To Be a (M)other: A Feminist Performative Autoethnography of Abortion

Abstract

This is an abortion story. A feminist story. A body story. An autoethnographic story. This is a story of learning how to story abortion in a culture unforgiving to abortion stories. A story of embodying a body deemed unworthy of embodiment. A story of enfleshment enmeshed amid silence and violence. Influenced by feminist embodied auto-epistemologies, this essay seeks to disrupt the functionality of the U.S. American abortion debate through a performative, somatic reclamation of my experience from the semantic constrictions of highly medicalized, politicized, and individualized hegemonic discourses. Engaging a feminist performative autoethnographic praxis informed by écriture feminine, I center my corporeal body as a site of epistemological value to speak back against the limiting narratives of/about abortion while illustrating the critical creative potentials of performative autoethnographic storytelling. This essay weaves theory, lyric prose, epistolary, and poetry to performatively reconstruct, reframe, and reclaim my abortion experience through an embodied autoethnographic framework, in hopes of illuminating possibilities for others to “[experiment] with how we might tell stories differently rather than simply telling different stories” (p. 16).

Mi casa de los Espíritus (My house of spirits): Challenging patriarchy with magical feminism

“…Embodied academic works have shown that the body is a site of epistemological value (Swafford, 2020) for the body is political (Thanem & Knights, 2019) and develops consciousness of lived experiences (Mandalaki & Pérezts, 2022). I have strongly related to these works and have learned to know myself better because I have read them.…”

“…I have lived in my heart the sadness and grief caused by separation (Helin, 2020; Mandalaki, 2022). I have felt in my entrails what it feels like to have an abortion (Swafford, 2020). I have seen and cleaned the blood from my miscarriages (Boncori & Smith, 2019; Pérezts, 2022) in‐between classes.…”

"I wish my mom was here." An Autoethnographic Account of Obstetric Violence in Mexican Healthcare Services

“…I argue that writing stories about gender violence in abortion experiences contributes to destigmatize such procedures and nurture and broaden the academic discussion of abortion. Furthermore, autoethnographies that shed light on the multiple and diverse experiences of abortion challenge what has been known as the "acceptable abortion" (Kumar, Hesini and Mitchell 2009;Swafford 2020). The acceptable abortion is the one in which the woman is ashamed and apologetic of her story and her decision: "Women who terminate their pregnancies are expected to be contrite or vaguely apologetic when exercising their rights" (Kumar, Hesini and Mitchell 2009, 628).…”