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.

The grief of miscarriage is a disenfranchised form of sorrow (Watson et al. 2018). This article re-reads my performance project Fluid Flesh (2019–21), which, originally an exploration of the experience of becoming a mother, has come to represent the grief of subsequent miscarriages. Re-reading Fluid Flesh through the lens of grief, I aim to make visible an occluded lived experience: to find ways to speak, in tangible and material terms, a grief that is silenced and rendered conceptually ambiguous. My lived experience is situated in an Irish, postcolonial, post-Catholic context, and by my positionality as a white, Irish, cis-gendered, middle-class woman. Irish identities can be understood as culturally hybrid: formed under influences such as British colonization, the Roman Catholic Church, legacies of indigenous and pagan traditions and the European capitalist values of a now secular society. The tensions of these often-incongruous cultural ideologies play out in the bodies and lived experiences of women, who are discursively produced through their competing values.

All images Katherine Nolan (2021). Images from Fluid Flesh, performance to camera. Image credit: Aoife Giles

Challenging understandings of sadness as a universally experienced emotion, I aim to write miscarriage as a culturally specific, gendered experience into the lexicon of grief: that is, the experiences of loss that a given society recognizes as valid. Butler asserts that ‘the differential allocation of grievability that decides what kind of subject is and must be grieved’ produces normative ‘exclusionary conceptions’ (2004: xiv–xv). I argue that this applies to what kinds of experiences are sanctioned as grievable. Miscarriage is a palpable embodied, visceral and painful experience of loss, and yet frequently remains unspeakable and unmournable.

Fluid Flesh began as a live performance in June 2019, the first after my son was born. Conceived as a response to the experience of becoming a mother, while losing my mother to cancer, the performance represented maternal experiences from an Irish perspective in the cross-cultural context of the Contemporary Irish Art Center Los Angeles.¹ I lie on the floor of the large warehouse space in a burgundy red dress. A glut of fleshy puce slime spills over my abdomen. Over the course of two hours, I grapple with this semi-solid material. A moving ball of flesh, representing an ambiguous bodily growth that might hold potential or aberration. The material eludes my grasp, oozing fleshy forms across my arms and body, and leaving messy entrails behind me on the floor. Sticky and thick it clings to my body, until eventually the entire mass weighs heavily from my dress. Now, made of liquid flesh, I exit.

This performance developed iteratively: as the live social media performance Domestic Flesh (2020) and as still and moving image works for the exhibition ‘Fluid Flesh’ at MART, Dublin (2021). The project explores the heightened precarity of the body in maternal experiences. Women, trans-men and non-binary people who become pregnant live with life on the edge of coming into being and the vulnerability of the body (their own and their baby’s) in the medically complex process of pregnancy. Fears about pregnancy loss, the delivery of the baby and a ‘primeval fear of dying’ are considered in psychosocial terms as simply part of the state of being pregnant (Bjelica et al. 2018: 103). This is an aspect of parental experience repressed by the heavy pronatalism of Irish society. Such anxious concerns, lurking in the fluid pink flesh, became a reality for me when in 2020 I suffered the first of three consecutive early miscarriages. My second miscarriage was particularly traumatic. I bled heavily for days until I found myself doubled over in the Victorian hallway of the National Maternity Hospital, Dublin, clasping myself as if to prevent the stream of blood running out of my body. These embodied memories of holding my own flesh, in a futile effort to contain the bodily processes already in play, are so strongly evoked by these works that I can only understand them now through these experiences. While deathliness was always available to read in the artwork, they have over time absorbed and assimilated ‘the conditions of history’, both societal and personal (Bedford 2012: 86). During the COVID-19 pandemic, I discussed how the project came to represent the spectre of death, which intensely haunted society in that moment (Nolan 2021). In this discussion, I read these works through my own personal history, rewritten through lived experiences of miscarriage in an Irish context, and the iterative, ever returning nature of trauma and grief.

In this article, I understand grief as an overarching experience commonly applied in the discourses of psychology around miscarriage care; in turn, sorrow and sadness often form constituent parts of that grief experience. In Untold Sorrow, Andrea Westlund asserts, ‘Sadness is widely recognized as one of the relatively few basic, cross-culturally recognizable, emotions’ (2019: 25). Fivush and Buckner assert, however, that even still, it is modulated in relation to gender and culture (2000: 232). This points to the need to consider sadness, and further I argue grief, as differentiated rather than monolithic concepts. The socio-cultural sanctioning of sadness and grief is subject to gender difference. In the case of miscarriage, grief is tied to the abject qualities often associated with women’s bodies in modern capitalism. Kristeva’s (1982) ‘maternal abject’ and Creed’s (1986) ‘monstrous-feminine’ attest to the threat that the reproductive capabilities of women’s bodies pose to patriarchal power. In an Irish context, women’s bodies continue to be discursively produced through the legacies of postcolonial nation building, in which patriarchal power was enacted through the control of women’s bodies exercised through the catholicized state (Fischer 2016: 822). The normative role of virtuous mother ascribed to Irish women, under this heterosexualist, pronatalist logic required women to hide any failure to live up to this ideal.² Thus while miscarriage is a form of grief, it is hidden by the discursive disciplining of women’s bodies that operates to contain their reproductive power. Socio-cultural pronatalism in various geopolitical contexts construct miscarriage as a ‘failure’ to reproduce and infer that the woman and her body are culpable (Browne 2018: 65; Peel and Cain 2012: 79; van den Akker 2011; Simelela n.d.; Bardos et al. 2015). Such attitudes produce a ‘cultural silence’ that works to isolate those who suffer miscarriage and construct it as a ‘solitary moment of loss’ (Layne 2003: 68; Watson et al. 2018: 1). Thus, women’s experiences of miscarriage are unspeakable, and their loss is rendered ungrievable. While Irish pronatalism, and the moral purity it demands of women’s bodies, is often discussed in relation to feminist critiques of abortion laws and historical institutional abuses, I here relate it to the lacuna of miscarriage. Though Ireland is now a largely secular society, increasingly aligned with European ideals, the legacies of Irish postcolonial nation building still circulate in socio-cultural conceptualizations of gender.

I argue that the grief of miscarriage is a form of ‘untold sorrow’, that is, it is ‘un-narrated’ or even ‘un-narratable’ (Westlund 2019: 21, emphasis in original). This is not only when the intensity of the trauma makes it inconceivable, but also when its stigmatization works to prohibit public recognition through cultural practices or social interactions. This occurs, van der Akker notes, as there is commonly a ‘lack of social support for women who have miscarried in a vacuum, without rites, rituals or acknowledgements’ (2011: 298). Yet public recognition of grief, and communal mourning rituals are vital, healing acts. In the death ceremony of the Irish ancient pagan tradition, the keener, a woman tasked with wailing in the presence of the deceased, was a way to publicly manifest the sorrow of the bereaved (McCoy 2009). Thus, in this tradition women were expected to embody grief on behalf of others. Yet in the case of miscarriage they must repress their own grief, as a shameful, abject, failure to reproduce. Keening was a central part of the Irish wake, with the deceased laid out in the social context of the family home, while both lament and revelry took place (Lysaght 1997). The wake is a practice whose informality is incongruous with, and yet is often still practiced alongside pious Roman Catholic funeral practised in which the viewing of the body is highly regulated (ibid.). Both traditions, however, emphasize the centrality of the body to mourning rituals, the body’s visibility vital to the public honouring of the lost love object (Lobar et al. 2006).

Unlike the body of a loved one as the visible, tangible focus of mourning, it is not so straightforward to commemorate what has been lost, particularly in early miscarriage. The bodily products of my pregnancies were unceremoniously disposed of in medical waste bins or flushed down toilets. Burial was offered on my third miscarriage via a tick-box on a hospital consent form, but I could not relate what had happened to practices around death or commemoration. I struggled to understand what it was that I had lost. A growing embryo or foetus is conceptually ambiguous: Layne describes their status in most cultures as liminal, not yet entirely human (2003: 61–3). Cultural contestation over the status of the foetus in early pregnancy is fervently politicized in, for instance, debates concerning abortion. In Ireland the right to life of the unborn was equal to that of the mother, under a constitutional amendment made in 1983, subsequently repealed in 2018 (Taylor 2015: 93). The resultant lack of access to abortion led to cases such as that of Savita Halappanavar, who died in 2012 as a result of being refused a termination on the grounds that the foetus had a heartbeat despite the fact that she was miscarrying (Taylor 2015: 94). I argue that the conceptualization of the foetus as a ‘child’ in such discourses is at odds with the denial of women’s experiences of pregnancy loss (Cullen and Korolczuk 2019). How can Irish women be so publicly understood to lose a child through abortion, but not through miscarriage? While I had access to treatment with (the previously illegal) Misoprostol in order to expedite one of my miscarriages, there is no law that can be repealed to undo the societal discomfort with women who miscarry and thus fail to embody the feminine ideals of Irish motherhood. The practice of the ‘twelve-week rule’, when the threat of early pregnancy loss has passed, still holds fast in Irish society. How does one mourn when there is no discernible being, subjectivity or body as the focus of the grief, and yet there is a very great loss? Many seek to commemorate miscarriage as they would the death of a loved one, for example in practices of sharing ‘angel baby’ photos on social media groups such as the Pregnancy Loss, Stillbirth & Miscarriage Support Group. However, I struggled to conceptualize the loss as that of a baby. In an information age, I turned to medical discourse and came to understand what I had lost as a group of cells with chromosomal abnormalities that was incompatible with life. Commemoration in the form of existing death rituals did not seem to represent what I grieved. Instead, I mourned the traumatic moments: the embodied experience of the physical process and the moment I was told ‘there is no heartbeat’. I still feel a deep sorrow at the loss of a dependable feeling of safety and an image of myself as a healthy, fertile woman. I continue to mourn the dislocated, intangible nature of my own grief and the isolation of these experiences, in the context of an Irish society that doesn’t want to acknowledge such ‘failures’ of women’s bodies. Exhibited as a series of photographic works in MART, Dublin these works sought to represent maternal experiences rendered invisible by dominant socio-cultural attitudes and practices. The abject, unstable, maternal body these performances produce transgresses the certainty of pronatalism and ‘purity’ demanded by Irish femininities (Fischer 2016: 822).

The artworks of Fluid Flesh have come to represent the embodied, complex nature of this grief. Unlike losing a loved one when their body fails, with no recognizable lost object, grief has imprinted itself on my body and sense of self. The sliding, dripping threads of flesh in these performances materialize the traumatic experience of what was at that moment part of my own body slipping away from me, uncontrollably. The fearfulness of these experiences resides in my body as images and sensations. The photographic works of Fluid Flesh have become a series of embodied metaphors: folding flesh as if ‘clots the size of oranges’ like those that fell from my body as I lay alone on a hospital trolley; the pools of liquid gathering under my armpits, like the feeling of my own flesh liquifying; and the pink material clasped around my neck, like the strangle hold these fearful embodied memories have on me. Performing this work also offers a way of grappling with otherwise intangible affects: a kind of material processing. My body and identity have reformed around these experiences, like the oozing slime around my figure, casting me in new and unfamiliar forms. I carry a heavy new cloth of skin, reshaped forever on the inside, though struggling to find a comprehensible externalized form. In July 2023, four years after the first live performance, images from the Fluid Flesh series were exhibited in the Contemporary Irish Arts Center Los Angeles (CIACLA). Presenting experiences from an Irish perspective in this context cross-culturally contrasted the effects of different geo-political conservativisms on women. The return of the work to this context marks heavily the painful transition to this new self, and the new readings of the work that this has provoked.

Framed through these experiences, Fluid Flesh produces visual metaphors and material encounters through which to process and make sense of what I have experienced. The works make tangible, in equally visceral terms, the dispersed grief that cannot be located and is not recognized: a way to undertake the healing grief work for which there is an absence of societal scripts and cultural tropes. Reading these works through the lens of grief materializes a form of occluded lived experience: it is a political act of making visible. While sorrow at the loss of a loved one is taken for granted as an experience all humans share, this account of miscarriage demonstrates how gendered forms of grief are occluded in such universalized conceptualizations. Whose grief, sadness and sorrow can be heard, and the non-normative forms that such emotions might take, needs to be expanded. Read through the lens of miscarriage, Fluid Flesh materializes an un-narratable loss, producing emblematic imagery that can account for a highly gendered, culturally specific, experience 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.