Platformed sociality has become an elemental part of existential processes and struggles. Previous research has shown that digital contexts offer lifelines of support and a sense of belonging based on shared vulnerabilities. By combining phenomenological and ethnographic approaches, this article explores involuntary childlessness (IC) online in so-called trying-to-conceive (TTC) contexts on Instagram and in blogs. The analysis is driven by the following questions: What are the particularities of digital lifeline communication in the context of IC? Can lifeline communication shape what is coming into being in the context of wished-for children and/or motherhood? Can (digital) life be challenged, extended, or created in this context? Drawing on interviews and online posts from 260 Instagram accounts and three blogs, I argue that digital lifeline communication in TTC environments facilitates digital existence and “digital life” as the notions of motherhood and longed-for and lost children attain a form of digital materiality through posts and discussions.
In their efforts to find others who share their experiential reality and existential struggle, many involuntarily childless women turn to Instagram to engage and participate in the practice of trying-to-conceive (TTC) communication. Through the conceptual lens of digital existence, where the digital and online are regarded as constitutive of existential transition, we draw on ten interviews and an online ethnography to explore some of the struggles that involuntarily childless women experience with and through technology. We find that TTC communication can be constitutive of coming to terms with the status of involuntary childlessness. In particular, this study illustrates that TTC communication, for involuntarily childless women, is both a site of struggle and a safe space as they transition to nonmotherhood in an existential terrain where they share an intimate journey.
Online contexts offer an important source of information and emotional support for those facing involuntary childlessness. This article reports the results from an ethnographic exploration of TTC (trying-to-conceive) communication on Instagram. Through a new materialist approach that pays attention to the web of intraacting agencies in online communication, this article explores the question of what material-discursive bodies (constructs of embodiment and medical information) emerge in TTC communication as the result of shared images and narratives of bodies, symptoms, fertility treatments, and reproductive technologies. Drawing on a lengthy ethnographic immersion, observations of 394 Instagram accounts, and the close analysis of 100 posts, the study found that TTC communication produces collective, unruly, and becoming bodies. Collective bodies reflect collectively acquired, solidified, and contested medical knowledge and bodies produced in TTC communication. Unruly bodies are bodies that do not conform to standard medical narratives. Becoming bodies are marked by their shifting agency, such as pregnant or fetal bodies.
This article engages with communities that invite monstrous characters to come to life and invade three-dimensional spaces through real-life bodies. Through focus group interviews with participants in live action role-play (LARP) and zombie walks in Stockholm, this text explores the ways in which participants engage in physical encounters with monstrosity and the surrounding narrative worlds. First, I address how monstrous corporeality not only functions as fiction or escape but most concretely taps into contemporary discourses connected to corporeal change. Through Butler’s performativity and becoming and in connection with discourses of makeover culture, I argue that both LARPs and walks function as both performances and performative acts in which demands connected to idealized corporeal transformation may be concretized,reenacted and renegotiated. Second, the monstrous body here functions simultaneously as an embodied narrative device and a medium. Participants compare the emotional and physical experience of LARPing and zombie walking to that of consuming popular cultural texts in horror or thriller films and television. However, an aspect of zombie walks and LARPs is the concrete physical transformation of those who participate. Furthermore, the use of masks, clothing and jewelry all add tactile dimensions to (or enhance these dimensions in) an embodied experience of a story-world of monsters.
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