(In) Fertile Embodiment: revealing the invisibility of infertility between the medical and maternal through feminist art practice

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Scholarship on female infertility in its Medical and Socio-Anthropological home, and portrayal within Art, is frequently bound to reproductive technologies (Franklin, 2006), with pieces focusing on embryonic imagery (Chadwick, 1996; Glover, 2020) and depictions of IVF journeys (Furse, 2003; Brotherus, 2013; Moses, 2014). My interdisciplinary project, through feminist cultural theory and fine art practice, will move away from reproductive development and medicalised encounters to examine invisible "patient"-led practices of women with infertility today, growing within digital and online spaces. This will add to recent significant resurgences in maternal art (Freelands Foundation, 2019), giving visibility to the breadth of the infertile experience through a feminist lens, to destigmatise infertility and reframe it as part of the maternal trajectory. Drawing on Sandelowski & de Lacey's (2002) work on the discursive creation of infertility as a 'disease' caused by the invention of IVF, my research will critically analyse how online environments create nonnormative (in)fertile narratives within feminist frameworks of alternative embodied subjectivities (Braidotti, 2012). This will question slippages between medical and maternal terminologies to considernew "sub-maternal" spaces within (deferred) desires of 'becoming' maternal (Shildrick, 2010) and explore potential for queering normative reproductive time (Baraister, 2014) through these self-care labours.- How is infertility visualised and verbalised within contemporary online spaces, articulating new embodied infertile subjectivities?- How can art practice re-present narratives of creative care around the dis-eased female body through reimagining (in)fertile experience?I will employ Feminist New Materialist methods to place value on phenomenological live(d) experience (Bolt, 2013; Coleman, 2015), enabling new understandings of women's affective engagement with online social settings in reproductive medicine by investigating hidden emotional responses through qualitative interviews, mobilised through artistic practice. This includes interactions with personal visualised biomedical culture through fertility apps; confessional coded languages in social #TTC (trying to conceive) communities; and hope rhetoric (visual/verbal) on commercialised infertility support websites. My practice will address (im)materiality of these remote experiences, foregrounding the sensory through making with performative photography, machinic para-printmaking, participatory text and bio-art pieces. Visits to research centres/archives will also help map my investigation within the parameters of Art & Maternal Health. This project will make an original contribution to emerging politics of Care (RCA), increased in Covid, questioning how we care for female bodies using relational and communal discourses. Broadening medicalised bodies in art practice is a growing field of Critical Medical Humanities (Viney, 2015) as manifested in Confabulations (Durham University 2021-23), as is infertility within maternal scholarship (MaMSIE, Missing Mother Conference). My research aims to insert new narratives into the recent wave of maternal visual arts, giving infertility accessible visibility to challenge stigmatisation.Year 1- Literature review - maternal/infertile embodiment, feminist care, reproductive time.- Ethical application, call-out, qualitative interviews. Textual analysis.- Experimentation - temporal, embodied artistic practices.Year 2- Follow up / analysis empirical research findings.- Fertilising infertile cultures into caring, embodied practice of productive encounters through female body.Year 3/3.5- Theory/practice thesis - new figurations of the infertile.- Exhibition - potential online space - growing domestic (in)fertile archive.