Theorising mother-baby-assemblages: The vital emergence of maternal health

First-time motherhood is a well-studied yet poorly understood determinant of health. Giving birth has significant physical, mental and social health impacts across the life course. Maternal transition research has attempted to understand first-time mothers' psychological and social needs to improve overall health. However, much of this research struggles to capture the fluid and fluctuating nature of affects, senses and bodies across human and non-human spheres, and has reached conceptual saturation. In this paper, I develop mother-baby-assemblages as a way forward in theorising first-time motherhood to better understand how maternal health is produced intra-actively through the relationality between human and non-human actants. I achieve this by plugging into feminist psychoanalytic and new materialist theory, diffractively reading across published qualitative maternal transition literature spanning five decades and enriching affectively through my own mothering encounters. I engage with topics at the forefront of maternal health research, including bodies, babies, vibrant matter, physical and online spaces and paid employment demands. I theorise trans-subjective and more-than-human emergent mother-baby-assemblages that invite relationality and difference over identity and linearity in the becoming-mother to replace human agency with the capacity to affect and be affected through human and non-human forces. I weave together theory, published data and personal encounters to move beyond understanding becoming-mother as a linear process, and instead think of this becoming-through-each-other as mother-baby-assemblages. Maternal health therewith becomes a product of distributed, emerging, fluctuating, and affecting agencies across human and non-human spheres. Such an approach can steer towards health initiatives for first-time mothers that are socio-materially grounded, consider reciprocity of needs, diversify responsibilities for child-rearing, and encourage future scholarship of the human and non-human emergence of maternal health.