Throughout her career, Lalaie Ameeriar, an associate professor in York University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, has researched how systems of care and institutional structures shape people’s experiences of harm, neglect and inequality.
While conducting fieldwork in medical settings, she often noticed mothers becoming angry, particularly during labour or postpartum care. What stood out to Ameeriar was the response to that anger, especially when it involved racialized patients.
“I noticed how quickly women’s expressions of distress or anger were minimized,” she says.
Because clinical protocols often prioritize calm, cooperation and reassurance, says Ameeriar, anger is frequently interpreted as noncompliance, emotional instability or even a threat. As a result, health care professionals often move to manage, neutralize or dismiss it.
Yet Ameeriar observed that anger often emerged at moments when mothers were trying to advocate for themselves or signal that something was wrong. This observation sparked a new line of inquiry, building on her long-standing work on care, institutional harm and racialized inequity.
“I wanted to ask what becomes visible when we treat anger as data rather than noise, and how that shift might change the way we think about care, credibility and responsibility in medical settings,” she says, noting that maternal mortality and morbidity rates remain disproportionately high for racialized women in North America, even within advanced health care systems.
That question led Ameeriar to research maternal anger as a form of knowledge – now captured in her article “Breathing through the rage: Maternal refusal as ethnographic method,” published in Medical Anthropology Quarterly.
Backed by a $96,000 Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the study draws on multi-year ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews and clinical observations that consider lived experience and emotion.
Ameeriar consulted with Black, South Asian, Latinx and mixed-race mothers, as well as birth workers, to document and understand their experiences during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Among the accounts she documented were repeated instances of women whose pain was dismissed.
During labour, Denise, a Black mother in Los Angeles, repeatedly told nurses that something was wrong. Her concerns were ignored, and she was described as “dramatic.”
Fatima, also a Black mother, repeatedly reported pain and concern, only to be sent home multiple times. She later gave birth at 25 weeks. A second opinion revealed that she had already been in labour when her concerns were dismissed.
Alejandra, a Mexican American mother who experienced postpartum hemorrhaging, had her screams of pain reframed as panic and emotional excess, as staff told her to simply “breathe.”
Across the stories Ameeriar documented, anger was not impulsive or irrational but cumulative, building through repeated dismissal and the demand to remain calm in the face of harm. The consistency of these experiences surprised her.
“I didn’t anticipate just how systemically anger was linked to moments of institutional failure,” she says, noting that these expressions were often the only available way for patients to signal unmet needs when other forms of communication had failed. “The findings confirmed that anger is not a breakdown of care, but often a response to its absence.”
With that realization, Ameeriar followed a new direction: instead of documenting anger in maternal health care settings, she wanted to make a case for reconsidering anger and for recognizing what it can reveal about where care breaks down, whose pain is ignored and how harm is quietly produced.
“Reframing anger as a form of knowledge, rather than a disruption, felt important because it challenges how institutions decide whose voices count and whose are discounted at critical moments,” she says.
This reframing matters because maternal health inequities – particularly for women of colour – are already well documented in terms of outcomes. What remains less visible are the affective and institutional processes that produce those outcomes: disbelief, racialized assumptions about pain tolerance, pressure to remain calm and fear of being punished for speaking up.
In her interviews, Ameeriar found that many participants described suppressing their anger to avoid being labelled “difficult,” even when doing so meant ignoring their own pain or delaying care. Many described carefully managing their emotions during clinical encounters, aware that showing anger could undermine their credibility or lead to worse care. They rehearsed what to say, scripted their tone and reminded themselves not to sound upset.
Ameeriar notes this kind of emotional self-surveillance can have consequences. It can delay care, intensify stress and deepen harm, especially in moments when urgency matters most. By treating rage as meaningful rather than disruptive, she argues, these hidden processes become visible, revealing how racialized harm is quietly produced through everyday medical encounters.
As she writes in the paper, “If we listen closely, rage does not merely reveal what was wrong. It illuminates what must change. It demands better stories, better structures, better kin.” In this way, Ameeriar sees her research and the stories shared in the paper as an “archive of rage” – forms of knowledge that exist outside medical charts and formal complaint systems, yet document institutional failure.
By advocating for anger to be taken seriously as a form of knowledge, Ameeriar hopes her work contributes to broader conversations about equity in health care with a lens on credibility, emotion and structural racism.