The main argument of this chapter is that knowledge is a phenomenon to be understood in the intersection of discourse and action, and that entextualization (Bauman and Briggs 1990) mediates this relationship. Drawing on mediated discourse analysis (Scollon and Scollon 2004; Jones 2013), the chapter explores an online discussion forum thread used by over 200 pregnant women expecting a child in the same month. The empirical examples demonstrate how the participants in this thread exchange information, provide reports and contest knowledge. By way of these examples, the analysis claims that a key process in such knowledge practices is the entextualization of prior actions, often from the private life of the participants. Through such processes, a range of transient actions are treated as a unit, such as an experience, that is given a linguistic form. Recentered in the interaction of the thread, the unit functions as a piece of knowledge for others to draw on. In this vein, the discussion forum becomes a resource for the participants to appropriate control over medical knowledge and the biologically and socially turbulent experience of pregnancy.

This article explores communicative aspects of preparing others, by studying prenatal education classes in which midwives prepare expectant parents for delivery. Data include documentation from classes and interviews with the presenters. This twofold dataset enables investigation into how ideologies of communication figure into the production of discourse. A dominant idea is that discourse can stand in for lived experience in the endeavor to decrease nervousness and fear in the expectant parents. The observation data are therefore analyzed by paying attention to how the expectant parents’ future deliveries are discursively represented. Drawing on the conceptual framework for analyzing anticipatory discourse, the study shows how the midwives largely frame this future as predictable and the mother as highly agentive. When addressing unexpected turbulence, however, the midwives use the opportunity to stress the agency of medical professionals to maintain a representation of the delivery event as generally predictable.

This article explores the relationship between discourse and experiences of ill health. Drawing on narratives, it shows how a mother experiencing difficulties breastfeeding embodies sentiments of shame over what she perceives as a failure to perform motherhood. The notions of interdiscursivity and historical bodies are employed to ground the individual’s experience in discursive practices and to argue that shame is a sentiment that arises in the rupture of biopolitical ideologies construed in those practices. Expressing shame becomes a resource for assuming responsibility over failed motherhood, at the same time that it appears to obstruct recovery to smoothly functioning breastfeeding.

Den här artikeln utforskar förhållandet mellan diskurs och erfarenheter av ohälsa. Med hjälp av narrativa data visar artikeln hur en mor som har problem med amningen förkroppsligar skamkänslor över vad hon uppfattar som ett misslyckande att performera moderskap. Begreppen interdiskursivitet och historisk kropp används för att förstå hur individens erfarenheter relaterar till diskursiva praktiker, samt för att föra fram tesen att skam är en känsla som uppstår i disharmoni med biopolitiska ideologier som konstrueras i dessa praktiker. Att uttrycka skam blir en resurs för att ta på sig ansvaret för det misslyckade moderskapet, samtidigt som det förefaller förhindra återgången till en fungerande amning.