Medical interactions around reproduction are increasingly extending beyond the physician's office and onto the Internet, where negotiation with medical authority occurs in complex and dynamic ways. Recently, scholars have noted the Internet's potential for creating spaces where women can dialogue with and reconstruct medical authority, yet this growing body of work is overwhelming heteronormative. This paper thus interrogates how lesbian women use the Internet to challenge, deploy, and rework medical authority around reproduction while navigating the transition to parenthood. I draw from 17 online journals authored by lesbian couples during the conception, pregnancy, and birth of their first child, each spanning between 18 months and 2 years, in order to understand how the transition process unfolds over time. I argue that lesbian couples engage with medical authority when seeking affirmation and normalisation yet discard and publicly reject the heteronormative assumptions that accompany reproductive medicine. Further, they chart a new process that I term 'constructing queer mother-knowledge', in which they critique and balance knowledges from institutionalised medicine, their own bodies, and their queer communities. With this new concept, I complicate understandings of lesbian mothers-to-be and their interactions with medical authority as they build subversive families.
In this article, I discuss a queer method for uniting visual sociology, digital sociology, and constructivist grounded theory to conduct innovative research into how lesbian couples experience the transition to first-time parenthood, based on my longitudinal doctoral research in sociology. I first attend to the complex and unexpected unfolding of the research design, which evolved with the needs of the population to move from adapted photovoice interviews to the use of textual-visual online pregnancy journal data in a process emblematic of queer methodology. I then consider the contributions that visual data can make to the study of reproduction, especially where marginalized populations are concerned, by using my data to demonstrate how visuals create what is possible, rework oppressive versions of time, and challenge controlling images imposed on reproducing bodies. I argue here not just for the significance of images but for the significance of taking seriously the products and processes that communities find meaningful, and for evolving our research methods and methodologies to centralize marginalized ways of existing, knowing, and archiving experiences of reproduction and family life.
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