Exercising caution: the production of medical knowledge about physical exertion during pregnancy.

Abstract

In this article I explore the production of medical knowledge about exercise during pregnancy in the latter half of the 20th century, illustrating how debates about the safe limits of maternal exercise were rooted in longstanding anxieties surrounding the female reproductive body as well as epistemological questions concerning what counts as knowledge or evidence in the scientific realm. By drawing to the surface the "rules of formation" for the production of knowledge about the pregnant body, I aim to bring to light the contingent nature of this knowledge--never neutral but always bound up in relations of power.