Scholars turn to reproduction for its ability to illuminate the practices involved with negotiating personhood for the unborn, the newborn, and the already-existing family members, community members, and the nation. The scholarship in this volume draws attention to doula work as intimate and relational while highlighting the way boundaries are created, maintained, challenged, and transformed. Intimate labour as a theoretical construct provides a way to think about the kind of care doulas offer women across the reproductive spectrum. Doulas negotiate boundaries and often blur the divisions between communities and across public and private spheres in their practice of intimate labour. This book weaves together three main threads: doulas and mothers, doulas and their community, and finally, doulas and institutions. The lived experience of doulas illustrates the interlacing relationships among all three of these threads. The essays in this collection offer a unique perspective on doulas by bringing together voices that represent the full spectrum of doula work, including the viewpoints of birth, postpartum, abortion, community based, adoption, prison, and radical doulas. We privilege this broad representation of doula experiences to emphasize the importance of a multi-vocal framing of the doula experience. As doulas move between worlds and learn to live in liminal spaces, they occupy space that allows them to generate new cultural narratives about birthing bodies.

Angela Castañeda is Associate Professor of Anthropology at DePauw University. Her research in Brazil, Mexico, and the U.S. explores questions on religion, ritual, expressive culture and most recently, the cultural politics of reproduction, birth and motherhood. In addition to her work as a practicing birth and postpartum doula, she also volunteers as a Spanish childbirth educator in Bloomington, Indiana, where she lives with her family.

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Julie Johnson Searcy is finishing her PhD in Anthropology and Communication and Culture at Indiana University. Her dissertation research in South Africa examines the space where reproduction, disease and technology intersect as women navigate pregnancy, birth and high rates of HIV/AIDS infection. Interested in issues of gender, reproduction and performance, she also works as a doula and childbirth educator.

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