'Doing' Pregnancy Performatively and Discursively in Digital Spaces.

Post-structuralist feminist approaches have highlighted the ways pregnancy has been surveilled from the 20th century onwards. This area of study has conceptualised pregnancy as something which is done rather than something that is: people learn to be pregnant through interactions. Not following dominant discourses of pregnancy could lead to a 'bad' mother label. Although this area of study has mostly focussed on the surveillance of pregnant women in public life and popular media, pregnancy has been increasingly talked about,
photographed, and performed in online spaces. The proposed research is a qualitative study examining how women discuss and perform pregnancy through an online ethnography of several digital spaces: interactive discussion forums and social media. Previous studies of pregnancy online have constructed a dichotomy wherein online spaces either reproduce and uphold surveillance of pregnant bodies, or
provide spaces to reinterpret these norms. Using and extending Hockin-Boyers et al.'s (2020) theoretical approach, the proposed research seeks to problematise this dichotomy, highlighting that it invisibilises pregnant women and their agency in strategically using digital technologies to perform and discuss pregnancy.