Botes Tamia Bianca
Department of Anthropology, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.
Department of Anthropology, Sol Plaatje University, Kimberley, South Africa.
Front Glob Womens Health. 2025 Aug 26;6:1531915. doi: 10.3389/fgwh.2025.1531915. eCollection 2025.
Obstetric violence, rooted in the racialised and gendered logics of colonial medicine, has long served as a tool for disciplining reproductive bodies. In both 19th-century Antebellum slavery and the Cape colony, Black women's bodies became sites of medical experimentation, regulation, and control. Gynaecology emerged as a site of race-making, displacing Black autonomous midwives and erasing their knowledge from official medical archives. Yet this erasure was never complete. In Eldorado Park, Black autonomous midwives, or voetvroue, have cultivated grounded, place-based forms of reproductive care: treating infertility, facilitating births, and enacting rituals transmitted along familial and communal lines. Drawing on archival research and life history interviews, this paper traces the erasure of "voetvroue", or Black autonomous midwives, from the medical archive and discusses the colonial transformation of birth and obstetrics into a site of surveillance, control, and violence. It follows the lives of three voetvroue-Aunty Faeeza, Aunt Rose, and their grandmother, Ouma-who re-fashioned her two-bedroom backroom in Eldorado Park into a birthing space, or "hospitaal". I argue that the huis-hospitaal constitutes a radical commons of care that offers a counter-space to colonial biomedical logics not through overt refusal but through the everyday enactment of pleasure, dignity, and agency. Here, pleasure is conceptualised as emotional, spiritual, and relational: a mode of re-imagining reproductive justice beyond the confines of state-sanctioned care. By reframing reproductive health through the lens of radical care, voetvroue reclaim space, knowledge, and autonomy for Black birthing women in the face of ongoing racial-capitalist violence. In doing so, they revalorise locale-specific modes of knowledge and technologies and prioritise holistic approaches to birthing care.
产科暴力植根于殖民医学的种族化和性别化逻辑，长期以来一直是规训生殖身体的工具。在19世纪战前奴隶制时期的美国和开普殖民地，黑人女性的身体都成为了医学实验、监管和控制的场所。妇科成为了种族塑造的场所，取代了黑人自主助产士，并将她们的知识从官方医学档案中抹去。然而，这种抹除从未彻底完成。在伊尔多拉多公园，黑人自主助产士，即voetvroue，发展出了基于当地、扎根实际的生殖护理形式：治疗不孕症、协助分娩，并践行沿家族和社区传承的仪式。本文通过档案研究和生活史访谈，追溯了“voetvroue”，即黑人自主助产士，从医学档案中的消失，并探讨了分娩和产科如何在殖民统治下转变为一个监视、控制和暴力的场所。文章讲述了三位voetvroue——法伊扎阿姨、罗斯阿姨和她们的祖母乌玛——的生活，乌玛将她在伊尔多拉多公园的两居室后屋改造成了一个分娩空间，即“医院”。我认为，家庭医院构成了一个激进的关怀共同体，它不是通过公开拒绝，而是通过日常践行愉悦、尊严和能动性，为殖民生物医学逻辑提供了一个对抗空间。在这里，愉悦被概念化为情感、精神和关系层面的：是一种超越国家认可护理范围重新构想生殖正义的方式。通过从激进关怀的视角重新构建生殖健康，voetvroue为面临持续种族资本主义暴力的黑人分娩女性夺回了空间、知识和自主权。在此过程中，她们重新重视当地特有的知识和技术模式，并将整体分娩护理方法置于优先地位。
