Simulacrum
Imagine giving a young child a watermelon Jolly Rancher and explaining, “Here. This is watermelon.” The next
day, do it again. “Mmm…watermelon.” The next day, she asks for watermelon. Another Jolly Rancher.
Delicious. She likes watermelon. As she gets a bit older, you show her where watermelon can be found. You even
teach her to read the word watermelon: j-o-l-l-y-r-a-n-c-h-e-r. It’s her favorite. This goes on for years. Then, one
day, someone asks her if she’d like a slice of watermelon. Would she ever! So they cut her a nice thick slab of a
big, juicy watermelon. This doesn’t look like a watermelon. Feels decidedly un-watermelon-ish between her tongue
and the roof of her mouth. Most of all, this tastes nothing like watermelon. Jolly Rancher’s interpretation has
become ingrained in her as “real” watermelon. For as many times as she tastes watermelon—even if she comes to
love it—it will never be the standard by which she judges the watermelonness of a thing’s traits. To her, it will
always be an imitation.
The term “simulacrum” has been applied in a variety of ways, to mean a number of things, by a handful of
philosophers. Some have used it to simply mean “a copy.” The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard took it a step
further, though, and used it to identify these representations that are used so frequently and so widely as to become
accepted as the thing itself - so much so that the original thing begins to look false. The representation replaces the
original and the “real thing” begins to appear as an imitation.
I recently attended my first homebirth, and it occurred to me that the average American birth experience is littered
with simulacra.
This thought first struck me shortly before I gave birth to my own daughter last November. I was laboring along
quite nicely when my nurse asked if she could monitor me for a few minutes. Once on the monitors, the nurse
began admiring my contractions (I was truly flattered, as one might imagine). She said to my husband, “This is a
really impressive pattern of contractions—for not having any Pitocin.” Had I not been, as it were, preoccupied with
said
contractions, I may have engaged her. Even from Labor Land, I was thinking, “I smell a simulacrum.” It was as
though she had forgotten—momentarily—that the purpose of Pitocin, at least theoretically, is to imitate a natural
labor pattern like my own. But I imagine an L+D nurse probably sees more “augmented” labors than not, and so my
labor probably did look “almost like the real thing” to this nurse.
At this birth, though, there was a point at which we were all on the floor—the laboring mother leaning back into her
own mother, and her partner and I on either side of her, holding up her legs. And I had this thought—I wish I hadn’
t—as my feet fell asleep from sitting on them too long, and my back cramped and my arms began to tremble just a
little; I thought, “We’re like human stirrups.” No sooner had the thought crossed my mind but I thought, “(Gasp!),
Simulacra!” And that’s just it—who looks at stirrups in the hospital and thinks, “Huh, what crude representations of
the calloused hands of the women of old, who would gather around a laboring woman to offer strength and support
during childbirth.” We see it, most of us, the other way around.
Of course these simulacra aren’t limited to birth; they’re everywhere. Someone once told me my son was just using
me as a “human pacifier,” as if I thought to stick my nipple in the baby’s mouth one day when I noticed that it bore
a striking resemblance to that plastic and rubber contraption that makes babies so happy.
The bottom line is, I’m glad for so many reasons that I attended this particular birth, but one of them is that it
reminded me that before hospitals and surgery and forceps and anesthesia, before fetal heart monitors and foley
catheters and intravenous antibiotics, birth happened, and it worked. And it works now. And the next time I find
myself holding a laboring woman’s leg, I won’t think for a moment that I am “like a stirrup.” I’ll think that I’m like
a million women who have done this before me.
Susan Kennard
From Fall 2007 Issue IV
Imagine giving a young child a watermelon Jolly Rancher and explaining, “Here. This is watermelon.” The next
day, do it again. “Mmm…watermelon.” The next day, she asks for watermelon. Another Jolly Rancher.
Delicious. She likes watermelon. As she gets a bit older, you show her where watermelon can be found. You even
teach her to read the word watermelon: j-o-l-l-y-r-a-n-c-h-e-r. It’s her favorite. This goes on for years. Then, one
day, someone asks her if she’d like a slice of watermelon. Would she ever! So they cut her a nice thick slab of a
big, juicy watermelon. This doesn’t look like a watermelon. Feels decidedly un-watermelon-ish between her tongue
and the roof of her mouth. Most of all, this tastes nothing like watermelon. Jolly Rancher’s interpretation has
become ingrained in her as “real” watermelon. For as many times as she tastes watermelon—even if she comes to
love it—it will never be the standard by which she judges the watermelonness of a thing’s traits. To her, it will
always be an imitation.
The term “simulacrum” has been applied in a variety of ways, to mean a number of things, by a handful of
philosophers. Some have used it to simply mean “a copy.” The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard took it a step
further, though, and used it to identify these representations that are used so frequently and so widely as to become
accepted as the thing itself - so much so that the original thing begins to look false. The representation replaces the
original and the “real thing” begins to appear as an imitation.
I recently attended my first homebirth, and it occurred to me that the average American birth experience is littered
with simulacra.
This thought first struck me shortly before I gave birth to my own daughter last November. I was laboring along
quite nicely when my nurse asked if she could monitor me for a few minutes. Once on the monitors, the nurse
began admiring my contractions (I was truly flattered, as one might imagine). She said to my husband, “This is a
really impressive pattern of contractions—for not having any Pitocin.” Had I not been, as it were, preoccupied with
said
contractions, I may have engaged her. Even from Labor Land, I was thinking, “I smell a simulacrum.” It was as
though she had forgotten—momentarily—that the purpose of Pitocin, at least theoretically, is to imitate a natural
labor pattern like my own. But I imagine an L+D nurse probably sees more “augmented” labors than not, and so my
labor probably did look “almost like the real thing” to this nurse.
At this birth, though, there was a point at which we were all on the floor—the laboring mother leaning back into her
own mother, and her partner and I on either side of her, holding up her legs. And I had this thought—I wish I hadn’
t—as my feet fell asleep from sitting on them too long, and my back cramped and my arms began to tremble just a
little; I thought, “We’re like human stirrups.” No sooner had the thought crossed my mind but I thought, “(Gasp!),
Simulacra!” And that’s just it—who looks at stirrups in the hospital and thinks, “Huh, what crude representations of
the calloused hands of the women of old, who would gather around a laboring woman to offer strength and support
during childbirth.” We see it, most of us, the other way around.
Of course these simulacra aren’t limited to birth; they’re everywhere. Someone once told me my son was just using
me as a “human pacifier,” as if I thought to stick my nipple in the baby’s mouth one day when I noticed that it bore
a striking resemblance to that plastic and rubber contraption that makes babies so happy.
The bottom line is, I’m glad for so many reasons that I attended this particular birth, but one of them is that it
reminded me that before hospitals and surgery and forceps and anesthesia, before fetal heart monitors and foley
catheters and intravenous antibiotics, birth happened, and it worked. And it works now. And the next time I find
myself holding a laboring woman’s leg, I won’t think for a moment that I am “like a stirrup.” I’ll think that I’m like
a million women who have done this before me.
Susan Kennard
From Fall 2007 Issue IV
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