Project 5 - Text 1 Analysis

During class on Thursday, March 25, we took a look at three selected concepts from Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life. The first concept discusses Certeau's ideas of production and re-production/consumption. He says that production is creation, while re-production is more like consumption or the recreation of something. Secondly, Certeau describes his key concept of poaching. According to Certeau, poaching involves taking bits and pieces of a product and re-using them in a different context or re-creating them to fit one's motives. In a way, poaching is similar to the process that we went through in writing our research papers for project 3; we took the information that we researched and re-phrased the information to incorporate it into our papers without plagiarizing. The last concept that we looked at was distinguishing between tactics and strategies. Certeau says that a strategy is based on a "proper" place and a base of "will and power," while tactics are more temporal and not rooted.
In order to apply de Certeau's key concepts, we read an article from CNNhealth.com titled "Mom won't be forced to have C-section." This article discussed an issue between a woman named Joy Szabo and her local hospital. Joy has decided to give birth to her fourth child at a hospital that is 350 miles away from her home and husband, due to the fact that her local hospital will only deliver her baby by C-section. Even though Joy successfully delivered her third child vaginally after having a C-section for her second child's birth, her local hospital has a new code that does not allow women who have previously had a C-section to deliver a baby vaginally. The hospital backs up their decision by claiming that there are several health risks involved in giving birth vaginally after having had a C-section for a previous birth. However, Joy's argument is that she had a vaginal birth that was very successful after she had had a C-section previously. Therefore, Joy does not believe that the claims that the hospital is making about health risks are that accurate or as serious as the hospital is suggesting. However, the local hospital still refuses to allow Joy to give birth to her fourth child vaginally; thus, Joy is forced to travel 350 miles away to a hospital in Phoenix that will allow her to give birth vaginally. The article is written in a way that seems to support the mother (Joy) by using pathos in order to create sympathy. However, at the end of the article, many readers still tend to side with the hospital. This connects to de Certeau's concept of tactics and strategies. In the case of this article, the hospital is using strategy because it is a place of high power that uses statistics and facts to provide evidence for why it established the new code. On the other hand, the Szabo family illustrates tactics because Joy provides one story/example (her own) to back up her opposing viewpoint against the hospital's code. That is not as powerful as the strategy that the hospital uses by providing statistics and facts from multiple birth cases in order develop the new code on not allowing vaginal births after mothers have previously had a C-section. Thus, the article on CNNhealth.com successfully illustrates de Certeau's third concept of tactics and strategies.