Post-partum Mental Health

Connecting feminist work on the genealogy of colonial violence as it continues into the contemporary period in unique, renewed and intensified ways through the experiences of Post-Partum mental health offers us a window into how memory, trauma and healing can be a catalyst for feminist engagement with genealogies of violence shaping survival strategies and possibilities for our collective futures, embodied in part through journeys of giving life, amidst a catalogue of injustice, oppression and violence aimed at our certain death.

As Schwab (2006) notes in her work on trauma, “Sometimes breaking down is an attempt to heal. Sometimes the breakdown of language forces us to listen to the silence, to acknowledge the gap, to inhabit it and rebuild the world from inside out” (104). Thus, healing intergenerational trauma acts as a site of feminist activism that engages directly with the work of remembering, healing and transforming what is possible, and as an act of mobilization and resistance, highlighting a powerful exercise of agency in the face of ongoing violence.