Through the Lens of Grief: Re-reading performance through pregnancy loss

Abstract

The grief of miscarriage is a disenfranchised form of sorrow (Watson, Jewell and Smith, 2018). Not only is it difficult to grieve an embryo or foetus whose status is culturally contested, the stigma surrounding miscarriage produces a ‘cultural silence' that works to isolate those suffering this form of loss (Layne, 2003; Peel and Cain, 2012). Unlike collective practices of mourning, miscarriage is understood in western culture as a ‘solitary moment of loss' (Watson, Jewell, Smith, 2018: 1). As an ‘untold sorrow', there is a lack of communal rituals and narrative practices, to serve as healing acts of grief work (Westlund, 2019). I draw on Butler to consider how miscarriage is rendered ungrievable by society , through the production of normative ‘exclusionary conceptions’ to argue for the invisibility of experiences of miscarriage as a form of oppression. (Butler, 2004 xiv-xv).

The article explicates the grief of early miscarriage through a re-reading of my performance artwork Fluid Flesh (2020). Originally an exploration of the embodied experience of becoming a mother, the work has come to represent the grief of subsequent miscarriages. The fluid, pink, vital, pulsing flesh of the growing bodies of mother and child, now the dripping threads of pregnancy loss. I situate my lived experience in an Irish, postcolonial, post-Catholic context. I examine how pronatalism and concepts of femininity in an Irish context, work render experiences of miscarriage ungrievebale. Re-reading these performance works through the lens of grief, I aim to make visible an occluded lived experience, as well as to find ways to speak, in tangible and material terms, a grief that is silenced and rendered conceptually ambiguous. I aim to open out wider understandings of sadness by writing this specific, gendered and culturally specific experience into the lexicon of grief.

Notes

1 For further discussion on the original intentions of this work see ‘Life on pause: Entanglements of the maternal and the mortal in a global pandemic’, in Performance in a Global Pandemic (2021), edited by Laura Bissell and Lucy Wier.

2 Fischer (2016) discusses this specifically in relation to pregnancy outside of marriage and access to abortion, which I apply in the case of miscarriage as another form of failure or transgression.