Expanding feminist resilience theorizing: conceptualizing embodied resilience as a material-discursive process during infertility

ABSTRACT

The Communication Theory of Resilience illustrates the material-discursive and adaptive-transformative processes that underline resilience, yet research has frequently underemphasized the physical enactment and embodied movements that assist in sustaining, recovering, and growing after a setback or loss. Drawing on communication theorizing and chronic illness literature, this study conceptualizes embodied resilience through three subprocesses: sustaining, foregrounding unproductive behaviors, and entanglement with biomedical actants. Through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 20 U.S.-based women undergoing infertility treatment, I investigate the ways in which these women remained resilient through embodied losses (i.e. miscarriages, failed treatment) and embodied pain (i.e. bruises). This study advances ontological, material, and neoliberal subjugations of resilience theorizing through the identification of intrapersonal and relational factors that delimit and enhance resilience during infertility. Family, friends, and healthcare professionals looking to enrich the resilience of an infertility patient can benefit from these findings and learn new methods to promote resilience within infertility patients.

KEYWORDS:

• Resilience
• embodiment
• infertility
• pain communication
• narrative

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the Purdue Research Foundation. The author wishes to thank Dr. Stacey Connaughton, Dr. Patrice Buzzanell, and Dr. Sean Eddington for reading versions of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The integration of personal narratives offers an important resource for situating my own experiences alongside those of my participants. Personal experiences imbue creative, heartful vulnerabilities within social scientific inquiry (Ellis et al., 2011) and have a long history in feminist and qualitative inquiries (e.g., Denzin & Lincoln, 2005; Ellingson, 2009). It is through integrating my own experiences alongside those of my participants that I bring to light the innumerable ways in which my identity and experiences shape my interpretations of the data and pronouncement of theory. I draw on tacit experiences and evocative emotions to help readers ‘experience an experience’ (Ellis, 1993, p. 711).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Purdue Research Foundation.