Transitioning Towards a Feminist and Situated Midwifery in Latin America

Abstract

The universal history as we know it has validated the defective and pathological understanding of women’s bodies, especially those borderline corporealities that inhabit territories made invisible by Western geography. In this sense, the hegemonic medical model promotes the need to intervene and generate biomedical procedures to repair and treat these sick bodies. However, in response, paradigms with strong social and political commitment emerge that not only question the pathological position of women's bodies in the official history, but also imagine other possible ways of understanding the processes of health, disease and care, from a rights-based, feminist and situated approach. This is how feminist midwifery emerges as a possible horizon of dignity and social justice with a sense of relevance in a territory historically invisibilized by Western hegemony.