What remains? Rethinking Feminist Theories of Pregnant Embodiment through the Symbolic Language and Lived Experience of Pregnancy Loss

When people reach for symbolic language like metaphor in an effort to express their understanding of a complex experience like baby and pregnancy loss it is usually because everyday language is inadequate. We demonstrate how an analysis of people’s accounts of stillbirth, miscarriage and termination for fetal anomaly collected in England suggests a variety of explanations for “what remains” after pregnancy loss. These include bodily traces, ashes, symbolic objects, and social relationships: a range indicative of the different physical, material, and affective elements that inform how a person understands bodily and temporal separation after pregnancy loss. We engage with the work of feminist philosophers who critique models of pregnant embodiment; those who propose parthood, and theorists who argue for more complex models of intercorporeal relationality. We then discuss insights from linguistics about embodied cognition and metaphorical language. Paying critical attention to symbolic language, combined with feminist thinking about intercorporeality, offers a methodology for analyzing the embodied metaphors that people use when they talk about their experiences of pregnancy loss. These articulations about “what remains” support our claim that the intercorporeal model of embodiment should be extended spatially and temporally beyond the moment of physical separation following pregnancy loss.