Paper short abstract:

This paper outlines a few crucial ways that post-humanism can offer a valuable insight into the lived embodiment of postnatal depression in new fathers.

Paper long abstract:

Postnatal depression (PND) is beginning to emerge into public healthcare policy and practice as a valid experience that fathers can suffer, rather than a solely female condition. Yet for mothers and fathers this 'mute illness', as it has been described, is still categorised in dual terms. For men, PND is considered to be primarily psycho-social in origin, and for women, the root cause is perceived as predominantly biological, due to fluctuating hormones after childbirth. Post-humanism and new materialism offer valuable insights into how PND is embodied and lived by men, by questioning conventional morals and ethics that underpin its conception, which appear to posit male and female, individual and collective, and biology and sociality in dual terms. Conversing with key anthropological and feminist texts and exploring the performance of biological actors such as hormones and  neurons, this paper outlines a few crucial ways in which the binary of nature and culture can be reconsidered and made more complex, more attentive to, and more telling of, somatic experience. In doing so, we can also begin to question what constitutes evidence in medical anthropology and account for the active, even literate quality of the body in expressing its lived embodiment.