Life Writing from Birth to Death : How M/others Know
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation approaches maternal life writing online as an epistemological node of maternal knowledge. I explicate maternal practices in mommy blogs and sites as digital-material positions and performances defined by technology, the ideals of intensive parenting, heteronormativity, whiteness, and the expectation of an able-body. The research material comes from eight blogs and two memoirs in English from the USA, Canada, UK, and Australia. In addition to analyzing examples, I perform conceptual work, presenting novel terminology and approaches to the entanglements of mothering and digitality in the first decades of the 21st Century. I partake in the on-going cultural redefinition of mothering in the fields of feminist motherhood studies, life writing studies, social media studies, narrative medicine, and death studies. My transdisciplinary approach views mothering as a point where multiple epistemic strands intersect: embodiment, materiality, the beginning and end of life, engagement with (not) living, care and the transference of culture to future generations, as well as the imagined and real effects of digitalization on the borders of subjectivity, gender, experience and narrative styles. This research is grounded in feminist theories of knowledge production: Donna Haraway’s situated knowledge, and the linking of materiality and stories; Karen Barad’s agential realism, which combines Nihls Bohr’s intra-action to the feminist strive toward the Other. In my approach, I combine feminist and literary studies methods of close reading using theoretical concepts, and practices of critical autoethnography. The dissertation investigates how the epistemic node of mothering is born in online life writing via narrative and how the particularity of digital materiality impacts this development. The four research articles analyze digital life writing as a maternal location of knowledge by focusing on 1) birth stories on mommy blogs as gateways into mothering, 2) how home, parenting and paid labor entwine in the online maternal discourse, 3) how mothers with terminal cancer foster hope via life writing, and 4) by creating novel concepts that characterize and address the impact and constructive power of digitality on autobiographical acts of mothers and their experience. At the heart of my research is the negotiation on maternal needs and mothering and the role that digitality plays via life writing. It has been claimed that a node of motherhood knowledge is born in the performative acts of mothering. I propose that this epistemology is transformed in maternal online life writing practices. In their digital materializations, mommy blogs are sites of knowing and development of practices, where in addition to maternal knowledge, trans-maternal connections and activism occur. The research articles suggest that maternal online life writing functions as a support in everyday mothering and in unprecedented life altering situations. Life writing can become a method of mothering as a multidirectional (m)other-related transformation. Maternal online life writing makes space for counter-narratives and norm criticism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".