With the development and use of technologies such as prenatal diagnosis, cooling cots and social media new ways of remaking death, handling the dead body, grieving, narrating, and practicing parenthood after the loss of a child or the termination of a pregnancy, are emerging.
Combining my own story of losing my three week old son to a severe congenital heart defect in 2007, with 16 interviews with women or men that have lost a child or ended a pregnancy due to congenital heart defects, textual material including the Danish regulation of second trimester abortion, media stories from 1980-2022 and social media material between 2000-2022, I explore how technologies of death and dying are being used and lived with by asking: How does men and women who has lost a child or terminated a pregnancy experience, and live with being engaged in remaking death, at the beginning of life?
Inspired by Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, I read the stories of the men and women to a deceased child or a terminated pregnancy diffractively. I hereby show how technologies remake and reconstitute norms and practices of interpreting the regulation of handling the dead body and living with the dead. 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 women and men that face embodied loss and grief, as they go through and live with having terminated a pregnancy or having lost a child.
The event is part of the Gender Awareness Week organized annually by the Center for Women's and Gender Research at UiT The Arctic University of Norway.
When: 09.03.23 at 12.00–13.00
Where: Brelia N-119
Location / Campus: Tromsø
Target group: Employees, Students
Contact: Ann Therese Lotherington
E-mail: ann.t.lotherington@uit.no