‘The only thing missing now is her being on the outside’: bodily borders/boundaries within father-foetal bonding interactions for UK expectant fathers

Abstract

Pregnancy and becoming a parent are heavily gendered experiences, experiences which feminist geographers have convincingly situated as significantly spatial. This paper makes an important contribution by addressing the general absence of expectant fathers’ voices/experiences within geographical work on pregnancy/parenting. Drawing upon periodic in-depth interviews conducted during pregnancy and after the birth, it interrogates the manifold ways geographical notions of bodily borders, boundaries, and interior spaces mediate expectant fathers’ encounters with their unborn baby. It firstly examines how, whilst expectant motherhood is characterised by notions of interiority and (inter)connection with the growing foetus, expectant fathers’ experiences are heavily demarcated by the relentless dichotomy of ‘inside’/‘outside’. Fathers drew on this heavily spatial (though literal) metaphor when describing their interactions with the foetus ‘inside’ the womb and their excitement/anticipation of when (following the birth) their child will finally be on the ‘outside’. Secondly, the paper explores the array of multi-sensory inter-embodied interactions fathers had with their unborn child—literally through the body of another person—exploring how these constitute anticipatory acts of love/intimacy. Thus, it forges an agenda for greater consideration of the everyday ‘pre-parenting’ geographies of expectant fathering, calling for feminist geographers to more critically consider fathers’ care-ful emotional, embodied experiences during pregnancy/expectancy.

Keywords:

• Expectancy
• Inter-Embodiment
• Intimacy
• Pregnancy
• Sensory geographies
• Wombs

Introduction

Pregnancy and becoming a parent have long been phenomena of interest to feminist geographers, whose work has convincingly situated pregnancy as a fundamentally spatial experience (Longhurst 2008); one which is highly gendered, negotiated within a range of spaces/places. It is also an intensely scalar experience, navigated within social spaces, but also manifest across particular spatial scales. The bodily processes of fertilising an egg and gestating a foetus for several months, for example, takes place within the space of the womb, which, as a reproductive organ, is housed within the space of (some) bodies (Longhurst 2018). As such, and importantly for this paper, pregnancy is fundamentally ‘inter-embodied’ (Lupton 2013); mutually constituted and relationally produced via interconnectedness between bodies, an interconnectedness perhaps most evident between mother and unborn child (Holt 2017).

However, despite the wealth of work on mothers’ inter-embodied experiences of pregnancy and early infant care within geography (Holt 2017; Longhurst 2008), there has been limited examination of the experiences of (non-pregnant) partners. In particular, the experiences of expectant fathers have been largely unexamined. This absence is surprising given the rise of ‘pre-parenting’ cultures in many Western contexts, wherein parents (particularly mothers, but increasingly fathers) are expected to demonstrate their emotional commitment to parenting before the actual arrival of a child (Hamper 2022). Indeed, contemporary discourse over intimate/involved fatherhood has been increasingly extended backwards in time, becoming enrolled into (interventionist) policy imperatives which argue that ‘involving men as early as possible lays the foundation for better, more involved fatherhood’ (Draper and Ives 2013, 723, cited in Menzel 2021, 87).

Through this paper I call for greater consideration of expectant fathers’ experiences within geography, in particular through attendance of their emotional geographies (see Davidson and Milligan 2004). I attend here specifically to the emotional, embodied experiences of expectant fathers, developing nuanced insight into the spatial practices and interactions through which fathers encounter future children in highly emotional, tender and ultimately care-ful ways. More, I interrogate how encounters, specifically with an unborn child are fundamentally constituted by bodily borders/boundaries and interior bodily spaces (specifically those within the body of another).

Drawing upon periodic in-depth interviews conducted with nine expectant fathers (most living in England), this paper explores the multi-sensory encounters through which expectant fathers anticipate and attempt to build a bond of love/intimacy with their unborn child (Meah 2017; Morrison et al. 2012). These encounters were both sites of separation, and connection as this paper will explore.

By positioning such experiences as inter-embodied (after Lupton 2013)—though in ways perhaps distinct from those of mothers—I demonstrate how attention to the spatialities of expectant fathering may be significant for facilitating new, critical insight for unpicking assumptions of differing and gendered expectations of care responsibilities performed by mothers/fathers, which feminist geographers, especially, could usefully contribute towards.

Feminist geographies is, however, a vast and wide-ranging field (as the scholarship of this journal attests), which, though arguably unified by a commitment to forging more socially-just and gender-equitable futures (McDowell 1997), has sought to do so from a multitude of perspectives and research foci. My approach to feminist geographies, in this paper, is one based on a framework of maternal feminism—centring the significance and value of care as a basis for radical change (Ruddick, 1995, cited in Twamley 2019). I situate this paper within the recent surge of geographical work seeking to redress traditional and pervasive gender relations—fundamentally embedded in space/place—by ‘regendering’ care, specifically work attending to the performance/engagement of care-work by men (Gorman-Murray 2017) such as through emotional and spatial navigations of intimate involved fathering (Meah 2017; Meah and Jackson 2016).

I spotlight how emotional geographies of expectant fathering are critically mobilised via the bodily borders/boundaries which mediate their interactions with their baby ‘inside’ the womb. Extending Longhurst’s brief (2018) commentary on thinking geographically with the womb, I examine, empirically, expectant fathers’ relational and lived inter-embodied encounters with the womb as a space within the body of another; an interior bodily space towards which expectant fathers’ lives become temporarily gravitated towards. Thus, this paper makes a novel contribution to feminist geographical research on pregnancy/parenthood (Boyer 2019; Longhurst 2008), as well as extending the—still fairly limited—research on fathering within geography (Meah 2017; Meah and Jackson 2016; Aitken 2009, 2000; Barker 2008), examining experiences of fatherly caregiving before the arrival of a child. It builds especially on Meah’s (2017) analysis of father-child intimacy, which highlights the ability for sensory experience to transport us—metaphorically, though in explicitly embodied ways—to different spacetimes, bridging distances between absent loved ones. These distances may be vast, or, as I will show, incredibly small, merely a layer of skin, bridging distances between expectant father and unborn child, inside the womb, via anticipatory acts of love/intimacy.

In the next section of this paper, I examine extant literature on pregnancy/maternal geographies which have begun to explore the spatialities through which anticipatory/imagined encounters with unborn children may be forged (Hamper and Nash 2021)—identifying and critiquing the general absence of paternal voices/experiences within such work. I then discuss literature on sensory, embodied geographies with a particular focus on their capacities to produce intimate encounters of (emotional) connection—connections largely demarcated by bodily surfaces/thresholds (Abrahamsson and Simpson 2011). This latter point is elucidated especially through engagement with feminist re-imaginings of geographical notions of borders/boundaries, and interior bodily spaces (Colls and Fannin 2013). Following an overview of my methodology, I then present rich, empirical material from my interviews, examining the significance of bodily borders/boundaries in mediating participants’ emotional, inter-embodied encounters with their future, unborn child.

Importantly, however, while I focus, in this paper, on experiences of expectant fathers primarily in relation to pregnancy (as this was the experience of all but one of my participants), it is important to acknowledge that this is but one pathway into parenthood. Indeed, literature within parenting geographies have attended to a number of other avenues—from IVF (Perrotta and Hamper 2021), surrogacy (Schurr and Militz 2018) and adoption (Leinaweaver et al. 2017). While a full review of these works is beyond the scope of this paper, I conclude by outlining some possible future applications of my conceptual framework for considering inter-embodied, multi-sensory experiences of expectant fathering in its more diverse forms, examining these through the lens of emotional geographies, specifically those of love/intimacy.

Spatialities of anticipatory encounters of love/intimacy with unborn children

Developing an agenda for examining ‘infant geographies’, Holt (2017) draws significantly on Lupton’s notion of inter-embodiment—a quintessentially-phenomenological concept denoting how individual, embodied experiences are always wrapped-up with the bodies/experiences of others, particularly within caregiving-practices and intimate relations (Lupton 2013). Although predominantly used by feminist scholars to critique the assumed blurring of self/(m)other (Lupton 2013) within pregnancy/early-infant care, for Holt (2017), this concept provides opportunities for considering infant/babies as individual and agential beings, connected to—but also distinct from—their caregivers. This call is echoed in many ways in Holt and Philo’s more recent (2022) paper on ‘tiny human geographies’. Through this section (and this paper more broadly) I extend these discussions, considering parental experiences of caring for and loving babies before they are born—what may even be termed ‘foetal geographies’ to recognise the intensely-felt presence (and subsequent agency) of unborn children, particularly within the lives of their future parents.

Within their paper, Holt and Philo (2022) muse briefly on the rather speculative nature of ‘life’ in the womb, and questions of when a ‘foetus’ becomes a ‘baby’. These questions are incredibly complex and difficult to even begin to untangle.¹ Reference to ‘foetal’ in this paper is intended to reflect the temporalities of interacting with a child not-yet-born, individual and subjective anticipatory encounters which blur distinctions between what is and isn’t ‘life’. This is enabled via acts of intimacy, which have a rather complex geographical nature, evoking an ontological sense of proximity and closeness. Reflecting how the geographies of intimacy can thus be ‘stretched’ across vast spatial scales, but also over time (Meah 2017), I therefore use the terms ‘foetus’, ‘unborn child’ and ‘baby’ interchangeably in this paper, to capture how these sense of emotional connection (and perception of life) is mediated through these spatial practices.

Maternal (and absent paternal) geographies

Maternal geographies is an established (and largely feminist) body of work, which operates broadly within the wider subdiscipline of parenting geographies, the latter being interested in how parents ‘create, experience and negotiate space and place as parents’ (Luzia 2013, 245, see also Jupp and Gallagher 2013). Emerging from the seminal work of Longhurst (2008) on women’s embodied experiences of pregnancy in and across different spaces, the geographies of maternities has since evolved to encompass examinations of the spatialities of mothers’ inter-embodied caregiving during pregnancy and into early parenthood (Holt 2017).

For example, geographers have argued how experiences of space/place are fundamentally shaped by infant caregiving, interrogating the various ways mothers’ movement through space is significantly changed when accompanied by babies/infants (Luzia 2013). Working particularly with emotional geographies (Davidson and Milligan 2004) Geographers have thus situated parenting as an intensely emotional spatial practice (Kerr et al. 2018), examining experiences of navigating the inter-embodied practice of breastfeeding in different spaces—including workplaces and public spaces (see for example Boyer 2019)—as well as how apartment homescapes can become spaces of parental anxiety, particularly at night, when caring for a (crying) baby (Kerr et al. 2018).

However, in addition to these works, geographers have also, more recently, begun to turn attention to the multitude of spatial practices and work which goes into preparing for the arrival of baby, such as during pregnancy (as well as in other forms—see Leinaweaver et al. (2017) on home-preparation in adoption). This interest reflects the rise of intensive pre-parenting cultures which value enactments of future parenting and thus commitment to childrearing before the arrival of a child (Hamper 2022). I argue that this preparatory work embodies anticipatory/imagined modes of encounter which facilitate a sense of connection and bond of love/intimacy with an unborn child. For example, within their ethnographic account of parent-infant co-sleeping arrangements, Tomori and Boyer (2019) explore how the material composition of home space evolves during pregnancy in anticipation of the arrival of a child, such as through the decorating of a nursery and preparing space for a baby to sleep. Arguably, their analysis reflects rather traditional gendered divisions of such labour, with expectant fathers performing more DIY/manual labour, such as building a crib, and mothers the more ‘hidden’ organisation and planning work. Nevertheless, it usefully reveals how such preparatory work enables expectant couples to begin imagining a sense of personhood for their future child, and a mutually-constituted sense of self as already parents, situating nursery-making as a (pre-parenting) ‘expression of love and care’ (1179). This reveals how such spatial practices enable expectant parents to begin developing a sense of connection and intimacy with their unborn child, imagining them as already present within their home.

Moreover, Hamper and Nash (2021) explore women’s engagement with pregnancy tracking apps, digital spaces which provide weekly updates about foetal development largely via visual materials, such as comparisons between various fruits and the size of the growing baby. Through encounters with these digital foetuses, pregnant mothers are provided with intimate knowledge of their unborn child, inside the womb. This enables expectant mothers to begin imagining and visualising their future baby and begin developing a sense of intimacy and emotional connection to their unborn child.

Despite this well-established literature on pregnancy and maternities, and emergent work on mothers’ pre-parenting geographies, the experiences of expectant fathers remain largely unexamined—an absence also present in geographic literature in other modes of becoming a parent (see for example Leinaweaver et al. [2017] on adoption).² Tomori and Boyer (2019) do allude to the care-work of expectant fathers undertaken during pregnancy—albeit along rather gender-normative lines—however, the actual voices/experiences of expectant fathers remain rather absent in their analysis. Moreover, Hamper and Nash’s (2021) research draws solely on the perspectives of mothers. Again, they do note the potential for spaces of pregnancy apps to enable mothers to ‘encourage their partners to “connect” with the pregnancy and bond with the [digital] foetus as a future baby’ (591) but it is less clear what these spaces might actually mean to expectant fathers themselves.

Even within burgeoning work on the geographies of fathering—which has critically explored the navigation of space/place within contexts of fathers’ primary (Aitken 2000, 2009), shared (Barker 2008) and sole caregiving (Meah 2017; Meah and Jackson 2016)—the focus has remained predicated on relationships/caregiving for existing children, resulting in a lack of understanding of the spatialities which comprise pre-parenting enactments of fathering, in particular their emotional and embodied dynamics. Indeed, some of the fathers in my research did, briefly, describe using pregnancy apps in order to feel engaged with pregnancy, but—as my analysis will show—it was when discussing their physical, multi-sensory and inter-embodied encounters with their baby that participants became much more animated, gesturing with their hands to mime touches and sounds to indicate their interactions with their partner and unborn child, suggesting these experiences may be more significant and worthy of examination.

Indeed, new/expectant fatherhood is often conceptualised as a comparatively disembodied experience in relation to motherhood, through a suggestion that men ‘lack the biological markers of the transition to parenthood’ (Draper 2003, 744). Such disparate embodied experiences permeate conceptions of pregnancy as having ‘his-and-her starting points’ (Kushner et al. 2017, 210), with consequent implications for societal expectations of gendered parenting roles (Lewis 2018), with motherhood, and maternal feelings, often being deemed as being more ‘natural’ and instinctual than paternal connections and father’s performances of care. This is revealed especially by Aitken (2000) in describing his shame and feelings of inadequacy whilst holding his ‘hard, breastless chest’ after being unable to comfort his crying infant son (581), effectively illustrating the often-secondary positioning of fatherhood, and its implicit entanglements with (dis)embodied experiences of pregnancy and early parenthood.

Within the broader literature on expectant fatherhood, research has interrogated the significance of a range of experiences which facilitate bonding between father and unborn child, through what Draper (2003, 2002) terms ‘body-mediated moments’, such as ultrasound scans and feeling foetal movement (cf. Hamper and Nash 2021). These practices are frequently enrolled into discourses of pre-parenting enactments, offering significant moments for fathers to actively engage with the embodied experience of pregnancy—via the pregnant mother—developing their own sense of involvement and attachment to the pregnancy, and the growing foetus as their future child. I suggest Geographers could usefully interrogate these further—particularly through examination of inter-entanglements of (fathers’) embodied experience and emotional connections, a conceptual framework for which I develop through the next section.

Borders/boundaries as intimate spaces of encounter: sensory embodied geographies and (interior) bodily spaces

Bodies have long been conceptualised as critically spatial entities by feminist geographers drawing critical attention to the body as the central site of emotional experiences, situating bodies as key spaces for understanding relations between people and place (Davidson and Milligan 2004). As I will show in this section, this includes relations of love/intimacy (Meah 2017; Morrison et al. 2012; Morrison 2012), elicited through multi-sensory encounters and spatial practices of care/caregiving. These works offer modes for understanding inter-embodied encounters which constitute experiences of expectant fathering, and the role of bodily borders/boundaries in mediating father-foetal relations.

Within broader literature on bodies and bodily experience within geography, sensory geographical research explores the capacity for multisensory, embodied experiences to disrupt perceived separations between self/other, between body/environment, through the affective, interpersonal qualities of sight, sound, smell, touch etc (Morrison 2012). This is illustrated through the fascinating analysis of the circuits of intimacy in Meah’s (2017) research on fathering through foodwork (the procurement and preparation of meals). Her work reveals how the taste and smell of particular foods can facilitate a maintained sense of intimacy with an absent loved one, creating a sense of proximity and emotional closeness with someone who has passed away. Through my analysis, I argue how a sense of intimacy (indeed, love) may also be constructed and imagined with someone who has not yet been born. This point makes a small contribution to the broader literature on geographies of intimacy (Valentine 2008), revealing how spatial enactments of family (specifically parenting) may be embedded within multiple timeframes. While this has been noted to include the past (through spatial practices around memory, as for Meah 2017), I show here how this may also be mediated by the future, via hope and anticipatory encounters, bringing the future practices of parental love/care into the present. Indeed, as well as having temporal dimensions, these encounters also have important spatial implications (as literature on geographies of intimacy attest—see Meah 2017; Valentine 2008), with fathers interacting with an unborn child, inside the womb, and thus within the body of another. This draws attention to the significant inter-scalar role bodily borders/boundaries play in shaping the experiences of expectant fathering.

Draper’s (2003, 2002) analyses of various ‘milestone moments’ are significant here. Via the inter-embodied experience of seeing their baby for the first time during a scan, expectant fathers (and mothers or other partners) begin imagining their future child, embodying an important transitional moment where the pregnancy, and baby begin to ‘feel real’ (Draper 2003, 2002; Menzel 2021). Moreover, the experience of physically touching one’s baby—still inside the womb—through foetal movement also offers important bonding moments (Draper 2003), allowing for the performance of playfulness between father and unborn child. I argue how such multisensory encounters thus constitute anticipatory acts of love/intimacy between father and unborn child, allowing for the development of an ontological sense of (emotional) closeness and proximity to someone not yet here, transcending temporal distances and bringing the future into the present (Meah 2017; Draper 2003). This has important implications for ‘how we understand social relations and the tensions at the limit where one body-subject encounters another’—or, indeed, several (Abrahamsson and Simpson 2011, 337).

Indeed, research on embodied experience within geography has tended to focus on the surface of bodies, primarily delimited by the external surface of the skin, particularly within sensory examinations of touch (Paterson 2009). However, over the last decade, feminist geographers have established a vibrant body of literature on the possibilities of interrogating interior bodily boundaries/surfaces and spaces. This has been especially through considerations of the placenta, a temporary organ, formed only during pregnancy which functions as a transitional space to mediate the transfer of matter/nutrients from mother to foetus (Colls and Fannin 2013). Reflecting conceptions of pregnancy as inter-embodied (Holt 2017; Lupton 2013), feminist geographers have argued that the placenta offers a mode of ‘thinking differently about the presumptions of boundedness, fixity, stasis, and identity that tend to underwrite more familiar geographical spaces of borders, barriers, territories and boundaries’ (Colls and Fannin 2013, 1098–1099) through the blurring of self/other to interrogate bodily relations within—even through bodies.

Furthering this work, Lewis (2018) calls for greater attention to the uterine within geography, positing that uterine relations are both spatial and spatialising, taking place in space, whilst making/unmaking places, borders and kin. She distinguishes between Longhurst’s (2008) examinations of the embodied experience of ‘being’ pregnant, and the absence of the interior of the uterus in kin-making, noting the need for further research which thinks geographically, and relationally, with the uterine (Lewis 2018). Longhurst (2018) extends this in her commentary on Lewis’ piece to consider the possibility of thinking relationally with wombs—with Longhurst suggesting this may be more familiar and useful than uteruses when attending to social experiences of pregnancy, as I do here—raising questions of the ways ‘wombs are lived in particular contexts’ (Longhurst 2018, 322). Through this paper, I explore how wombs are lived and encountered within the context of expectant fatherhood. I examine, empirically, expectant fathers’ relational, and inter-embodied encounters with the womb as a space within the body of another. In so doing, it interrogates the importance of these encounters for how fathers anticipate and attempt to bond with their child, who has not yet been born, constituting anticipatory acts of love/intimacy (Meah 2017).

Methodology

Data for this paper derives from my PhD research, which concerns experiences of expectant fathering in the UK. Importantly, this project was interested in experiences of expectant fathering holistically, with the theme of father-foetal bonding and inter-embodied encounters being just one focus of the research. Seeking to develop rich, detailed insight into fathers’ evolving emotional experiences during the transition to parenthood, it entailed, primarily, periodic in-depth interviews with nine expectant fathers (most living in England), adopting a qualitative ‘mini-longitudinal’ design strategy(see Vincent (2013) on advantages of repeat interviews in social research on pregnancy). Conducted during the coronavirus pandemic, participants were, necessarily, recruited via online parenting groups and via word-of-mouth, with interviews taking place over January 2021–May 2022, held over Zoom.

Participation in this project was open to anyone who identified as an ‘expectant father’, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, or nature of their expectancy—hence the inclusion of John, who was becoming a father through adoption. Despite this however, my participant sample comprises rather gender-and-heteronormative experiences of parenting. All participants identified as (cisgender)male, and were in long-term heterosexual relationships with the relevant expectant mother (all but one couple being married by the end of data collection). All referred to their partner using the gender pronouns she/her—which I use in this paper to reflect participants’ preferences, rather than assume gender normativity. All but John were becoming parents through pregnancy. Participants were also majority-White (Azri identifying as Filipino), ages ranging from 26 to 54-years at the time of the first interview. All participants seemed economically comfortable, with many owning—or soon hoping to own—their own home. All pregnancies were wanted and planned.

My sample is reflective of the general methodological challenges (arguably exacerbated during the pandemic) of recruiting fathers for research, with fathers often not volunteering to participate unless they are named, specifically, as desired participants—a factor that is arguably indicative of the secondary positioning of fathers within many cultural contexts. Although speaking to the experiences of expectant fathering in its complete, diverse forms, is beyond the scope of this paper, this research is still important for demonstrating the possibilities and potentials for incorporating expectant fathers, more equitably, into feminist, geographic, research.

Ethically, it was important that participation would only begin following the initial (NHS) scan, typically at 12 weeks, to confirm the health-status of the foetus, or after passing the first Stage of adoption training. This was to minimise the risk of participants becoming emotionally involved in the project before their ‘expectancy’ status was well-established. Interviews therefore took place during the second trimester of pregnancy, during the third trimester, as soon after the child’s arrival as possible—(typically 2–4 weeks post-birth, after participants’ paternity leave), along with a follow-up interview approximately 6-months later (with John’s interviews taking place at an equivalent point in his adoption journey). All participant names have been replaced with pseudonyms.

Once fully-transcribed, data were then analysed following Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, interpreting and making sense of each participant’s unique emotional, experiences, in-full, before moving onto the next (see Smith et al. 2009). This process entails reading, making notes and identifying themes for each participant, ensuring that themes not emerge from the data itself, but importantly ‘do justice’ to the individual experiences of participants (Smith et al. 2009). It thus offers a framework of deep, emotional immersion into individual experiences, which was particularly useful in aiding my immersion into the life-worlds of my participants—emotionally, fully, and empathetically—particularly important as I do not share these life experiences.

Through the interviews, and analysis, I felt I developed a deep emotional (and in many ways embodied) connection with my participants, an experience which is particularly interesting given my positionality as young woman and non-mother: I have never been (nor tried to get) pregnant. I don’t know, nor can I truly imagine, what that must feel like, to be growing a life inside my body, just as my participants could not (a point which I return to later in my analysis). Yet I often found myself getting goosebumps at the profoundness of the experiences participants were describing, viscerally reacting to the sensations they were trying to convey, for example, getting tingling in my fingers when they talked about foetal movement, or tears in my eyes at the love/connection they were experiencing.

There is often an important emphasis on empathy, rapport and listening within feminist research (Averett 2021; McDowell 1997). However, empathy is often conceptualised as being founded upon shared experience. I instead consider it more to be a fundamental process of opening oneself up to being affected, emotionally/bodily, to the experiences of another, providing the potential for blurring preconceived boundaries of (differing) positionalities, overcoming dichotomies of self/other within interview encounters. Thus, whilst this research provides unique, cutting-edge insight into the emotional experiences of expectant fathering during the pandemic, perhaps more importantly, it provided participants with an opportunity for someone to bear witness to their experiences, to be there and simply listen to them (Averett 2021). This is revealed especially through how each interview typically lasted between 1.5-2 hours, speaking to the depth of emotional experiences.

Bodily borders and father-foetal interactions

Drawing upon this interview data, this paper now turns to a discussion of the role of bodily borders/boundaries in mediating expectant fathers’ encounters with their unborn child in different spaces/places. Through this first section, I reveal how participants articulated the distinct embodied nature of pregnancy between them and their partner, via the spatial dichotomy of ‘inside’/‘outside’ and the implications of such borders for fathers’ sense of connection to their unborn child and ability to begin developing a sense of self as a father pre-birth (cf. Tomori and Boyer 2019). The second section then examines various inter-embodied, sensory experiences through which expectant fathers sought to ‘transcend’ this border, directly interacting with the baby inside the womb (cf. Hamper and Nash 2021; Meah 2017), shedding light on fathers’ inter-embodied experiences of pregnancy in different spaces.

Importantly, my focus on expectant fathers’ inter-embodied encounters with the womb and unborn child is not to displace or render invisible expectant mothers (or pregnant people more broadly), nor their bodies, feelings and identities. Indeed, all participants acknowledged the primacy of their partner’s explicitly embodied experience of pregnancy, compared to their own:

Beth has obviously been going through more than me, because of the changes she’s going through physically…

– Ollie (36-weeks, third-trimester)

…it’s not about me, it’s about being a supportive husband. Because [my wife] she’s the most important thing

– Denny (29-weeks, second-trimester)

Participants frequently described experiences of engaging in what Draper (2003, 2002) calls ‘body-mediated moments’; ‘physical prompts’ which enabled the pregnancy—and the future child—to ‘feel more real’ and tangible (see Menzel (2021) for a recent summary). Within these narratives, there was often considerable emphasis on participants experiencing these moments with their partner, as a shared, intimate experience. For example, when describing his experience of the first ultrasound scan, Martin described the overwhelming urge to hold his partner, Mel’s, hand just as the baby came on screen.

I just grabbed Mel’s hand…when the baby came on the screen – I hold my partner’s hand all the time – but when I held her hand, for both of us…It just felt different holding her hand

– Martin (23-weeks, second-trimester)

In his narrative, Martin highlights the significance of hand-holding as a haptic performance of love/intimacy between himself and Mel as a couple (Morrison 2012). However, he explains how this act took on profound new meaning within the space of the ultrasound scan; the experience of encountering their unborn child bringing forth a sense of themselves as parents (cf. Tomori and Boyer 2019). Indeed, the ‘grasping’ of Mel’s hand reflects both the intense (emotional) reaction to ‘seeing’ their baby on the screen—and excitement about becoming parents—as well as a metaphorical ‘grasping’ of Martin’s transition to fatherhood through Mel’s pregnancy (Draper 2002).

The significance of physical, inter-embodied, experiences for mobilising the impending reality of fatherhood was illustrated especially by Frank. Frank was the only participant to describe having used a pregnancy app, although, he only noted this very briefly—perhaps as a way of highlighting his active involvement in the pregnancy, particularly given his emphasis on how it is him using one, and not Faith (in contrast to Hamper 2022; Hamper and Nash 2021). Indeed, Frank went into considerably more detail when describing his physical encounters with the pregnancy (discussed later), growing particularly animated when describing how the early progression of Faith’s body at just 17-week’s gestation related to his sense of the pregnancy ‘feeling real’.

Well actually I’m the one with the baby app on my phone, I’m the one who’s tracking the development of the baby…Faith’s hardly showing a bump, so in that sense it’s on the cusp of being real (he waves his hand in front of him, with a curved trajectory, as though brushing his hand along his partners’ bump).

– Frank (17-weeks, second-trimester)

Here, Frank also draws attention to the prominence of bodily borders/boundaries to his experience as an expectant father, the miming of an intimate caress over Faith’s baby bump highlighting how their baby is growing within Faith’s body. This was also highlighted by Denny, who alluded to his sense of anticipation/excitement about the impending arrival of their daughter.

We’re talking about this person – which is currently residing inside my wife and is soon going to be out and about – and she’s going to be our daughter…and we’re going to be in love with her in a way we’re not in love with each other.

– Denny (29-weeks, second-trimester)

Particularly interesting here is his reference to the love he feels (or will feel) for their daughter, which he distinguishes from the love he has for his partner. This situates this as a distinctly paternal love, revealing a sense of personhood as a father to this child before they are even born (Meah 2017). These various anticipatory (even imagined) encounters allow expectant fathers to begin conceptualising the growing foetus, inside the womb, as already a person; as their baby (Holt and Philo 2022). Such anticipatory/imagined encounters also mobilised visceral emotional reactions for some participants, demonstrating the significance of embodied encounters to their emotions and experiences as expectant fathers (Draper 2003, 2002).

When I do allow myself to think about holding my daughter (he shrugs, smiling), I do feel really warm and like – (he puts his hands to his chest, explaining where the warmth ‘is’. After a minute pause, he tries to explain differently) – Just welling up basically! (he grows much quieter), by, by emotion, so yeah.

– Martin (23-weeks, second-trimester).

Martin’s narrative highlights the capacity for these encounters to blur the boundaries between future/present, through how imagining holding his daughter once she is born elicits an intense emotional reaction at just 23 weeks’. Importantly, however, these temporal boundaries are intertangled with the embodied spatialities of pregnancy and expectant fatherhood.

Inside/outside

Participants positioned pregnancy as an interior experience, with their baby growing inside their partner’s womb; a space which fathers cannot access or know. This was often through explicit reference to bodily capacities and boundaries (Mohr and Almeling 2020; Draper 2002); that it is only when the baby is born—and on the ‘outside’—that expectant fathers felt they would be able to be involved and to actively contribute to the care of their child.

You can only do so much when [the baby’s] in the womb

– Azri (34-weeks, second-trimester)

Your role kicks in more in terms of the actual birth-day, that’s when you step up…there’s not much you honestly can do between that time apart from support your wife

– Logan (33-weeks, second-trimester)

This illustrates how expectant fathers’ experiences are heavily demarcated by the spatial binary of ‘inside/outside’ with their emotions and feelings being powerfully compounded by this dichotomy. This was alluded to especially by Robbie in our post-birth interview, wherein he explained how the (dis)embodied nature of pregnancy and expectant fatherhood mediated his feelings of connection, positioning his ‘bond’ as a father as somewhat secondary. He situated Haley’s bond as having been more ‘naturally’ established during the pregnancy, in the carrying of their baby inside her, whilst he was only able to begin ‘learning to love’ their daughter once she was born, at which point he could more actively participate in caregiving (Kushner et al. 2017).

I think for, for me, for fathers…I think I’ve got to like learn to love her a bit. Whereas for Haley, because she’s been inside her for nine months, maybe that’s more, more natural, more, you know, in-built in her. Whereas for me, I think it’s just sort of learning to love her a bit, by just being with her and the fact that she’s here.

– Robbie (post-birth-interview)

Indeed, even John, who was becoming a father through adoption, drew comparisons between the perceived ‘naturalness’ for mothers to form an intimate bond with a child due to the embodied experience of pregnancy.

If she was our own like birth child…Val would have gone through all of the bonding through the birth and time before, when she was stuck in the womb

– John (post-match-interview)

Fathers commonly described their feelings of being unable to experience embodied moments of pregnancy first-hand. One participant, Tom, even admitted to feeling an odd sense of jealousy that his partner, Tara, could experience these intimate, embodied sensations, and that her body can do this ‘amazing thing’ which his could not.

Tara could feel the kicks weeks before, but I couldn’t feel them on the outside…In some ways, I do feel slightly jealous that she can do this, this amazing thing.

– Tom (38-weeks, third-trimester)

Ollie also described his disappointment over when Beth would feel the baby kicking but he could not feel this on the ‘outside’, the force of the baby’s kick (at 25 weeks) not quite yet able to penetrate the interior boundaries of Beth’s body to be felt and experienced by Ollie on the outside.

Obviously, Beth will tell me that he’s kicking and I’ll put my hands on her belly to feel him move – I can’t always, because obviously it’s happening inside her and she can feel everything. I can’t always be able to

– Ollie (25-weeks, second-trimester)

However, the dichotomy of inside/outside also elicited positive feelings, with Azri describing his excitement and anticipation towards the end of their third trimester that the only thing missing now is their baby being on the outside, and it’s just a matter of waiting those extra few weeks.

Just real excited to meet this little baby…everything’s–it’s all set up, we have everything. Like the only thing missing now is her being on the outside

– Azri (36-weeks, third-trimester)

This section has established the primacy of bodily borders/boundaries to fathers’ experiences, which significantly mediate fathers’ emotions/feelings of connection (cf. Aitken 2000). This is especially demarcated through the spatial dichotomy of inside/outside, which participants drew upon to articulate their ability to engage with, and connect to, their baby inside the womb. I now explore a series of multi-sensory inter-embodied encounters through which fathers interacted with their unborn child in different spaces/places, constituting anticipatory acts of love/intimacy (Meah 2017).

Inter-embodied encounters: transcending the border

Importantly, each of the encounters discussed in this section—including visual, audial and haptic interactions between father and unborn child, took place literally via the body of the pregnant mother (Draper 2003, 2002)—with Logan explaining how it is just a layer of skin that separates him from their baby.

Yeah, he’s like a thin layer from you – that is it. Like. Honestly, it’s just a layer of skin I guess.

– Logan (35-weeks, third-trimester)

This situated these encounters as being distinctly inter-embodied (Holt 2017; Lupton 2013), constituted via interactions between multiple bodies—including mother, father and unborn child (Holt and Philo 2022). These interactions with the baby—a being inside the body of another, within the interior bodily space of womb (Longhurst 2018)—are importantly mediated by various bodily borders/boundaries, involving multi-scalar interior bodily boundaries of organs (Colls and Fannin 2013) and exterior thresholds of the skin (Abrahamsson and Simpson 2011). Through this section, I reveal how various, intimate, multi-sensory encounters enable the ‘transcending’ of these borders, facilitating the creation of intimate spaces of pre-parental care.

Ultrasound scans…audial-visual encounters

Ultrasound scans are highly significant moments for expectant parents (Menzel 2021; Draper 2002) with participants typically describing this as their ‘strongest’ memory of the pregnancy during the second-trimester interviews, often going into great detail about how that moment felt. For many expectant fathers, the visual presence of their baby during an ultrasound scan was a highly significant moment, being able to see them as a whole person on a screen—which was more emotionally provoking than a positive pregnancy test (Draper 2002).

[Strongest memory has] got to be the 13-week scan…that was a big leap from seeing an indication on the Clear Blue stick to seeing the whole person…that was, that was a real moment.

– Martin (25-weeks, second-trimester)

This experience blurs ‘temporal and corporeal boundaries’, bringing the future into the present (Draper 2002, 790), allowing expectant fathers to visually and emotionally experience the reality of their baby’s existence.

However, beyond visual encounters (cf. Draper, 2002), ultrasound scans are also profound moments where expectant parents can hear their baby’s heartbeat, inside the womb, thus providing audial confirmation of their existence. Indeed, for Frank, hearing the baby’s heartbeat was the most profound moment of the pregnancy. He was so overcome that he was unable to articulate how this experience felt; to hear that sound coming through his partners’ body, illustrating the emotional geographies of sound’s porosity (Kerr et al. 2018).

And then we heard the heartbeat at the scan, we were able to see a heartbeat and it was like – (he stops, unable to find the words)

– Frank (17-weeks, second-trimester)

He describes the unexpected intensity of the emotion and connection he felt to his unborn child, even at 17 weeks, by hearing their heartbeat and seeing them on a screen.

…that was amazing…and that sort of connection (he pauses, emphasising the enormity of the moment)…I didn’t expect that sort of connection that happened between me and this image on a screen. Yeah, ‘that’s my baby’, you know.

– Frank (17-weeks, second-trimester)

Frank’s emphasis on connection illustrates the ability for inter-embodied encounters to elicit emotional reactions, mobilising expectant fathers’ sense of intimacy and closeness to their unborn child (Meah 2017). Moreover, Robbie’s partner, Haley, is a trained midwife and bought a foetal heartrate detector so they could hear their baby’s heartbeat together, at any time.

We’ve got like a little doppler thing that you can hear the heartbeat with…she’s a midwife so she knows what she’s looking for…we were listening to it like everyday.

– Robbie (23-weeks, second-trimester)

This experience alludes to the less obvious spaces where bodily boundaries may be transcended during pregnancy, allowing Robbie and Haley to hear their baby’s heartbeat on a daily basis, facilitating intimate audial encounters with their baby inside the womb whilst at home, not just at the infrequency of scans within hospital spaces (Draper 2002). Importantly, however, Robbie stressed how this was only possible because of Haley’s expertise of what to look for, explaining how this is not something she would recommend for other expectant parents (also highlighting how expectant fathers frequently deferred to their partner’s expertise during pregnancy).

Foetal movement…haptic encounters

Within the literature on haptic geographies/geographies of touch, there is an interesting debate around how ‘touching and being touched [can] produc[e] feelings of intimacy and physical closeness and strengthen emotional bonds’ (Morrison 2012, 12) thus mobilising emotions and feelings. However, touch can be invasive, and it is important to note, in this section, that all participants were invited to touch their partner’s body when the baby was moving:

he kind of kicks and Beth says ‘Oh, you’ve got to feel him!’

– Ollie (25-weeks, second-trimester)

Many expectant fathers remarked on feeling their baby’s movement during the later stages of pregnancy with Azri marvelling at how much he could feel through Aila’s body, being able to distinguish different limbs of their unborn daughter (contrasting significantly to the early experiences of foetal movement). He explained how the intensity of this intimate haptic interaction allows for the imminent arrival of their baby to feel especially real (Draper 2002).

Like you can feel her little legs and like her little hands and stuff like that, like you can make out whole body parts…leading up to it, it definitely makes it feel a lot more real, just from how you actually like physically feel her

Azri (36-weeks, third-trimester)

However, these haptic interactions can also be uncomfortable for expectant fathers. Logan, in particular, explained how feeling his baby inside the womb, particularly moving inside the womb was a rather strange sensation. Quite humorously, he even went as far as to associate the experience as akin to the horror movie Alien.

I find it a little bit weird. It is weird, I’m not gonna lie to you…It’s a lot like Alien, let’s be fair.

– Logan (35-weeks, third-trimester)

Male perceptions of the pregnant body have often been conceptualised as being ones of repulsion or disgust, usually through reference to the abject ‘leakiness’ of maternal bodies and breaking of bodily boundaries (Longhurst 2008). Indeed, Logan—the only experienced father in this study—noted how his partner believes he thinks feeling the baby moving inside her is ‘gross’, an interpretation he contested, explaining that he doesn’t think it’s ‘gross’, but rather he just finds it weird.

She always thinks I think it’s gross. Not weird, but gross…and it’s like ‘It’s not gross, I just find it weird’…

– Logan (33-weeks, second-trimester)

He explains that his feeling is less one of repulsion, but more one of incomprehension—a feeling I can somewhat sympathise with! It is incomprehensible to him, and his male body, that there could be a real person existing and growing inside her and who is practically already alive without having even been born yet (Holt and Philo 2022).

Like it’s not gross, it’s my son, but how can you tell me that someone pushing from the internal of you – that’s not born yet – that that’s not weird. ‘Cause it is!

– Logan (33-weeks, second-trimester)

These encounters—through multi-sensory, inter-embodied interactions—blur spatial, temporal and bodily boundaries (Draper 2002), with the baby simultaneously being inside his partner, yet Logan can feel—and literally see, almost touch—them moving on the outside. The baby is right there, inside her, through this very thin layer of skin, but is yet not quite here, although moving around as though they are (Holt and Philo 2022).

Intimate, care-ful encounters: pre-parental forms of intimate fathering

For most participants, interactions of foetal movement were particularly prominent at night, enabling performances of intimate caregiving, and facilitating the creation of spaces of intimacy between father, mother and unborn child (cf. Tomori and Boyer 2019). Participants frequently described experiences of their babies being very active at night, when they were going to bed (itself an intimate space—Morrison 2012).

Yeah, mostly when we’re in bed or on the sofa, so kind of bedtime is the most reliable time for when he’s kicking

– Ollie (25-weeks, second-trimester)

Tom in particular described in great detail how his partner Tara would often be awoken by the baby’s movement, disrupting her sleep. He described how, in this moment, he would get up to sing to their unborn daughter, soothing her so that Tara could go back to sleep.

There have been times where Tara would wake up in the night and say ‘she’s having a manic moment, I can’t sleep’…So I would sing to [the baby] and she’d often calm down a bit

– Tom (38-weeks, third-trimester)

This is a profoundly intimate family moment between mother, father and baby (still inside the womb), with Tom touching Tara’s stomach, singing to their baby. He explained his certainty that their baby can ‘definitely’ hear him singing, facilitating intimacy between father and foetus (Meah 2017), with Tom describing his hope and anticipation that, in doing this, when their daughter is born (and outside), she will recognise his voice as her father from being inside the womb and therefore know who he is, thus facilitating father-infant bonding after her arrival. Indeed, he linked this especially to discourse over father-foetal bonding and attachment during pregnancy, resonating strongly with contemporary cultures of pre-parenting enactments of caregiving.

We tried a few things like stroking Tara’s stomach…but yeah, singing seemed to have a bit more of an impact…she can definitely hear me when I’m singing…I think people sort of recommend it, that you talk to them and sing to them so when they arrive they might recognise your voice and be like ‘I know who you are’

– Tom (38-weeks, third-trimester)

These inter-embodied encounters thus embody intimate emotional spaces of pre-parental father-foetal bonding. Through these experiences, expectant parents (mothers and fathers) were able to begin imagining their future baby and their presence in the home (Tomori and Boyer 2019), assigning them particular qualities and personality traits. Ollie, for example, explained how his baby has a cheeky quality, ‘winding him up’ by not kicking as soon as Ollie reaches out to feel the movement.

She’s said ‘Oh, he’s moving, he’s doing something’ and then quite a lot of the time – whether he’s trying to wind us up or something, I don’t know – but as soon as I reach out to feel him kicking, he’s just stopped!

– Ollie (25-weeks, second-trimester)

Situating this encounter as his baby playing with and teasing him, through the womb, illustrates how such encounters enable expectant parents to begin developing a sense of intimacy/love for their (future) child during the pregnancy (Hamper and Nash 2021; Meah 2017), beginning to anticipate and develop a sense of personhood for his baby (Tomori and Boyer 2019).

Through this section, I have explored a series of multi-sensory, inter-embodied, encounters through which fathers interacted with their unborn child, taking place in different spaces/places. I have argued how the inter-embodied nature of these intimate experiences enabled a ‘transcending’ of the (multiple, inter-scalar) physical bodily borders between father and child; of the mothers’ skin and the womb and how these experiences mobilise expectant fathers’ emotions, eliciting feelings of love and connection, which facilitated the creation of intimate pre-parenting spaces (Meah 2017) and through which fathers begin performing acts of love and caregiving before their baby is born.

Conclusions

Recent decades have seen a general rise in expectations of pre-parenting commitment to children (Hamper 2022), with discourses of the involved, intimate, father becoming increasingly enrolled into enactments of fathering, before the arrival of a child (Menzel 2021). This paper has explored the significance of bodily borders/boundaries in expectant fathers’ encounters with their unborn child, inside the womb (Longhurst 2018). Engaging with critical feminist work on inter-embodiment (Holt 2017; Lupton 2013) and interior bodily spaces (Colls and Fannin 2013), it has shown how these encounters take place not only within different spaces/places but also between bodies, thus revealing their intrinsically spatial nature. I therefore suggest that the experiences of expectant fathering warrant further attention from feminist geographers.

Through in-depth interviews with nine expectant fathers, this paper presents nuanced and critical understanding of what these encounters actually mean for expectant fathers themselves, as well as their intrinsic spatialities. It reveals how bodily borders/boundaries present both sites of separation, via the spatial dichotomy of inside/outside, as well as of connection, articulated through analysis of a range of multi-sensory, inter-embodied, encounters through which fathers interacted with their baby, creating intimate moments of pre-parental bonding (Meah 2017). Thus, this paper addresses the notable absence of expectant fathers’ voices/experiences within geographical research, making a novel contribution to geographical work on pregnancy, parenting and specifically fathering, illustrating how expectant parents—fathers especially—may develop a sense of love and intimacy with a baby before they are even born (Meah 2017; Holt 2017). It extends also Holt and Philo’s recent (2022) call for ‘tiny human geographies’, going beyond, to consider anticipatory encounters of being—and, indeed, actively living—with children who are unborn. Thus, it forges an agenda for more critical examinations of the spatialities of fathers’ pre-parenting geographies.

Here, I have considered expectant fathers’ experiences primarily within the context of pregnancy, examining the construction of love/intimacy with a future, unborn child via inter-embodied, multi-sensory encounters with interior bodily space of wombs (Longhurst 2018)—coining these ‘father-foetal relations’. However, there are numerous other potential avenues of inquiry. For example, relating to the conceptual focus of this paper, feminist geographers could examine fathers’ multi-sensory encounters with baby things (their textures, their sounds) in bringing forth intimacy/closeness with their unborn child (cf. Tomori and Boyer 2019).

Since expectant fathers’ interactions with such objects take place in-lieu of the physical, embodied presence of a child (in the home, or the body of another), they open up possibilities for considering the spatialities of how expectant fathers anticipate and attempt to build an emotional connection of love/intimacy with future children, in contexts beyond those considered in this paper. This includes experiences of pregnancy for non-resident fathers, as well adoption (cf. Leinaweaver et al. 2017) and surrogacy; unique pathways parenthood, which depend on rather different factors than those considered in this paper, comprising very different emotional geographies of pre-parental practices of love/intimacy.

Indeed, participants in my research spoke eloquently (and often quite emotionally) about the multitude of material objects—including clothes and soft, cuddly toys– lying within their bedrooms, or other spaces of their home, which they were drawn to, describing experiences of tenderly holding and caressing these objects while imagining their future child (Leinaweaver et al. 2017). Importantly, many of these latter encounters took place without ‘prompting’—such as through the embodied experiences of others, such as their pregnant partners. This provides a fascinating avenue of potential enquiry for how expectant fathers, individually, seek to encounter not-yet-arrived children in intimate, emotionally-charged and care-full ways.

Importantly, this paper does not offer a prescriptive list of practices/engagements which may constitute ‘good fathering’—as part of a culturally-specific understanding of intimate and involved fathering ideals currently adopted in the UK (Twamley 2019; Dermott 2008). Rather, it presents the narratives of the practices in which these expectant fathers engaged, and the significance of these encounters (emotionally and practically) for them, as expectant fathers, in bonding with their future child. I call for feminist geographers to attend more heartfully to the spatial practices through which expectant fathers strive to develop an emotional connection with not-yet-arrived children, developing an understanding of what these practices/interactions actually mean to expectant fathers themselves, in order to develop greater awareness of the spatial factors which enable—or hinder, father inequitable engagement and participation in the labours/demands of (pre)parenting.

Acknowledgements

The paper was originally presented at the ‘Bordering Parenthood/Bordering Family’ session of the RGS-IBG Annual Conference in 2021. I would like to thank the organisers of the session, and the audience for their supportive and encouraging feedback. Thanks also to my supervisors Professors Peter Kraftl and Jessica Pykett for their guidance. Special thanks to Dr Rachel Colls for her kind and thoughtful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful and engaging comments.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

UK Research and Innovation Economic and Social Research Council 2066096.

Notes on contributors

Alice Menzel

Alice Menzel is an Assistant Professor in Human Geography at the University of Birmingham. Her research critically explores the emotional geographies of expectant fathering across myriad everyday spaces/places (particularly against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic) through periodic, in-depth interviews with expectant fathers in the UK. Alice’s broader interests include feminist geographies/approaches, the spatialities of family life—specifically parenting—and research on emotions and bodies.

Notes

1 This is not least given the incredibly emotive and political-laden nature of foetal life, as evinced by feminist protest over reproductive rights and mobilities through the overturning of Roe vs Wade in the US in early 2022.

2 A partial exception includes Schurr and Militz’s (2018) research which briefly details the experiences of homosexual male couples in Mexico selecting and contracting a surrogate. Their work primarily with legal geographies of surrogacy (Mexico being one of the few countries where same-sex male couples may contract a surrogate), with minimal discussion of how fathers develop an emotional connection with their future child, as I explore in this paper.