Leaking milk, and falling hair: Embodied experiences and technological remaking’s of becoming a mother to a dead child

About the seminar

There is no word for being a mother to a dead child, and no easy ways to work out how to mother after infant death. With Facebook, blogs and Instagram, ways of practicing motherhood after the loss of a child, is however becoming increasingly available on social media. In this presentation, I explore how social media is being used by women that have ended their pregnancy or lost a child, due to a severe congenital heart defect by asking: How does women use social media to become mothers to a dead child, and how does social media take part in remaking motherhood of the dead? Methodologically, the presentation draws on a multi-modal material that includes: 18 interviews with women that have lost a child or ended a pregnancy, autoethnographic material from the loss of my first child, and social media material. Inspired by Haraway and Barad, I read the stories of becoming mothers to a deceased child diffractively. I hereby show how social media remake and reconstitute norms of motherhood. It is at the same time stories, that calls for being circulated as part of a feminist reproductive future, that can teach us about the experience of infant loss, and the need for support of parents that face embodied loss and grief, as they go through and live with abortions or the loss of a child.

About the presenter

Stine Willum Adrian is a professor in Sociology at UiT- The Arctic University of Norway. She holds a PhD in feminist STS and cultural analysis from Tema Genus, Linköping University. Adrian’s work has always been interdisciplinary joining feminist theory, ethnography of medical technologies with cultural analysis, ethics and law. Her research interests lie in questions concerning, reproductive technology, technologies of death and dying at the beginning of life, gender, intersectionality and feminist materialisms. Adrian has previously done several comprehensive ethnographic studies on fertility clinics and sperm banks in Denmark and Sweden looking at IVF, insemination, fertility travelling, cryotechnologies, sperm storage, and she has been the PI of the research project, Technologies of Death and Dying at the Beginning of Life funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark.