Jodi Le Roux

This dissertation explores the concepts of pregnancy and motherhood held by women in body positive communities in Cape Town, South Africa. By focusing on their expectations and experiences of these concepts within body positive communities and their wider social circles, the research examines what it means for women to want or not to want to be pregnant; what it means to be pregnant; whether pregnancy and motherhood are experienced as sociallyascribed performance, and what it might look like to challenge the social conventions around pregnancy and motherhood. The contextual landscape where the perception of women is typically polarized into contradictory identities through pro-natal social convention, frames the research. I collected data over a six month period through multi-sited ethnography and the qualitative anthropological techniques of participant observation, semi-structured interviews and autoethnography. Through an overarching lens of intersectional feminism I drew from an...