga Gaile's novel Stikli (Glass Shards, 2016) and Anna Auziņa's novel Mājoklis. Terēze's dienasgrāmata (The Dwelling. Terēze's Diary, 2021). While Gaile explores experimental writing and rhythm to articulate natural birth from the immediacy of an embodied experience, Auziņa portrays the experience of giving birth in hospital, where birth is reduced to a sequence of medical procedures and the birthing woman's agency is erased, with the retrospective storytelling becoming a way of recovering the agency. The different circumstances portrayed present childbirth as a completely different experience, yet by focusing on the subjective and embodied perspective of the woman giving birth, both texts challenge the previous taboo of talking about the maternal body and disrupt the cultural beliefs about childbirth that erase the subjectivity of the birthing woman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]