This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Citation Map Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via HighWire Citing Articles via Google Scholar Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Hockey, J. Articles by Draper, J. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

Beyond the Womb and the Tomb: Identity, (Dis)embodiment and the Life Course

University of Sheffield

Janet Draper

Royal College of Nursing Institute in London

Grounded in the authors’ theoretical and ethnographic work on pregnancy and social life after death, this article explores the ways in which the body is involved in processes of identification. With a focus on the embodied nature of social identity, the article nonetheless problematizes a model of the life course that begins at the moments of birth and ends at death. Instead, it offers a more extended temporal perspective and examines other ways in which identity may be claimed, for example, via material objects and practices which evoke the body as imagined or remembered. By documenting pre-birth and post-mortem identity-making of this kind, it demonstrates how the unborn and the dead may come into social existence. In addition, a cultural privileging of both the body and visuality is shown to shore up the capacity of material objects and practices to shape social identities in a highly selective fashion. The article therefore proposes that models of the life course need to accommodate the meanings of pre-birth and post-mortem materialities and so incorporate a conceptualization of social identity as contested, relational and inevitably incomplete.

Key Words: birth • body • death • identity • life course • visuality

Body & Society, Vol. 11, No. 2, 41-57 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/1357034X05052461


CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?

This article has been cited by other articles:

				H. Keane Foetal personhood and representations of the absent child in pregnancy loss memorialization Feminist Theory, August 1, 2009; 10(2): 153 - 171. [Abstract] [PDF]

				T. F. Sorensen The presence of the dead: Cemeteries, cremation and the staging of non-place Journal of Social Archaeology, February 1, 2009; 9(1): 110 - 135. [Abstract] [PDF]