Grieving the ambiguous online: pregnancy loss, meaning making & celebrity on Twitter

ABSTRACT

This article explores three cases of celebrity miscarriages or pregnancy losses as mediated on Twitter. Through an exploration of how ambiguous grief is mediated in social media, this paper highlights the way gender, race, celebrity, and grief intersect in social media spaces. Using interdisciplinary work from media studies, gender studies, disability studies and trauma studies, this article offers a way to recognize how digital media offers space for coping to everyday people through mediations about and by celebrities, even while policing the boundaries of those celebrities’ grief. In exploring the complexity of this type of digital mediation this article offers an entry point through which to understand other digital mediations of loss, grief, and trauma in social media.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital grieving
• ambiguous loss
• pregnancy loss
• Twitter
• digital mediation

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. While this work writes about pregnancy loss and its associated grief, it is in no way meant to dismiss the importance and centrality of women’s reproductive freedom.