Private Birth, Public Spectatorship: Reimagining Digital Activism through Embodied Practices of Natural Birth Vlogging in South Korea

Jiyoung Bae, Yale University

This study investigates how natural birth vlogging becomes a site of gendered reproductive politics in contemporary South Korea by producing embodied knowledge and circulating affect across digital platforms. In a context where childbirth has been historically medicalized and institutionally governed, women’s reproductive bodies remain subject to professional authority and gendered expectations of endurance and care. Against this backdrop, the study asks: How do women’s embodied childbirth experiences, when made publicly visible through natural birth vlogs, challenge institutional authority and renegotiate gendered divisions of reproductive labor? By making childbirth publicly visible and audibly present, natural birth vloggers do not simply narrate their experiences, but they transmit them. In this way, vlogging operates as a site of embodied knowledge-making, where emotions circulate between bodies and generate collective understanding that unsettles dominant medicalized interpretations of birth. Drawing on theories of affective knowledge production and mediated witnessing, the study conceptualizes natural birth vlogs as sites where embodied experience becomes politically meaningful. Through mediated co-presence, audiences encounter childbirth not as a distant spectacle but as experiential testimony that challenges assumptions about medical authority and reproductive governance. Methodologically, the research employs thematic discourse analysis and visual/sonic analysis of 60 YouTube natural birth vlogs. The findings are threefold. First, vloggers politicize reproduction by claiming reproductive autonomy across medical decision-making, fathers’ participation, and post-birth care practices, thereby challenging medical authority and gendered divisions of labor. Second, deliberate visual and sonic techniques render embodied experience sensorially transmissible, producing affective knowledge. Third, publicization invites mediated witnessing that expands perceived reproductive options and prompts viewers to reconsider the institutional control embedded in dominant childbirth practices. Overall, the study argues that the publicization of childbirth reconfigures the politics of reproduction, demonstrating that the politicization of private life can unfold through the circulation of lived, affective knowledge rather than overt protest discourse.

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 Presented in Session 59. Reproduction, Population, and the Modern State in South and East Asia